Thousands Are Deployed in Final Push

As President Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry try to close the deal with millions of voters over the next two days, each will rely on what operatives are calling record-breaking voter mobilization efforts.

The salesmen-in-chief will draw the headlines and television crews, but responsibility for delivering their voters to the polls Tuesday now lies in the hands of hundreds of thousands of mostly faceless workers. They labor for operations as vastly different as the candidates they serve.

For the Bush campaign, the final push has been engineered mostly by a single top-down organization that sets goals in Washington and relies on a vast network of neighborhood volunteers.

Kerry, in contrast, depends on a conglomeration of party, labor and issue organizations that use multiple messages to target divergent audiences.

Regardless of style, the growing anticipation was palpable in both camps this weekend.

“This feels just like we’re waiting for a hurricane,” said Dan Gelber, a Democratic state legislator and Miami-Dade County campaign chairman for Kerry. “We know what’s coming. We know what it might entail. But still it’s unfathomable.”

Thousands of volunteers continued to arrive Saturday in battleground states such as New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida -- most flying or driving in from states where the presidential race appears not to be close.

So many Democrats flooded the Miami area that a second wave of volunteers, calling themselves “Kerry comforters,” were being deployed to distribute water and snacks. Volunteers for both sides talked of vacations willingly lost. They described an odd emotional dissonance, saying it was thrilling to be part of what they called a once-in-a-lifetime fight, but fretting at the size of the task at hand.

Republican retiree Esther Morgan, who joined a dozen volunteers at a phone bank for Bush in suburban Milwaukee, said she would remind herself after difficult phone calls that she’d once sold carpet cleaner by phone.

“And that,” she said, “was even harder.”

Bush-Cheney ’04 officials say they have 1.6 million volunteers across the nation, and an organization that reaches down to the precinct level in most voting locations in the dozen most competitive states -- Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

With a pyramid organizational structure that has been compared to Amway or Tupperware, the campaign has set goals for volunteer recruitment, registrations and voter contacts.

“It’s micro-targeting,” said spokesman Reed Dickens. “You have to run TV and radio ads, but the most persuasive form of communication is person-to-person communication with someone you trust on issues you care about.”

The ground forces the Democrats are martialing this weekend, in contrast, come from many sources -- led by the party’s 250,000 volunteers, 226,000 union members and more than 140,000 workers from two big-money liberal organizations -- America Coming Together and MoveOn PAC.

Grasping to describe the magnitude of the work at hand, spokespersons for both sides flung numbers.

In Wisconsin alone, Bush volunteers said they were poised to make 1.5 million voter contacts in the last week of the campaign. Nationwide, America Coming Together, a pro-Kerry group, was ready to dispatch an estimated 5,100 rented vans to drive voters to the polls. It armed its paid canvassers and volunteers with 20,000 digital cameras to record instances of voter intimidation.

Like football coaches before a big game, top strategists for the two sides took pains not to let their teams grow complacent.

Michael Whouley, general election manager for the Democratic National Committee, described the party’s huge volunteer effort, then demurred: “I’m not underestimating my opponent. They will have the best operation Republicans have ever had.”

Strategist Matthew Dowd called Bush’s get-out-the-vote effort “much, much, much more extensive than any other” run by the Republicans. But he quickly added: “The question we have is whether our operation is equal to their operation. And I don’t think we will know the answer to that until election day.”

As the final events unfolded, the final forces were being brought into place.

At Democratic Party headquarters in Albuquerque, a representative scene took place: As about 150 volunteers jumped off buses from El Paso, each received a tortilla and a bowl of posole (Mexican pork soup) from one volunteer. Then another handed them a manila envelope filled with voter addresses and maps.

While their effort was homegrown in most places, Republican volunteers also hit the road -- most notably at least 5,500 activists from the Washington, D.C., area, who fanned out to battleground states.

Among them was Richard Balzano, 39. The technology program manager for a defense contractor flew to Ohio from suburban Virginia on Thursday. He had already whipped up to Cincinnati and its suburbs with other out-of-towners and then to Columbus, where Saturday he hit what the pros would call a vote-rich environment: the Ohio State-Penn State football game.

Balzano was willing to miss a week at home with his wife and two daughters, and operate on about four hours of sleep a night, because, he said: “I believe in this administration.”

“I think a lot of people don’t realize just how serious a war against terrorism we are in,” he added, “and just how serious a leader President Bush is.”

The fervor was at least as strong for Democratic activists like Sandy Schechter, who left the Pelham Parkway section of the Bronx to volunteer in Columbus for Kerry. She said she had taken all her vacation, sick and personal days from her job at a New York textbook publisher to be in Ohio for America Coming Together.

“I don’t need to go to Tahiti,” said Schechter, a longtime voter and first-time political activist. “I’d rather be in Ohio. Nothing is more important to me than being in Ohio.

“This is a history-changing event happening right before our eyes.”

As the hours wore on, campaign workers devised tactics for keeping the repetitive work interesting. One office installed a “knock-o-meter” to register the number of voters visited; another sounded a gong for every new recruit.

League of Conservation Voters activists in Orlando, Fla., a city known for its larger-than-life cartoon characters, unveiled a 4-foot-tall papier-mache Kerry head -- chin elongated, eyes deep-set. “It brings people in,” said spokesman Ken Cook.

On election day, both sides will be hoping that local candidates and measures can drive more of their voters to the polls. Ballot measures that would ban same-sex marriage in Oregon, Michigan and Ohio are expected to bring out both conservative supporters and liberal opponents.

In Florida, the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a liberal group, is using a state ballot proposal to raise the minimum wage by a dollar to get low-income voters to the polls.

“There is a set of voters out there that is not candidate-driven, but want to vote. We want to reach those people,” said Brian Kettenring, the group’s state director.

“And we’re betting that those people will go with Kerry once they have a ballot in their hand.”

While motivation is an issue for some, simple mechanics also come into play.

That’s why Bill Royall, a 60-year-old retired United Airlines pilot volunteering for the Democrats in Miami, felt so good about one of his last voter contacts.

He drove the absentee ballot of a 101-year-old Miami Beach woman to the elections office in downtown Miami.

“Every vote counts,” Royall said. “And time [is] running short.”

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Rainey reported from Los Angeles, Verhovek from Columbus, Ohio. Times staff writers Charles Duhigg in Los Angeles, John M. Glionna in Orlando, Fla., Kathleen Hennessey in Green Bay, Wis., Elizabeth Shogren in Columbus and Peter Wallsten in Miami contributed to this report.