Opinion: Why We Won

Since his victory in the Iowa caucuses, it has been clear that President-elect Barack Obama is different from other candidates. His ability to inspire young people drew unprecedented numbers of enthusiastic and determined volunteers to his campaign. These foot soldiers knocked on doors, made phone calls, registered voters, and gathered the data that helped Obama win on November 4.

In a nod to all of his volunteers, Obama said during his victory speech that they “proved that more than two centuries later, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people has not perished from the Earth.”

Cornelius Hurley, director of the School of Law’s Morin Center for Banking and Financial Law and a professor of law, witnessed this youthful enthusiasm firsthand when he spent six weeks volunteering for Obama in northern Colorado last spring. “These were committed kids,” he says of his fellow volunteers, “who just knew there was a better way than how we’ve been doing it for 20 years, which was practically their entire life.”

Hurley (MET’81) talked to BU Today about his experience.

First, intensive training
I was out in Fort Collins, in northern Colorado — “noCo” — for about six weeks. My official title was Obama organizing fellow. I was one of about 3,500 nationwide; there were maybe 150 to 200 in Colorado who were deployed in June to do grassroots community organizing for Obama. And that’s what we did — we had three days of intensive training on how to do this kind of thing, all the way from how to walk up to strangers on the street and engage them in conversation and find out if they were registered to vote to registering them to vote. We had to be officially certified under Colorado law as voter registration organizers. Every person who was registered was traceable to an individual, so the paperwork had to be exactly right and so there was no opportunity for voter fraud. They sent 150 to 200 of us in groups of 8 to 10 to different districts in Colorado, which had not voted Democratic in a presidential election since 1964, but had been trending in that direction, so we felt we had a tremendous challenge ahead of us.

One part of the three-day training that really struck me as a big reason for the campaign’s success was the primary principle of projecting a positive message. We were specifically directed not to engage in any trashing of Hillary Clinton or John McCain. And when you consider that we had a lot of young people who had never been involved with a campaign, I was really gratified by that. The tendency when people are trashing Obama is to come back with something about, “Well, your old man …” and trash McCain. But we were directed not to, and no one did.

Next, voter registration
Once in the district, we were charged with reigniting the enthusiasm for Obama that was there way back in February for the caucases, when he really swamped Senator Clinton. Nothing had really been done organizationally between February 3 and June when we arrived, so we had to gather whatever lists were left over from that effort and reach out to as many supporters and “leaners” as we could. We got on the phone every night to try and get people to agree to a one-on-one meeting with us, where we would hopefully establish some rapport and get a sense of whether the person had leadership qualities. The goal was to turn the one-on-one into a house meeting in that person’s neighborhood, where we would try to gather 20 to 40 people who were not necessarily Obama supporters, but were leaning that way. So this was the identification phase. All the while we were building lists.

The remarkable thing about this campaign — and I’ve been involved in a lot of them — was the data intensity. A day in the life of an Obama organizing fellow was: 9:30, report with your laptop to a coffee shop with Wi-Fi; 9:30 a.m. to noon, you’re on the phone, having conference calls with people around the state or country in order to learn the message; noon to 5 p.m., you’re out on the streets doing voter registration, knocking on doors, going into post offices, hanging out in parking lots. I was very proud because one day I was kicked out by the management of five different big box retail parking lots. It was a highlight because the trade-off was that I had registered 40 or 50 new voters at each. You figure if you go to a Home Depot, the people there are those who have just moved in, new to town. And there are three Home Depots, and then you’ve got Lowe’s. So you get kicked out of one and you just go to the next one, or a supermarket, you name it.

There is also a big event in the Fort Collins social calendar every year called the Brewfest, held in the old town. It’s a big deal, particularly for people between the ages of 21 and 35. There’s a long line to get in; people have to show ID. Working that line was a mother lode of voter registration opportunities, and it was precisely Obama’s demographic. We registered thousands and thousands of new voters — it was so empowering. I remember at least half a dozen people I registered who were not just new voters, but new citizens. And then people, hundreds probably, who were disenchanted and hadn’t voted for several cycles so their registration had lapsed.

So after voter registration, which would take you into the early evening, you would spend from 6 to 9 on the phone, dialing for voters, trying to line up one-on-ones for the next morning. And at about 9:30, when everybody was totally exhausted mentally and physically, we’d spend another hour doing data entry. One of the things they taught us was that if you don’t record it, it didn’t happen. So if you met somebody in line at the Brewfest and you registered them to vote, but didn’t enter them into our database, it was like it never happened.

The interesting thing about Colorado is there are really two “get-out-the-vote” days. There’s the traditional day, November 4, but also a vote-by-mail day. Most Colorado voters do so by mail. And they send out the ballots about a month ahead of the election, so October 4 is a big day. You basically have to make sure the ballot gets mailed in instead of ending up in the cookbook or with the Sunday newspaper. And that’s an intensive effort itself.

A disciplined, enthusiastic campaign
You read about the turnout for this election — the figure I’ve seen is 60 percent — but it wasn’t just that the percentage was higher than usual. The base was also a lot higher as a result of all the new voters we registered. It was a pretty powerful accelerant that we, the Obama organization, inserted into this race.

The people working with me were about 30 years younger than me for one thing. Every time I walked into the room, I brought up the average age by decades, not years. But these were committed kids who just knew there was a better way than how we’ve been doing it for 20 years, which was practically their entire life. A lot of them had just graduated from college and had the freedom to stay on, whereas I had a job here that I had to come back to. The organizing fellowship was a six-week commitment, unpaid of course, with an option of staying on or going back to reality. It was an incredible experience, and I really do think this program they came up with had a large role to play in how election night turned out.

I think what really separated this effort from others in the past was the discipline. The technology has been there for a couple of election cycles. Howard Dean showed that you can raise massive amounts of money, and then Obama took that to another incredible level. But we also had our own laptops. I stayed with a volunteer — a veterinarian, a single woman — in her guestroom. I paid for my own meals, my own travel, so there was literally nothing that the campaign expended on us.

So I would say that if you had to sum up the difference between this and other campaigns — discipline number one, and enthusiasm. Everyone recognized, just as Obama said in his speech Tuesday night, “It’s not about me.” Everybody knew that. It wasn’t about cult of personality. They knew that they were, we were, creating something bigger than ourselves.

Edward A. Brown can be reached at ebrown@bu.edu.