Obama rallies his supporters, but possibly at a cost

President Obama heads out for a final round of campaign rallies this weekend to mobilize supporters for the midterm elections next week — his last chance to push Democratic voters to the polls and hold off an expected wave of Republican victories.

On Friday, he led a rally for beleaguered Rep. Tom Perriello in southern Virginia and he planned to stump through the weekend in fiercely contested races in Connecticut, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Illinois.

In his recent appearances, the president has drawn huge, appreciative crowds: 9,000 in Las Vegas; 26,000 in Madison, Wis.; 35,000 in Columbus, Ohio. But he also is facing questions about whether these appearances help the party’s prospects or divert Democrats from their gritty get-out-the-vote work.

Obama’s campaign stops over the last few months have excited his party’s core voters in a bleak election season for Democrats. “No matter what happened, this was going to be a challenging election,” said Daniel Pfeiffer, White House communications director. “We worked very hard to try to make it better. And I think every poll shows we have done that. We have improved the situation to give Democrats a fighting chance here.”

What’s less clear is whether the events have a concrete payoff. Even the White House acknowledges that the success of the rallies hinges on the kind of campaign operation that local Democrats have in place.

“It all depends on whether the campaigns have a real field ground game,” said one senior White House official, who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. “If so … then they use these as massive organizing opportunities.”

It would seem natural for a president to campaign for his party, but it’s not always an easy call. Former President Clinton came to regret the campaigning he did in advance of the 1994 midterm elections, concluding that it made him look more partisan, less presidential.

“My campaign riffs were effective for the party faithful, but not for the larger audience who saw them on television; on TV, the hot campaign rhetoric turned a statesman-like president back into the politician the voters weren’t sure about,” Clinton wrote in his autobiography, “My Life.”

In the end, Democrats suffered widespread defeats that year, losing control of Congress.

One Democratic pollster said that large rallies put the focus squarely on Obama at a time when his approval ratings have sagged. “Here’s the downside of all this,” the pollster said, referring to Obama’s campaign efforts. “You say to the larger audience that this race is about me. And in most parts of the country, that’s not the message Democrats want to be sending.”

The pollster spoke on condition of anonymity to speak more candidly.

Veteran Democratic organizers say that large presidential rallies come at a price. Time spent ensuring that Obama has a sizeable audience cuts into canvassing and phone banks — the essential work of juicing election day turnout. The White House said it is sensitive to this, noting that Obama won’t attend any rallies on Monday, the day before the election, so as not to interfere with efforts to get Democrats to the polls.

Obama’s political arm, Organizing for America, approached local Nevada organizers and asked for help in generating a large crowd for the president’s visit on Oct. 22, engendering some resentment, according to people involved in the effort.

Toward the end of that rally, Obama looked out at the large, buoyant crowd and urged them to go vote, right then, at a polling place in the nearby Boulevard Mall.

“Don’t wait. Don’t wait,” Obama said.

The response was underwhelming. A total of 808 people voted at the mall that day — no real difference in the number who voted in the week before the president’s rally, Clark County election records show.

Privately, some Democratic organizers in Nevada complained that arranging the rally and building the crowd of 9,000 intruded on what should have been their first priority: reelecting the struggling Senate majority leader, Harry Reid.

“They did not get a bump out of it at all,” one Democratic organizer in Nevada said of Obama’s rally for Reid. “OFA said, ‘We need to move large numbers of people to the rally.’ And the reaction of groups was, ‘We’re trying to get Harry Reid elected.’ ”

OFA’s Nevada state director, Jennifer Lopez, did not return a call for comment.

The senior White House official countered that in Clark County as a whole, Democrats voted in greater numbers than Republicans on the day of Obama’s appearance and in the next couple of days after that.

But a look at a longer period shows no increase in Democratic voting.

In the six days leading up to the Vegas rally, early-voting Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 7,814, county election records show. On the day of the rally and the five days afterward, the comparable number was 7,032.

Still, in states where Obama is popular, candidates are eager for a visit. A total of 37,000 came to see Obama stump for Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) in Los Angeles on Oct. 22.

“I can’t say that there was a bounce” in terms of early voting, said Rose Kapolczynski, Boxer’s campaign manager. “More importantly, it [the Obama rally] is part of an effort to build momentum in the two weeks heading into election day. It tells the occasional voters that there’s really something at stake.”

peter.nicholas@latimes.com

Kathleen Hennessey of the Washington bureau contributed to this report.