How Obama's campaign will coordinate in Ohio

U.S. Sen. Barack Obama: Getty Images PhotoU.S. Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign and the Ohio Democratic Party will include state House and Senate candidates in their coordinated campaign's get-out-the-vote effort, according to the Obama campaign, breaking with the one led by 2004's Democratic nominee, U.S. Sen. John Kerry.

The coordinated effort will feature Obama canvassers going door-to-door and asking voters whom they've decided to vote for in the presidential election, the congressional election and their local house or senate election - a process known as IDing. These preferences are included in the Democratic Party's voter file, which campaigns at various levels can use to decide how they will target areas or even individual houses.

Integrating local races into the coordinated campaign effort is a break with the 2004 Democratic coordinated campaign. Kerry's presidential campaign and the Ohio Democratic Party identified household preferences for the presidential and congressional elections, but not local races.

All three levels that cycle were being targeted for get-out-the-vote and persuasion by independent expenditure groups.

The Obama campaign said the 2004 efforts between Kerry, the ODP and 527s led to duplication in targeting and identification. The campaign feels that this version of the coordinated campaign will eliminate such waste.

Greg Haas, a Democratic strategist who was the coordinated campaign director in 1992 when Bill Clinton was the presidential nominee, said this larger coordinated campaign is made possible by Obama's decision to forego public financing in favor of a more lucrative private campaign finance regime.

"The Obama campaign is able to control so much more of what's going on, both in terms of message and this kind of stuff," Haas said. "When it comes to organizing and influencing what's happening at the grassroots level, the campaign has a much stronger role than the Kerry campaign did."

Haas said the Clinton coordinated campaign identified local races in its canvassing effort in 1992 as did the Celeste gubernatorial campaign did the same in 1982 - Haas was field director in that effort. What's truly changed between those campaigns and 2008 is the technical ability to canvass and ID voters.

"They can just do stuff that we only dreamed of doing," Haas said of the previous campaigns he worked on. "We had people sitting in front of phones manually dialing numbers or holding paper lists when they were going door to door, that were usually several months old, if not a year old."

A local party official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said he spoke to a member of the Obama campaign who told him that the campaign plans to hire 300 paid organizers for its field work, 25 in Franklin County alone.

Obama communications director Isaac Baker said he wouldn't comment about specific numbers.

"We will have hundreds of staff across the state and have a very significant field presence in every corner of Ohio and every community across the state," Baker said.

In an Obama campaign memo given to PolitickerOH.com by the Ohio Democratic Party, the Obama campaign stated its goal to recruit 10,000 unpaid volunteers to bring its total Ohio volunteer number to 14,000, or enough to have every one of the state's 11,500 precincts covered by a volunteer.

"By September 1st, we want every precinct covered by at least one volunteer, and ‘heavied up' with multiple canvassers in our most important precincts," the memo said.

This will be on top of 515 "trainings of activists, operatives, and elected officials" across the state, according to the memo.

Furthermore, the Ohio Democratic Party has spent $250,000 on "polling, modeling, and micro-targeting" and wants to commission more to improve voter targeting. The memo said that its "technology infrastructure - voter files, phones, connectivity, networking, and more - are now scaled to meet peak election demands."

In recent weeks the Obama campaign hired Greg Schultz as its deputy political director. Schultz is a former legislative liaison for Gov. Ted Strickland, which means the Ohio campaign is now led by two Strickland men, with former Strickland campaign manager Aaron Pickrell in charge.

The campaign also hired Jackie Bray as its statewide field director. Bray was deputy field director for Hillary Clinton's Ohio campaign and worked with the youth-vote group Vote Mob in Ohio four years ago.

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