Kerry Spot    [ jim geraghty reporting ]
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Since Election Day, Republicans have been hoisting a beer or three to the dramatic performance of their new and improved get-out-the-vote system. And chuckling a bit at the Democrats' and their surrogates, groups like MoveOn.org and Americans Coming Together, and how they (apparently) flopped.

This story by Matt Bai in the New York Times magazine this weekend should give the GOP a little bit of pause. The ACT-MoveOn-Democrat effort didn't flop; in fact, it exceeded expectations. The problem for Democrats was that they never expected the Republicans to improve their turnout efforts.

By Election Day, ACT claimed to have registered 85,000 new voters in Ohio, while the rest of the America Votes coalition — groups as large as the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and MoveOn.org and as small as Music for America — had registered another 215,000. If you were an Ohioan registered by ACT or one of its partners, Bouchard told me, you were contacted as many as a dozen times after you registered, by phone or by mail or by a live canvasser at your front door. ACT claimed to have knocked on 3.7 million doors and held more than 1.1 million doorstep conversations in the state; in contrast, the Kerry-Edwards campaign, which had its own significant turnout effort under way, had arrived in Ohio months after ACT and reported having knocked on about 595,000 doors. ''There's no way a party or a campaign could put on the ground the resources that we have,'' Bouchard told me. ''The sheer numbers of doors we knock on and phone calls we make are just astounding.''

Earlier in the year, I had spent weeks on the other side of the lines in Ohio, writing an article for the magazine about the Republican plan to vastly increase turnout using an all-volunteer network, modeled on a multilevel marketing scheme like Amway, that would focus on the new and growing exurban counties around Ohio's major cities. Democrats, traditionally the masters of field organizing, had dismissed the Republican effort as an exercise in self-delusion, insisting that volunteers could never build a turnout model to compete with professional organizers. In ACT and its partners, Democrats told me, they were building the most efficient turnout machine in political history. I returned to Ohio in the final days of the campaign to see the power of this grass-roots behemoth in action. I did — and I came to understand its limitations as well.

Of course, as we all learned, the personal touch of strongly-motivated volunteers is even more effective than paid professional organizers.

We all moved on to Champps for lunch, where Rosenthal got a call from his office on his cellphone and began taking down the numbers from the first wave of exit polling. Kerry was up by 4 points in Ohio and Florida. He led by 12 in Pennsylvania. ''These look great,'' Rosenthal told Lindenfeld and Bouchard. ''I'll take these.'' The three men wondered why it was that they hadn't seen much evidence of the vaunted Republican turnout effort. The ''vote challengers'' that Republicans had successfully appealed to the courts to allow into the polls had never shown up. Field offices weren't detecting any sign of Bush canvassers on the streets or at the polls. It was as if all this talk about the Republicans' volunteer-driven machine had been some kind of a strategic feint rather than an actual plan.

Heh. "Only the fighters are attacking... I wonder what those Star Destroyers are waiting for?" Bush fans will love the turns this story takes...

I was beginning to understand that the rules of the game were changing, confounding even the experts who seemed to have this business of voter turnout all figured out. For decades, Democratic operatives had been virtually unchallenged by Republicans when it came to mobilizing voters, and during that time, they had come to rely on a certain set of underlying assumptions, all of them based on experience in urban areas. One was that the volume of activity at a polling place was a reliable measure of turnout; long lines meant higher turnout, and no lines meant disaster. Another was that the strength of a get-out-the-vote program could be gauged by the number of people canvassing city streets, the people holding signs in the rain, vans carrying voters to the polls.

But Ohio, like much of the country, was undergoing a demographic shift of historic proportions, and Republicans were learning to exploit their advantage in rapidly expanding rural areas that organizers like Lindenfeld, for all their technological innovation, just didn't understand. In shiny new town-house communities, canvassing could be done quietly by neighbors; you didn't need vans and pagers. Polling places could accommodate all the voters in a precinct without ever giving the appearance of being overrun. In the old days, these towns and counties had been nothing but little pockets of voters, and Republicans hadn't bothered to expend the energy to organize them. But now the exurban populations had reached critical mass (Delaware County alone had grown by almost one-third since the 2000 election), and Republicans were building their own kind of quiet but ruthlessly efficient turnout machine.

Even on the outer edges of the cities, long lines were not necessarily the indicators of Democratic muscle that they used to be. Returning to the headquarters in Columbus, we passed a polling place at the local fish and wildlife office, where a line of voters stretched around the building, even though the polls were closing. ''You see that?'' Lindenfeld exclaimed admiringly. To him, it was another sign of Democratic enthusiasm. When I walked over to the line a little later, however, the man who was administering the site told me that, judging from his precinct lists, the majority of voters standing in line lived in new town-house developments across the highway, and they had stopped in to vote on their way home from work. Most of them, he said, were Republicans.

This part will bring back Election Night memories for all of us:

The volunteers who had been watching the numbers on a laptop refused to accept what was happening; they decided it was Brokaw's fault, because he had put Ohio into Bush's column, while CBS was still calling it even. Cursing Brokaw, they abruptly flipped channels to Dan Rather instead, causing a minor uproar. ''Folks, the reason we changed the channel is because NBC is the only network that called it!'' one of the frustrated volunteers shouted.

Bouchard, watching this unfold from the back of the room, recognized the desperation for what it was. ''I hear the PAX network hasn't called it either,'' he said sardonically. ''Let's put that on.''

But as the article points out, Kerry's 2.66 million votes were the most ever for a Democrat in Ohio. And it is probably only a matter of time before the Democrats adapt and start using the "highly-motivated volunteer" model that worked so well for Republicans.

While Democrats are enjoying their tantrum now, they are unlikely to "misunderestimate" GOP turnout efforts so much on Election Day 2006.

[Posted 11/22 10:17 AM]