CINCINNATI, Ohio — Stormy weather wasn’t enough to prevent
George Cullen from canvassing for Mitt Romney this week. Monday,
while Ohio was hit by cold wind and rain, the Clermont County
resident knocked on 25 doors — but that’s about half his average
daily total, and Cullen has been knocking on doors in the suburbs
of Cincinnati for the past five weeks.
While the conservatives he speaks to during his door-to-door
visits are “energized,” says Cullen, “A lot of them don’t want to
do early voting. They’re traditionalists. They want to wait until
Nov. 6.”
Republicans are encouraging early-voting, but when Cullen tries
to push this during his canvassing trips, he says, many of the
conservatives tell him, “Don’t worry. We will get there [on
Election Day].”
A West Point graduate who served six years in the Army, Cullen
is now one soldier in another army of grassroots volunteers who are
determined to make a difference here in what all acknowledge as the
crucial battleground of this presidential campaign. The question is
whether supporters of Romney can match the vaunted Democrat “ground
game” that helped President Obama carry Ohio by a quarter-million
votes in 2008.
Cullen was at the Eastgate Holiday Inn here Tuesday for a
pre-election event with Americans for
Prosperity. Cullen’s wife of 40 years, Rosemary, will be
volunteering in AFP’s Ohio phone-banking operation, part of a
massive grassroots organizing effort by the free-market group,
which has been closely allied with the Tea Party movement. While
AFP’s tax-exempt status prohibits them from engaging in what
lawyers call “electioneering,” they have mounted an intense
campaign of “voter education.”
The walls of AFP’s Columbus office are festooned with maps
showing a series of towns around Ohio’s capital city: Gahanna,
Hilliard, Westerville, Pickerington, Dublin and so on. Each map
highlights clusters of home addresses targeted for contacts by AFP,
which has been organizing for months in Ohio. Also in the office
are stacks of boxes containing thousands of “door hangers,” cards
bearing the organization’s message about the Senate campaign: “Has
Brown worked for you? Sherrod Brown supported President Obama’s
$825 billion failed stimulus… hundreds of millions of dollars were
spent on failed green energy experiments like the bankrupt Solyndra
Corporation.… Sherrod Brown rubber stamps President Obama’s
job-killing agenda 95% of the time.”
AFP boasts more than 100,000 activists in Ohio and, while not
all of those grassroots activists are going door-to-door in the
final week of the campaign, there are enough of them that the
organization has reportedly ordered a half-million of the
door-hanger cards. The maps on the wall at AFP’s Columbus office
are visual representations of data stored in a sophisticated
digital system that guides activists as they make their rounds on
voter-contact expeditions. In Ohio and other battleground states,
volunteers carry computer tablets with lists of names and addresses
of voters identified in AFP’s databanks as leaning toward their
message. The system evaluates voters on the basis of more than 200
different data points. “We’ve modeled what an AFP person looks
like,” says Seth Morgan, Ohio policy director for the group. “We’re
looking for people who agree with us on the issues, on economic
freedom.”
The differences between this kind of voter-education effort and
a get-out-the-vote campaign are — let’s be honest — strictly a
matter of semantics, and AFP is not the only group making this kind
of grassroots push that will have the practical effect of boosting
Republican turnout in Ohio. While the impact of Hurricane Sandy
forced Mitt Romney to cancel public campaign events Monday and
Tuesday, the troops providing the “ground game” in Ohio continues
marching, encouraged by polls indicating they are fighting on the
winning side in this crucial battleground state.
The latest Rasmussen poll of Ohio shows Romney moving ahead by
two points here and, following on the heels of
Sunday’s Ohio newspaper poll showing a tie race, confirms a
sense of momentum shared by many conservative activists in the
Buckeye State.
“I see the shift moving in our direction,” said Andrew Bair, the
25-year-old Ohio field director for National Right to Life. “The outpouring
we’ve seen from the grassroots has been impressive. The grassroots
are fired up.”
Bair has been doing “boots on the ground” organizing in Ohio
since August, working to turn out pro-life voters Nov. 6. “Our job
is to make people understand how extreme Obama has been on
abortion,” Bair says, explaining that the administration’s
health-care mandates have helped push blue-collar Catholic voters
toward the Republican column. National Right to Life and its state
and local affiliates have distributed “hundreds of thousands of
pieces of comparison literature” in Ohio, Bair says, and activists
are “sharing information with their churches and through social
media.” Citing polls that indicate growing opposition to abortion,
Bair says, “It’s a pro-life country. We deserve a pro-life
president.”
With less than a week remaining until Election Day, Cullen says
he still encounters undecided voters in his canvassing expeditions.
But he delivers the pro-Romney message to them, and such wavering
voters are unlikely to suddenly flip to Obama, who has already had
four years to close the deal. With thousands of fired-up grassroots
activists now crisscrossing the state, the volunteer army could
make the decisive difference in this year’s ultimate
battleground.
