Old Hat but Still in Style

Cheryl Simpson and Charles Eldridge’s paths crossed on a recent hot September morning, a chance encounter at the Orange International Street Fair that neither of them is likely to remember in much detail.

Eldridge, a 23-year-old government teacher at Santa Ana’s Calvary Chapel High School, was looking for November campaign literature for his classroom. Simpson, in a bright red shirt and white summer hat, had Republican fliers to hand out from behind a folding table flanking a life-size, cardboard George W. Bush. After a flurry of small talk and the shuffling of brochures, Eldridge was on his way, unaware that he had just become another notch on the belt for a key grass-roots campaign worker for Republican U.S. Senate candidate Bill Jones.

This is old-school politicking, a practice that some believe has outlived its usefulness in a world of television ads and phone banks, Internet sites and instant e-mail updates.

Yet even in a state as large and unwieldy as California, there still is a role -- and a need, proponents say -- for old ward-style electioneering, where envelopes get stuffed and sealed, lawn signs are meted out and stickers are added to lapels with a robust slap of confidence.

For the faithful, this is where political campaigns live and breathe -- and where they can be won and lost.

“You get a close election, you start losing statewide by 100,000 votes or 75,000 votes, that’s when it’s a factor,” said Bruce Nestande, campaign manager for Jones, who is trailing incumbent Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer in recent polls. “That extra door knock is what’s going to make a difference in a close election. Our attitude is, you run your campaign as though you’re one vote behind, and you chase that vote, and then whatever shall be, shall be.”

A 2000 study by Yale University’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies tracked the effect of the old-fashioned approach. Field tests in a 1998 New Haven, Conn., election found that voter turnout increased by more than 9% in areas in which voters were contacted face-to-face by nonpartisan canvassers, while turnout increased by less than 1% among voters receiving only direct-mail reminders.

“It is effective because we do it on a precinct-by-precinct basis,” said Simpson, an Orange accountant who helps maintain Orange County Republican databases, registers voters at local shopping malls, and walks door-to-door urging Republicans to vote in November. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the response, ‘Gee, nobody has asked us to vote before.’ They really appreciate it.”

Neither Jones nor Boxer is relying solely on grass-roots organizing, but each places significant importance on the effort. It is time-consuming and, at times, a logistical nightmare -- although the advent of e-mail and the Internet has made it easier to distribute training instructions, precinct sheets and other key information.

But the labor is free, the contact personal, and the pitches are sincere.

“You can’t buy that,” Nestande said. “What the volunteers do, the work they put in, if you had to pay them an hourly wage you couldn’t afford it. It’s a tremendously valuable asset.”

Jason Kinney, an advisor to former Gov. Gray Davis and longtime Democratic campaign activist, estimated that a strong “field program” could add as much as 8 percentage points to a candidate’s vote if the opponent ignored his or her own grass-roots work.

“In this race, I’m not sure it’s going to leave a huge footprint” given Boxer’s comfortable lead, Kinney said. But Boxer’s position can’t be taken for granted -- or her grass roots left untended. “She’s got to run for self-preservation, and you have to exhaust every weapon in the arsenal.... She’s leading the ticket in California, and she has a responsibility, not just for her own race but for Democrats up and down the ballot, to lead by example.”

Not that Boxer would overlook grass-roots work. It is, she says, what launched her career as a Marin County supervisor in the 1970s. It also landed her a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1992, first helping her outdraw better-known and better-funded Democrats in the primary, then helping her prevail in the general election.

“Everyone said grass-roots politics wouldn’t mean a thing in such a large race,” Boxer told supporters at the recent opening of a neighborhood Democratic Party campaign office in East Los Angeles. “They said you just had to have millions of dollars -- I believed that. But I also believed that that wasn’t enough, that you needed to see the people face-to-face, needed to encourage people to understand the connection between what goes on in Washington, D.C., on a daily basis and the quality of their lives.”

In the 1992 election, Boxer became a standard-bearer for women angry over the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas faceoff in the Senate’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Thomas.

“Women were outraged and energized and wanted to do something to make a difference,” recalled Rose Kapolczynski, manager of all three of Boxer’s Senate campaigns. “Thousands of them came to the Boxer campaign. We had people walking into our Hollywood Boulevard office we had never met before, people calling, ‘What can I do to help? I have $5. Can I make phone calls? Can I go door-to-door?’ ”

This time around, Boxer and Jones are going about the effort in different ways.

Jones didn’t enter the race until December 2003 -- a point in the election cycle when most candidates have already built their networks. He has since cobbled his system together from the remnants of Bill Simon’s failed 2002 gubernatorial campaign, plus his own contacts from three statewide elections -- two successful runs for secretary of state and a failed primary bid for governor in 2002.

Under Jones’ decentralized structure, much of the work, including finding volunteers, is delegated to 125 members of the “leadership team” under the direction of Lois Godfrey, Jones’ director of volunteers.

“They’re the eyes and ears of what’s happening on the street,” said Godfrey, running her first statewide effort after several local and regional efforts, including leading Bush-Cheney’s grass-roots efforts in the five-county Los Angeles area in 2000.

Most volunteers are referred to their local existing county Republican committees, which Godfrey said avoids duplication of efforts. “They’re the ones that will do the get-out-the-vote,” Godfrey said. “They have the precinct walk sheets, the telephone sheets.”

Jones and Boxer also have built networks of higher-level supporters among party figures and sympathetic organizations, such as unions. And both are firing up voter-registration drives on college campuses to try to snag young voters as the academic year is starting up.

Boxer has put together a larger and more sophisticated organization, including phone banks, which the campaign will add to broader Democratic efforts as the election nears, said state political director Yvette Martinez Bracamonte.

“For the most part, we have our own structure,” she said. The campaign estimates Boxer has about 1,500 volunteers this election, down somewhat from her earlier -- and more tightly contested -- campaigns.

Another key difference between the Jones and Boxer efforts: Boxer’s “Barbara-Que” house parties, neighborhood get-togethers that rely on volunteer hosts to hit up friends and relatives for small checks to the Boxer campaign. At the same time, they collect contact information the Boxer campaign uses to bolster its volunteer ranks.

Boxer first used the tactic in the 1992 campaign, calling the parties a “Thousand Points of Loot,” mocking the first President Bush’s “Thousand Points of Light” campaign to encourage volunteerism. At Boxer’s house parties, supporters meet up but also can buy campaign paraphernalia, including “Boxer shorts” -- men’s underwear with Boxer’s logo on them -- and night shirts that read “Boxer 2004: You’ll sleep better at night.”

“It’s very time-consuming for us, but also a lot of fun,” Martinez Bracamonte said.

Earlier this summer, Delfina and Fred Velasco served lasagna, salads and mixed fruit to about 20 friends and relatives in their La Habra backyard, a first tentative step into political activism for the retirees -- both lifelong Democrats.

Although Delfina Velasco belongs to the Mark Twain Club -- a local Democratic women’s group -- she had never involved herself in campaign organizing until this year, spurred largely by her desire to see a change in leadership in the White House and the Senate.

She was enlisted to hold a Barbara-Que after a Boxer aide spoke to the Twain group seeking grass-roots help.

“They told us this was a good way to raise money,” Velasco said. She sent out about 50 invitations to people who she knew “would respond favorably. Most of them are Democrats, and they were happy to come.”

Velasco asked each guest to write a $30 check to the Boxer campaign, and raised $600. It was one of about 30 gatherings held around the state that day.

“I’m excited,” Velasco said before moving from the living room to the patio, where the guests were settling into chairs around a speakerphone to listen to a statewide conference call with Boxer -- the focal point of the party. “I feel we might make a little bit of a difference.”