Jeremy Bird, the National Field Director of Obama for America (OFA), said on Tuesday that Obama’s winning coalition on November 6 was the result of “the strongest grassroots organization in the history of American presidential politics.” OFA had more than twice as many local offices as Republican Mitt Romney in the targeted swing states, he said.
In those targeted states, Bird said, OFA had 631 offices, compared to only 282 for Romney.
While Republican strategist Karl Rove was raising $300 million for television ads depicting Republican candidate Mitt Romney as a would-be efficient manager of the U.S economy, Bird said the Obama for America operation assembled a network comprised of more than two million volunteers, backed by neighborhood political teams and 2,700 field organizers. The local offices were critical to mobilizing the volunteers, he said.
The title of Bird’s presentation was “Brick-by-brick: The nitty-gritty organizing work that turned out Obama’s winning coalition.” Although he is now the National Field Director for Obama for America, Jeremy Bird is a former community organizer with a history of working in Democratic Party politics.
Some conservatives are still insisting that Obama was elected through vote fraud, even though Romney has conceded the election and Republican consultants are acknowledging the flaws in the “ground game” of turning out the vote. The Bird presentation makes it plain that the Obama campaign simply out-organized the Romney campaign and used money where it was most effective—on the streets.
Bird’s remarks and a slide presentation dramatizing the Democratic Party advantages in the election were delivered at a Center for American Progress (CAP) event called “The Obama Coalition in 2012 and Beyond.”
As panelists openly talked about the success of the “Obama coalition” and what it could accomplish in the future, including in the 2014 congressional elections, they quickly dismissed a concern that the political nature of the conversation could jeopardize CAP’s status as a “non-partisan” and tax-exempt entity.
Funded by hedge-fund billionaire George Soros and other prominent liberals, CAP is considered a virtual front of the Obama Administration and claims to have played a “key role” in passing Obamacare.
CAP’s 2010 annual report, which reports almost $30 million in revenue, notes appearances by CAP figures on CNN as well as MSNBC host Ed Schultz’s taping of his radio show at the CAP radio studio.
The November 6 election came as a shock to many Republicans and conservatives, who believed the polls forecasting a Romney win. On Fox News, Karl Rove and Dick Morris were among those predicting a Romney victory.
The CAP event went behind the headlines of the Obama victory to demonstrate how they did it. Jeremy Bird said that OFA volunteers made 146 million “door knocks and phone calls” for Obama in order to try to get them out to the polls, and conducted a voter registration program that “changed the electorate” by increasing the turnout of minorities and others favorable to Obama. Bird noted that the Obama campaign had another program, Operation Vote, which focused on getting “core constituencies” to the polls.
Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg, senior vice president of Greenberg Quinlan, Rosner Research, mocked the pollsters who had predicted a Romney win and said that the GOP’s most “reliable voters” did not turn out on Election Day. Greenberg said her final poll showed Obama winning the election by four points, close to the actual final margin of 3.7%.
She said that while Republican officials had ridiculed the Democratic Party’s emphasis on early voting, that turned out to be one of the keys to the outcome. Obama won the early vote in such states as Iowa, Ohio, Virginia, Nevada, North Carolina, Florida and Colorado.
Ruy Teixeira, a CAP fellow, was the host of the event and delivered his own reporton the election results. “In 2012 President Obama won re-election with 50.9 percent of the popular vote and 332 Electoral College votes,” he noted. “He is the first Democratic president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt to win two terms with more than 50 percent of the total popular vote. Unlike Democratic victories of the past, however, President Obama was also able to achieve victory with a historically low percentage of the white vote.”
He said, however, that it is an open question whether Obama and the progressives can deliver on their agenda for the nation and “improve the economic standing of middle- and working-class families…”
Read more stories like this at AIM.org.
Photo credit: RafePhoto (Creative Commons)
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Romney did not do himself any favors, the way he conducted himself in the second and third presidential debate. Romney had Obama punch drunk bouncing off the ropes, after the first debate, and let him off the ropes in the second and third debate. Unfortunately, it would not have mattered if Romney kept the same intensity throughout all three debates, because there was no way anyone could have beaten the “Chicago Machine,” and the illegal votes that they crammed into the election.
All one has to do is look at the facts, every state that required voter ID, Romney won, every state that did not allow voter ID as a requirement to vote, Romney lost. Couple that with how could a small voting district in Florida that had seven registered voters, produce over nine hundred votes? The evidence of fraud is rampant throughout the country, and no one does anything about it.
I guess we somewhat deserve what we get, by not holding our elected officials feet to the fire.
Obama’s “grassroots” movement might more aptly described as a unions & crooks movement. The infiltrated most of the local election divisions to do their dirty work there. Not being the brightest bulbs in the pack, they weren’t too stealthy about it. Now we have tons of cases of blatant voter fraud exposed for all to see. Most of the “rally volunteers” were SEIU union members, paid to attend ot protest. Most didn’t try to hide who they worked for, or that they were being paid. Of course, that union, along with most others, owns Obama now. Most Obama staged rallies could barely fill a phone booth, while Romney was forced several times to seek a larger venue to hold all the people who showed up (unpaid and non-union). I should point out that a great many of the rallies held for Romney/ Ryan were Tea Party organized, not GOP organized. In fact, Tea Party volunteers outperformed GOP funtionaries in 2010 and 2012. This is why the GOP fears and reviles us now. The GOP is dying out and the TP grassroots movement is growing. Natural selection of the fittest I’d say.
Out organized? You mean out-propaganda’d. When you own the press, it’s easy. Remember what has been said about repeating something over and over until it seems true? That’s all this was about, the ability to snow every ignorant SOB out there.