Apparently, the Romney campaign will rely almost exclusively on the RNC for voter reg/GOTV efforts and on television advertising to get their voters to the polls. They don’t even pretend that their candidate has any innate appeal:
“For the Republicans, what’s going to drive turnout is not going to be Mitt Romney — it’s Barack Obama,” [Doug] Gross [a veteran GOP activist and Romney’s 2008 Iowa chairman] said.
Meanwhile, the president’s team is already in the field registering voters.
The campaign appears poised to be even more aggressive this year. Volunteers are registering new voters in an effort to expand the pool of supporters. They are knocking on doors to identify likely voters — an activity that usually occurs in the summer or fall. And the reelection effort has begun blanketing battleground states with field offices, including 18 in Florida, 13 in Pennsylvania and eight in Iowa. In the process, Obama’s apparatus has locked up local Democratic operatives across the country much earlier than expected.
“It’s made it tougher to find good staff for local campaigns,” said Jim Ross, a San Francisco-based Democratic strategist who runs campaigns in California, Oregon and Nevada.
That traditional field work is being buttressed by a massive technological investment aimed at expanding the campaign’s voter database, which in turn fuels the organizing efforts. Nearly a fifth of the campaign’s spending so far — $15.1 million — went to online advertising, technology consulting and Web hosting. The campaign recently opened a field office in San Francisco for volunteers who want to contribute their high-tech skills to Web development and other projects.
Obama’s reelection effort also will draw on the resources of the Democratic National Committee, for which he’s helped raise $138 million in the last year.
I’m going to predict right now that the Obama campaign will fill up Georgia with field offices while Romney is poll-testing what kind of advertising can make Northern Virginians take him remotely seriously.
The Obama campaign will have identified its soft supporters in Montana before Romney can select a running mate. While Romney is bleeding money to air commercials in Pittsburgh and Phoenix, Obama volunteers will be completing their third walk-thrus of neighborhoods in Tucson and Harrisburg.
The community organizers already proved the superiority of their model once. Hillary, McCain and Pailn scoffed at us up until the moment they realized that their gooses were cooked.
