“As we got to the end, there were really only two things that mattered,” said Bird. “How many folks are registering to vote? Who are those people, and who’s turning out for the early vote? All the other stuff is inputs. Those were the two things that told us: Are we changing the electorate, and are our voters turning out?” The organizing was valued over the ads. Meanwhile, the Romney campaign and the Super PACs were blowing wads of cash on ads that washed right over people.
In the OFA session, Bird called on former volunteers—alternating the genders, boy-girl-boy-girl—to get fresh anecdotes on what worked and what would no longer work. One Iowa organizer revealed that phone calls had become nearly useless for reaching college students. Bird asked the crowd, all 20-somethings and 30-somethings, how many of them had landline phones. One woman raised her hand, in a crowd of a hundred people. The landline wasn’t coming back, either, said OFA’s Marlon Marshall, and that was going to be true “in eight years, when we turn Texas blue.”
Bird pointed out that the contact rate on all phones had fallen from 23 percent in 2008 to 16 percent in 2012. He derided the idea of “massive call centers” in central locations. I had a flashback to all the time I’d spent talking to Tea Party groups, proudly expanding their phone call outreach to voters.