May the best man win

Suffolk, VA.  If you are interested in how Virginia might go in the presidential contest, I’m afraid I can’t enlighten.  Better to read 538’s focus on the state published yesterday evening.  It is the nature of the “ground game” that those involved in it have little idea of how it is going overall.  We are talking mostly to Obama voters at this stage, trying to get them to the polls as well as recruit the most enthusiastic to join us in the canvasing and phone bank efforts.

I was out canvasing all day yesterday.  First “turf” was south of Suffolk, by the Great Dismal Swamp.  Gunshots of hunters punctuated the gray, rainy day.  The second turf was a close-in neighborhood of blacks returning from church.  The conversations were living demography.  The whites either said they would not be voting or not voting for the President.  Blacks said they of course would vote or had voted for him, with the occasional person who either had a felony conviction or for religious reasons could not vote.  I confess I didn’t know until two days ago that Jehovah’s Witnesses do not vote.

I stopped mid-morning at a prosperous-looking brick house with a Cadillac parked out front, somewhere off White Marsh Road near the swamp.  A white-haired white lady answered the door and I braced myself for the expected demographic answer.  “We’re not the crazy ones,” she said,” waving generically at the surrounding neighbors.  “We’re the sane ones, of course we’re voting for Obama.”  That was a great relief, reminding me that demographic assumptions can always be wrong.

I finished the day in a mad rush to try to complete a third turf that others had found difficult.  It was.  Road too narrow to park, addresses that weren’t found at the places indicated by my GPS.  New streets that my now aging maps do not include.  Unleashed dogs.  My partner and I gave it up as the winter light failed.

For all the much-vaunted quantitative dimension of the Obama ground game, I couldn’t help but notice how technologically backward it was.  I’d have easily finished that third turf if I could have recorded my data on a tablet and submitted it wirelessly, as I did observing elections in Libya last July.  There are people in each campaign office who spend their days gathering the data, entering it into spreadsheets and transmitting it to Richmond several times a day.  Four years from now, I trust all that will disappear in favor of internet-based transmission from the canvaser.  For now, we are stuck in the paper and pencil age.

I am headed over to Franklin, half an hour away today, I presume because someone higher up determined that it is now important to strengthen the effort there.  Others will continue to deepen it in Suffolk.  If enthusiasm and determination win elections, we’ve got a good shot at this one, though of course there is a lot of that on the other side as well.  May the best man win.