Campaigns hope their calls ring true

In a tiny Santa Ana office one recent evening, campaign volunteer Linda Barnes hit a prime target in her third hour of calls: a voter, torn between Republican Senate candidates Carly Fiorina and Chuck DeVore, who was actually willing to hear her pitch.

Jammed between a banner printer and a drafting table in a corner of another supporter’s architectural firm, Barnes cupped her hands around her cellphone to drown out the sounds of the other DeVore volunteers around her and breezed through the highlights of the candidate’s biography. The voter’s questions persisted. Barnes offered to pass the phone to the candidate’s wife, who was making calls nearby, in case getting “up close and personal” with his family would sway her.

“Chuck’s kind of a homeboy here -- that’s the way people feel about him in Orange County,” Barnes said into the phone, vouching for DeVore’s conservative credentials and promising that, unlike Fiorina, he could “hit the ground running.”

After giving the caller her personal cellphone number so they could chat again, Barnes tried one last avenue of persuasion. “You know that Carly worked for John McCain,” she said softly, referring to Fiorina’s advisory role in the Arizona senator’s 2008 presidential campaign. “John McCain will highly influence her in what she does [in Washington]. And I just think he’s a little too progressive for us.”

The three Republicans vying to replace Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) have struggled for months to get a word in edgewise as the GOP candidates for governor have saturated the airwaves and filled up mailboxes.

For the Senate contenders, these kinds of voter-to-voter appeals are an acutely personal way of connecting to voters before Tuesday’s primary, and one they hope will make all the difference.

Their difficulty in breaking through up to now was apparent in the findings of the latest Los Angeles Times/USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences poll. More than half of California voters still didn’t know enough about DeVore and former Rep. Tom Campbell to express an opinion. Just over half could identify Fiorina after she lent her campaign at least $5.5 million to finance television ads.

With funds dwindling and little time left, all three are relying on volunteers like Barnes to corral undecided voters and turn out supporters Tuesday.

The campaigns are planning some limited door-to-door efforts. DeVore’s campaign sent each volunteer a list of registered Republican voters who live on their street. Campbell has invited volunteers to talk to their neighbors.

But in a state as vast as California, the campaigns are trying to maximize their reach through phone banking: getting their volunteers to log onto their websites to access the latest call scripts and lists of likely voters who they can dial up from home or at “call parties” like the one in Santa Ana.

Fiorina met Friday with callers in San Diego and later at a humming office in Palm Desert, where she chatted with every volunteer before sitting down to call half a dozen voters, several of whom told her they had already voted for her.

“We don’t take a single day or a single vote for granted, and these folks are really committed and working hard,” Fiorina said.

The systems the campaign callers use are similar to those employed by the Democratic National Committee and President Obama’s team in the 2008 campaign.

Volunteers can send information about the voter’s response to campaign headquarters on their laptops, making it immediately available to campaign strategists.

DeVore’s campaign, for example, is using that data to help determine where the candidate should spend his time.

The DeVore and Fiorina campaigns made voter lists available online to volunteers in late April and early May; Campbell launched his system several weeks later.

DeVore and Fiorina have also kept their supporters fired up through heavy use of Facebook and Twitter, while Campbell’s campaign is helping volunteers link up for get-out-the-vote efforts through a social-networking application called Campbell Connect, which listed 2,566 members as of Friday. Campbell himself plans to participate Sunday in a call that will dial up 300,000 voters and offer them a chance to ask him live questions.

With all the online tools at their disposal, Campbell spokeswoman Erin Daly said the campaign hasn’t had to provide a lot of structure. The volunteers “really have been doing a lot on their own,” she said.

That is also the case with DeVore’s campaign, which built up its base by launching his online “eleader” system a year ago with a competition featuring “dinner with Chuck” for whoever could bring in the most campaign donations.

Vastly outspent by his opponents, DeVore’s campaign has relied on those homespun touches to expand its network. Diane DeVore, who made her husband’s campaign buttons at home with her daughters and distributes them from a Tupperware bowl at events, said she has answered every online campaign donation with a personal thank you note via e-mail.

The campaign has also tried to personalize its voter outreach: confining call lists to the volunteer’s neighboring ZIP Codes, and -- for longer-distance calls -- adding a feature that shows the weather in the area to ease those awkward first moments.

“Building trust in a 30-second phone call is difficult,” said DeVore’s new-media guru Justin Hart. “So anything you can do to improve on that is vital.”

The Fiorina campaign, which said it has 4,300 volunteers making calls to try to reach 100,000 voters over the last two weeks, tried to encourage more supporters to get involved by offering a mobile phone banking application that allows volunteers to call key voters from their cellphones.

“It’s phone banking any time, anywhere,” Fiorina spokeswoman Julie Soderlund said.

The evening after Barnes and other DeVore volunteers made calls from Santa Ana, Fiorina staff and volunteers fanned out across a far more spacious borrowed office in Tustin.

On their laptop screens, Fiorina’s “C3” system showed a call script describing her as a “conservative who ran Hewlett-Packard” and signed a “no new taxes pledge.”

But often the conversations turned to those lingering questions.

Daniel Mole, a contractor who is Fiorina’s Orange County chairman, found himself clearing up a voter’s confusion between Fiorina and Meg Whitman, the former EBay chief executive who is running for governor. And he deftly handled a question about Fiorina’s association with McCain by explaining that although she advised the senator, “she certainly has carved out her own opinions and her own niche issues.”

When the voters are patient, making those distinctions is crucial in this final stretch, Mole said.

The rest of the time, he said, he just tries to get in the campaign mantra -- Carly is the conservative Republican who can defeat Boxer -- before the line “goes click.”

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maeve.reston@latimes.com