Back-to-Basics Candidates Take the Fight to the Field

Kessa Alvey’s nails are bitten ragged. She guzzles Dr Pepper to stay awake. And when she gets home from work around midnight, the 23-year-old Ohio transplant crashes on a mattress in a Boyle Heights house she shares with two friends.

Alvey, a lead field organizer for Rep. Xavier Becerra’s mayoral campaign, is one of the hundreds of weary but eager recruits pounding the pavement and working the phones for the six major candidates vying for the city’s highest office.

While the mayor’s race is being waged mostly through slickly produced television commercials and glossy brochures, a little-noticed cadre of campaign workers is engaged in the shoe leather-wearing, calf-straining work of reaching out to voters one at a time.

“Field,” as it’s called in the world of politics, represents the opposite pole to television on the campaign spectrum. It is personal, direct and, on a voter-by-voter basis, extraordinarily labor intensive. It is a phone call, a handshake and a look in the eye in an era when most voters will get their only measure of a candidate from a fleeting image concocted in a production studio.

What is unclear is whether, in a city as far-flung as Los Angeles, a campaign built around field can win.

More than any other candidate, Becerra is testing the effective limits of a ground effort. While all the mayoral candidates are using varying amounts of field to mobilize voters, the four-term Democratic congressman has focused most of his campaign on organizing volunteers to call potential supporters and walk door to door.

In part, that’s a function of necessity: Becerra lags far behind the leaders in fund-raising, forcing him to rely more heavily on volunteers.

Still, his campaign makes the most of the situation.

“It’s a totally back-to-the-basics, fundamental way of campaigning,” said Becerra’s campaign manager, Paige Richardson. “In a culture in which you get less and less interpersonal interaction, it becomes more valuable. It’s going to last longer and have more depth than a television commercial.”

At its best, field can help candidates build a quiet groundswell of loyal support that sometimes is undetected by polls, and can make the difference in a close election, experts say.

“I’ve consistently told candidates that you’ve got to do what everyone else is doing: You’ve got to do the mail, the media and the radio,” said James Acevedo, a veteran Los Angeles field organizer who worked with former Mayor Tom Bradley and City Councilman Alex Padilla, among others. “But if you want to make your candidacy a cause, a reason for being, you’ve got to be able to touch people at the door.”

The challenge, as Becerra’s campaign admits, is to reach enough people across the sprawling city to compete with the regular bombardment of thousands of residents by his opponents’ commercials.

Since February, the campaign has signed up about 1,400 volunteers who have made more than 300,000 contacts with voters, about 20% of whom have pledged to vote for Becerra, Richardson said.

To Becerra backers, those numbers suggest the potential for a surprising showing on election day next week.

But those same figures pale next to the reach of television.

According to Los Angeles political veterans, about $400,000 worth of network television ads during a week--a typical buy for the top candidates--can reach about 450,000 likely voters as many as 10 times.

As a result, while field may be an appealing and folksy method of politicking that gives voters a more concrete impression of a candidate, it may not be the most efficient way to reach people in a large citywide race, some experts said.

“The most effective contact you can have is face to face with a voter. There’s honesty there,” said Sue Burnside, a consultant for City Councilman Joel Wachs, who started the first field consulting firm in the country.

“[But] the mayor’s race is not one of those big field races. There are just so many voters. You’ve got to have thousands and thousands of walkers out to try to make up the difference with TV.”

Most campaign experts agree that, for field to work, a candidate must also do significant outreach through television and mail. Becerra has been unable to muster much of either.

By last week, he had raised about $1 million, the least of the six major candidates. Without much money in the bank, he has been able to afford only a limited television buy, most of it on Spanish-language stations. The campaign is also sending out several mailers to voters during the campaign’s final days.

Indeed, recent polls suggest that Becerra’s effort has not registered--at least not yet. He trails the rest of the pack significantly in most surveys.

Field “can be a tiebreaker, but it doesn’t get you in the game,” said Parke Skelton, a consultant for former Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, another mayoral candidate.

But Richardson, who has years of experience in field organizing, believes a ground effort can work. She started walking door to door as an 8-year-old in Charleston, W. Va., pulling a red wagon full of literature for her father, a candidate for the state Legislature. Most recently, she ran the reelection campaign of U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.).

“Field is often an afterthought, and it’s a crucial mistake,” she said. “In tight elections, it’s been demonstrated that your field effort can make a 2- to 3-point difference in your turnout.”

The Key Is Targeting Voters

The key, Richardson said, is targeting voters who are most likely to support your candidate and making sure they go to the polls. Becerra is going after liberal voters and Latinos who are likely to vote in a municipal election.

“You’re not talking about trying to speak with 2 million people at their doors,” she said. “You find a very small universe and give them a lot of high quality contact.”

Field may have a grass-roots flavor, but it is expensive, exhausting and time consuming. Organizers have to be paid, campaign literature printed, volunteers organized.

For every 10 hours a media consultant spends on a campaign, a field consultant spends 100, said Burnside, who calls it “the blue-collar end of the political profession.”

“It’s based on the need to have an awful lot of people do something they don’t want to do,” added Gale Kaufman, a Sacramento-based Democratic consultant. “It’s very labor intensive and it’s dependent on people. With any volunteer operation, there’s a flake factor.”

Becerra’s operation is extensive. The campaign opened seven field offices around the city, hired six organizers and 12 interns, and contracted with a group called La Colectiva to do paid canvassing on the Eastside. In addition, Becerra will have held more than 60 neighborhood meetings around the city by April 10.

A chart at the downtown headquarters tracks voter contacts. The goal for each organizer and intern: 100 contacts a day.

To get there, Becerra is counting on the energy of people like Alvey, a recent college graduate hooked on campaign life. Alvey got her start as a volunteer knocking on doors for U.S. Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) as a student at Baldwin Wallace College in Cleveland, and is now on her fifth campaign.

“I love talking to people and getting them enthralled,” said Alvey, chewing gum frantically as she shuffled pink message slips at Becerra’s downtown campaign headquarters on a recent afternoon. “Government is so exciting. Every vote does count.”

Alvey heads Becerra’s field effort in the San Fernando Valley, a massive responsibility that includes reaching out to voters in five council districts. She runs two offices, one in Sylmar and one in Sherman Oaks, and coordinates more than 100 volunteers.

Hers is a typical campaign lifestyle, one in which the basics fall by the wayside: She rarely has time to go to the store and buy shampoo. If she wants to exercise, she goes jogging in Boyle Heights at midnight.

“Sometimes when you go to sleep at night, you think, why am I doing this?” she acknowledged. “But you get addicted. You wake up, pumped up. This is a cause.”

When she’s not in the Valley talking to volunteers or organizing community meetings, she works six-hour shifts at the campaign headquarters phone bank, doing something called “predictive dialing.”

Alvey sits with a phone pressed to her ear as a computer in front of her automatically calls voters. The phone beeps when someone answers, and Alvey launches into her pitch. If the voter is a Becerra supporter, she pushes one number; undecided, another. The computer keeps a running tally of the breakdown.

Using the computer doubles or triples the number of calls she can make, but it’s also tedious. While Alvey waits to reach a live person, she plays cards or reads magazines.

Personal visits can be equally grueling--yielding mixed results for long days of precinct walking.

On one recent Saturday afternoon, Alvey, dressed in a white Becerra for Mayor T-shirt, walked the sloping streets of a hillside neighborhood in Sylmar, knocking on doors. Armed with a clipboard, a list of voters and campaign literature, the young organizer tried several doors without reaching anyone.

Some Doors Slam, but Some Open

Then, at one house, her knock set off a frenzy of excited barking from several dogs inside. A woman opened the door a crack and peered out. “Yeah?” she said warily.

Alvey began her pitch about Becerra, describing his work as a congressman and his “neighborhoods first” agenda. The woman watched her impassively. The dogs kept barking.

“I hope you keep him in mind,” Alvey said. The woman nodded and slammed the door shut.

A few doors later, at a stucco home with plastic toys scattered in the driveway, she had better luck.

“Yeah, I’ve heard of him,” said Adela Mendez, 53, a cafeteria worker, as several children peeked out the door. Alvey invited Mendez to a neighborhood meeting the next day in Pacoima. Mendez said she would try to make it.

Later, Mendez said that she was impressed that someone had actually shown up at her house and talked to her about a candidate.

“No one else has come by,” she said. “It gives me a good feeling about him, that he has supporters who are motivated to do this.”

Now, after talking to Alvey, she says she is likely to vote for Becerra.

“From what she said, he seems like a good person,” Mendez said.