Features » June 11, 2008

Expand the Vote

The Obama campaign’s voter registration drive could radically alter the electoral map this fall

By Adam Doster

Nineteen ninety-two was a crucial election year in Illinois. Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton was hoping to carry a swing state that President George H.W. Bush had won by a scant 2 percentage points four years earlier, and Illinois’ Cook County Recorder of Deeds Carol Moseley Braun was attempting to become the nation’s first African-American female senator. Close observers believed that a swell in black turnout could make the difference in both contests, but activists feared that the leadership of Chicago’s Democratic Party — which historically hadn’t pushed registration in majority-black wards — would squander the opportunity.

In stepped a young organizer named Barack Obama. Fresh out of Harvard Law School, Obama moved to Chicago to head up the local branch of Project Vote, a D.C.-based non-partisan voter registration organization focused in low-income communities of color. Recruiting staff and volunteers from community groups and black churches, he helped train 700 deputy registrars and devised a comprehensive media campaign based around the slogan “It’s a Power Thing.” His volunteers hit the streets and registered more than 150,000 black voters in only six months. According to a 1993 report from Chicago magazine, the elections “turned on these totals.”

Sixteen years later, in the midst of his own presidential campaign, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) hasn’t forgotten the crucial lesson he learned canvassing Chicago’s South Side: Activating underrepresented communities can dramatically alter close elections.

Using his massive volunteer base, the one-time organizer is now adapting his Chicago experience for the national stage, leading similar targeted drives in all 50 states. Combined with his ability to inspire new voters and the continued efforts of long-established voter registration organizations, a registration boom could reconfigure the electoral map come November.

Why slice pie? Let’s grow it!

Lynne Schwartz, a veteran clinical psychologist based in Ann Arbor, Mich., was drawn to Obama well before he rose to national prominence. Schwartz focuses on juvenile justice reform, and Obama had led efforts in Chicago to combat legislation that would have put more juvenile offenders into the adult system. After reading his first book, watching him deliver his famous 2004 Democratic National Convention speech, and learning about his commitment to the Constitution and consensus-based problem solving, Schwartz knew she had found her candidate.

“I kept hearing him talking about healing the nation and repairing the world,” she says, “and I resonated with that at such a visceral level.”

When he announced his presidential candidacy, Schwartz jumped in, volunteering as the Washtenaw County organizer for the fledgling Michiganders for Obama. Although the Illinois senator wasn’t on the ballot in her state and had made no effort to campaign there, her organization pounded the sidewalks of Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti anyway, talking to voters about the confusing circumstances of their early primary and the value of voting “uncommitted.”

Their ground game paid off. “Uncommitted” received 45 percent in Washtenaw, beating the 43 percent Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) received in the county.

Following the primary, Schwartz stayed busy, phone banking from her personal computer, hosting local fundraisers, traveling to Ohio to canvass, and even winning a seat as a delegate to the national convention. But her biggest thrill came when the national campaign tapped her to run the local branch of the Vote for Change voter registration drive, a signal that the folks in Chicago were taking her organizing seriously.

Vote for Change is the latest iteration of the Obama campaign’s comprehensive electoral ground game, one that will build off the methodical and underreported registration efforts staged by Obama supporters during the primary season. Just in the late contests alone, campaign volunteers enlisted 200,000 new Democrats in Pennsylvania, 165,000 in North Carolina and more than 150,000 in Indiana.

“Recent voter registration drives conducted by our campaign have registered significant numbers of voters across this country,” says Obama spokeswoman Shannon Gilson. “We feel like this really scratches the surface of what’s possible.”

Launched in all 50 states on May 10, Vote for Change has been dispatching Obama staffers across the country to marshal volunteers through the campaign’s massive online database and train them in the basics of voter registration. Working with local organizers and using similar “micro-targeting” techniques honed by the GOP in the 2004 presidential campaign, Obama supporters will pepper precincts for the next six months in search of eligible but inactive political participants likely to value Obama’s message of change.

“It’s reaching out to our base of supporters,” says Gilson, “and empowering them to reach out into their communities to register their friends and neighbors.”

Chosen as one of the Vote for Change staging sites, Ann Arbor received a full-time organizer from the Obama campaign in late April, which Schwartz says has helped immensely with volunteer coordination and outreach.

“What has been outstanding and different from any other campaign that I’ve participated in has been the synergy,” says Schwartz. “It’s not like some campaign is coming in and the people doing the work on the ground for months are thrown under the bus. … They have a strong interest in our ideas and how we do things here.”

Following a successful kick-off on May 17, momentum in Washtenaw has been growing. Volunteer organizers have flooded Schwartz’s Wednesday planning meetings, each with their own list of potential targets and tactics. On the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, 42 Obama supporters traveled to Ypsilanti and registered close to 100 people, many of whom have never voted.

Schwartz, who maintains she isn’t easily inspired, says she is continually stunned by both the professionalism of the national campaign and the enthusiasm local organizers bring to the work. “I go to work and I get home and there are new ideas being run by me that [are] just amazing,” she says. “There’s so much creativity and so much energy.”

Such enthusiasm will be needed to reach the campaign’s ambitious registration targets, which Gilson hinted would be in the millions. It helps that Obama has already won the support of many members of the voting rights community, who find his commitment to increasing the franchise refreshing.

“For many years, candidates … tended to compete for people who are already in the electorate, rather than expanding the electorate,” says Project Vote Deputy Director Michael Slater. “They thought of a slice of the pie rather than trying to grow the pie. So it’s interesting to see a candidate that is really talking about growing the size of the electorate.”

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• Reader Comments

  “Combined with his ability to inspire new voters” 
  Is this inspiring?

  (Stanley Crouch, columnist) Feb 2, 08
  When black Americans refer to Obama as ‘one of us,’ I do not know what they are talking about.”

  (Ms. Dickerson)Feb 2, 08
  I’ve got nothing but love for the brother, but we don’t have anything in common,” said Ms. Dickerson, who wrote recently about Mr. Obama in Salon, the online magazine. “His father was African. His mother was a white woman. He grew up with white grandparents.

  “Now, I’m willing to adopt him,” Ms. Dickerson continued. “He married black. He acts black. But there’s a lot of distance between black Africans and African-Americans.”

  (Obama, “Town Meeting” / Spike Lee’s 1992 “Malcolm X,” )
  “They’re trying to bamboozle you. It’s the same old okie-doke. Y’all know about okie doke, right? ... They try to bamboozle you. Hoodwink ya. Try to hoodwink ya. Alright, I’m having too much fun here. ... ” - Barack Obama

  dog whistle politics
                            or inspiring voters whatever you want to call it….

  Posted by oam6000 on Jun 12, 2008 at 5:35 AM

  Obama is going to expand the vote alright.  You are going to see white voters in droves who have never voted before going to the polls to vote AGAINST this unqualified, hate filled racist and his bitter anti-American, anti-white wife!

  Posted by Kirt on Jun 12, 2008 at 11:33 AM

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