10 Oct 2004 - Tampa Tribune
State Democrats Use Web to Muster Troops
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Section: METRO
Page: 1
By GARRETT THEROLF
gtherolf@tampatrib.com
TALLAHASSEE -- Republicans set the bar for get-out-the-vote efforts in this state during Gov. Jeb Bush's 2002 re-election campaign with a costly strategy targeting casual GOP voters.
The plan, which consumed a major chunk of the campaign's $6 million doorstep outreach budget, targeted about 400,000 Republican voters who tend to skip elections without a presidential race. It is widely credited with helping Bush secure his landslide victory.
The campaign mailings and personal visits delivered more than 50 percent turnout among the so-called "Gube-No-Shows."
Now, in the final month of the 2004 campaign, Democrats are rolling out a new get-out-the-vote strategy that some believe will duplicate the earlier GOP success at a fraction of the cost.
Like the Republicans, Democrats are focusing on carefully chosen voter groups but are using the Internet in a centerpiece role in the effort to organize armies of volunteers to provide the personal outreach.
The late strategy shift comes with considerable risk but potentially election-tilting results.
In a state that decided control of the White House by just 537 votes four years ago, the ground game in Florida is largely hidden from view but deadly earnest.
Along with its allies, the Democratic Party is furiously launching last-minute Web sites to enlist outreach volunteers online and immediately dispatch to them a replenishing list of some 10 to 15 Florida residents culled from sophisticated voter databases.
Volunteers also receive explicit directions on how to best call, visit or write a personal note to each of them.
In effect, the traditional campaign volunteer organizer -- the backbone of any political campaign -- is being replaced by a computer.
"The issue that we faced is: How do we organize 100,000 volunteers? No one we went to with the idea had ever reached this scale before. Now they can," said Daniel Lopez, a key developer of the software that runs several of the Web sites.
Republican Strategy
The state Republican Party and its candidates are sticking with proven volunteer management systems.
Republican strategists said those tactics can include gathering names and contact information from Web sites, but then turning them over to staffers to decide how they should be used.
Reed Dickens, a spokesman for President Bush's re-election campaign, said: "We have volunteers in every precinct in every county, but it is based on word of mouth and love for the candidate."
Democrats, reeling from years of steady Republican advances in Florida, are willing to take greater chances.
The goal is to transform the Internet's success as a political fundraising and communications tool into a next-generation way of getting key voters to the polls.
Florida is serving as a testing ground.
Among candidates giving the new technology a try is U.S. Senate hopeful Betty Castor, a Tampa Democrat whose volunteer organizing Web site is to go online today.
The campaign hopes it will deliver undecided voters by matching up chatty volunteers with Floridians who might otherwise skip the ballot box.
Members of Seniors for America, a liberal nonprofit group, are logging on to their own sites to receive addresses for likely undecided voters in Florida that they can "adopt" as pen pals.
The group is prohibited from urging people to vote for a particular candidate, but it is able to express its dissatisfaction with one or more of the candidates.
"What we saw in the past, especially at the [Howard] Dean campaign, is that the Internet can be excellent in building a community out of people and getting them to contribute money, but nobody figured out before how to use the people effectively. Now we think we have," Lopez said.
Moving past Meetup.org organized meetings of campaign supporters or the candidates own chat rooms -- all preaching to a candidate's choir -- these new Web platforms focus entirely on outreach to make voters out of the undecided or unmotivated.
Debbie Romanello, a St. Petersburg volunteer for Castor, was one of the first to test the campaign's site.
"It's very easy," she said. "There are things you can do at home, things you can do on the road. ... This is a great way to get involved in a grass-roots campaign even if you are not close to a campaign office."
Many of these new Web sites use matching capabilities to connect enthusiastic supporters with a potential voter of the same community, age, ethnicity or gender.
The instructions advise volunteers to engage in chatty interactions rather than old campaign staples such as the tape-recorded phone call by a well-known political personality, dubbed "Robo-calls," or a mass-produced campaign flier.
"At its best, a Web tool like this could accomplish the trickiness of making the campaign feel authentic and homegrown because it relies so heavily on ordinary people," said Yale Professor Donald P. Green, coauthor of "Get Out The Vote!" -- a manual for campaign organizers.
A major force behind the trend is the dire need for cheap ways for the Florida Democratic Party and its candidates to reach voters.
At one point this summer, Florida Democrats reported just $105,000 in the bank, compared with $1.7 million in state Republican accounts at the same time.
The Castor campaign, meanwhile, has blamed Florida's destructive hurricane season as a crippling hindrance in its own fundraising effort.
Unlike the Republican Web sites, such as GeorgeWBush.com that use proprietary software, Democrats are powering their sites with the technology of the computing counterculture: open-source software that is distributed free and is later improved, customized and debugged by programmers.
Dramatic Cost Savings
The resulting cost savings has drastically reduced the average per-contact cost.
Political operatives of both parties say the average contact with an individual voter by mail, phone or in person costs the party or candidate about $1.50 to organize or deliver.
Political operatives working with the new volunteer organizing Web sites are budgeting for an individual voter contact at no more than 50 cents each.
Guiding the deployment are freshly printed studies, many by Yale's Green and his partner, Alan S. Gerber, using experiments that assign precise values to individual outreach methods, including door-to-door canvassing, phone banks and direct mail.
Gone in this model is the campaign field director's accumulated knowledge of the voting patterns and folkways that run through this state's complex demographics, along with some unsubstantiated claims of how campaigns have conquered them.
"If you canvassed 10 homes, you didn't get 10 votes. You might have gotten one if you did it right, half if you didn't," Green said.
For now, many of the most sophisticated portions of the volunteer Web site trend is largely limited to Florida.
The state is again asserting itself as a test lab for emerging campaign strategies, as programmers work against aggressive deadlines to finish work on security concerns for Internet pages.
"The worry, of course, is that some blog supporting our opponents will direct people to flood these Web sites and load their volunteer lists with meaningless names, leaving us with no idea of what voters have actually been canvassed," said Chris Sands, IT director for the Florida Democratic Party.
Sands said checks have been placed in the system to guard it, but the state party has kept its Web volunteer site particularly modest as a result of the threat.
Lopez, 28, a Miami Cuban and former president of the Harvard Computer Society, is the driving force behind many of the other sites.
He acknowledges the threat.
Ambitious and hyperarticulate, Lopez persuaded the Castor campaign, Miami-Dade Democratic Executive Committee and Seniors for America clients that the risk can be eliminated by starting out small, planting a few campaign staffers on the list of voters to be called and evaluating volunteers before giving them bigger assignments.
These safeguards are untested, and the calendar leaves little time for error.
The company, VIVA Democracy Corp. -- an acronym for Voter Intelligence and Volunteer Activation -- was formed with other veterans of the Dean campaign.
Some onlookers doubt the current cycle will be enough to test whether the sites work.
Stephen MacNamara, Florida State University associate vice president and communications professor, said: "When you win, you think it's effective. When you don't win, you don't really know," MacNamara said.