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ELECTIONS
Ohio is base camp for campaigns' ground game
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- Voters who are young or African-American or who sat out the last few elections have never been more sought after as the presidential campaign hits its last weeks in perennial swing state Ohio.
Meghan McCain, the 24-year-old daughter of the Republican nominee, recently visited voters in rural central Ohio. Democrat Barack Obama sent music mogul Russell Simmons to rally voters in Columbus and Cleveland. And NBA star LeBron James — the closest thing Ohio has to a sports saint — has pitched Obama's candidacy.
"It's all about getting young people to understand how important it is to vote. This is a time that could be life-changing for a lot of people," said James, who campaigned for Obama in Cleveland.
Both campaigns are using the biggest megaphones they can find to build on past years' models. Republicans still plan to carry rural areas; Democrats want to run up big numbers in the state's urban centers.
But both are attempting to go past that.
Just after the 2004 campaign, political operatives regarded President Bush's Ohio grass-roots operation as the gold standard.
Bush won a second term by carrying Ohio with just a 10-votes-per-precinct margin. Other campaigns noticed and began digging into potential voters' magazine picks or favorite carryout joints to identify supporters.
Then they got them to register to vote.
Compared to this year's efforts, Bush's 2004 campaign is amateurish. Less than a month before Election Day, more than 200,000 voters a day are getting pitched a presidential candidate, either on their phone or at their door.
Obama has surpassed Bush's benchmarks in Ohio, and John McCain's aides say they are on pace to at least meet Bush's results here.
Obama's campaign in the state is playing in areas that don't normally get campaign staff. His massive neighbor-to-neighbor program reaches into rural regions and traditionally Republican areas, where they hope to narrow their expected margin of loss.
The Democrats have a satellite office within 42 miles of every Ohio resident. All told, Obama's 300-person-plus staff in 79 Ohio offices is twice the size of John Kerry's in 2004, aides said.
They also have been in touch with 250 percent more voters than Kerry was at this point, numbering 2.6 million contacts so far, the Obama aides said.
"We've identified Obama supporters across Ohio, and over the next month we'll be following up with them to make sure they have all the information they need to vote early between now and Election Day," Obama spokesman Isaac Baker said.
Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner said this week that roughly 666,000 new voters have registered in Ohio since the start of 2008.
McCain's campaign has been forced to spend time in areas once thought reliably Republican. Luckily for them, the Ohio GOP has long organized the state with a ground game that never truly shuts down after elections. The grass-roots volunteers remain engaged, and the state and county parties keep tabs on them.
It's also heavy on volunteers, something the McCain campaign will have to use if it wants to compete against Obama's glut of bodies.
McCain is running a leaner campaign, but the Republican National Committee's collaborative Victory Committee is supplementing their efforts. McCain has 40 Ohio offices — but they're open far fewer hours and have far fewer paid staff.
"The groundwork had been there for years. That gave us a good foundation through the dog days of summer," said Jon Seaton, McCain's aide tasked with running Ohio and Pennsylvania.
"In other states, creating the infrastructure was a lift. We could get right into it here."
On a recent weekend, the two campaigns' volunteers crossed each other while knocking on doors in Canton, a northeast Ohio city struggling with a dire economy.
Each camp also has combined public and private databases to dispatch volunteers to their neighbors' doors, armed with address-specific talking points. Volunteers use their cell phones and campaign databases to call voters with targeted scripts.
Obama has had staff on the ground in Ohio since before he clinched his party's nomination in June. McCain, who earned the nomination in March, drew criticism from Republicans for being slow to start a full organization in the state.
No Republican has ever won the White House without carrying Ohio, and only two Democrats in recent history have. Elections here are hard-fought and brutal, and television attack ads are common.
This is the first presidential election in Ohio in which voters can cast a ballot early without an excuse, and for a weeklong window that ended last Monday, Ohioans could register and cast a ballot on the same day.
Unlike past elections, the final push is no longer the final 72 hours. Now, it's a monthlong marathon.
