Sunday, November 09, 2008

How Obama Won Florida

Miami Herald: Inside story: How Obama won Florida
It took passion, precision and a little bit a luck for the Obama team to turn Florida from red to blue


[T]he campaign registered 200,000 new voters in Florida, opened 50 state field offices, recruited 600,000 volunteers and allocated $40 million to fight John McCain....

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Obama's Florida strategy was thorough and simple: ask every supporter to help, give every volunteer a job, register every eligible voter, get ''sporadic'' voters to the polls, and bring the campaign to every pocket of the state.

The campaign did it by dividing the state into five regions, or ''pods,'' each with its own staff and message geared to regional concerns. It harnessed social networking on the Internet and cell phones to allow grassroots organizers set up their own voter registration drives, home-grown phone banks and text messaging chains.

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in 2004, 1.6 million Democrats didn't vote, including 600,000 African American voters.......

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''We don't stop when we ask you to vote. We ask you to talk to your neighbors, or start a phone bank, or knock on doors or donate food,'' says Botticella, 25 and a California native.

''It's about turning conversations into relationships,'' she says.

In Florida, that means 1,414 ''Neighbor to Neighbor'' teams with a total of 22,000 volunteers.


Community organizing, baby.

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