Turnout, Not Burnout
After all the debates, campaign stops, and TV ads, it may all just come down to this: Which party can get its voters to the polls?
Unlike the centralized Republican effort, the DNC and the Democrats' House and Senate election committees are each running separate turnout programs. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has put $10 million into its effort, more than twice as much as in 2002, and started working last summer with 40 Democratic House campaigns-mostly challengers-to create field programs that could replicate the GOP's 72-hour plan. The DCCC is also microtargeting voters for the first time, identifying Democratic voters in majority Republican areas rather than simply working Democratic strongholds.
"Drumbeat." Even with such innovations, Democrats are still leaning heavily on Big Labor, particularly the AFL-CIO. In Pennsylvania alone, members have been making 112,000 phone calls a week since August to the state's roughly 1.4 million union households. In a Philadelphia phone bank housed inside a tractor-trailer, a dozen middle-aged union workers last week dialed into Pennsylvania's 10th District to promote Democratic challenger Chris Carney over Rep. Don Sherwood. "In 2002, our message wasn't as well received," says James Weyrauch, a Department of Labor employee working the phone bank. "It's because we didn't have the Iraq war."
But some Democratic candidates are facing their own base motivation problems, with recent polls showing lower-than-normal black support for Democratic Senate candidates like Missouri's McCaskill, who wasn't cracking 50 percent black support in a poll earlier this month. Other polls show African-Americans more likely than whites to doubt that their votes will be counted because of voting controversies in recent years. "I hear Talent really trying to address some issues near and dear to the African community," says St. Louis Rep. William Lacy Clay, a Democrat. "I don't hear the same drumbeat from the McCaskill camp."
While acknowledging McCaskill's ties to the black community, St. Louis NAACP Vice President Claude Brown says Talent "has done a tremendous job recruiting African-Americans." But, he adds, "people are really angry. If nothing else gets African-Americans to the polls, it's anger." If that's still not enough, perhaps a call from one of the two parties will do the trick.
With Silla Brush
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