Phone forces heed the calling

Both sides have their share of numbers to cite.
PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
COLUMBUS -- Welcome to the emotionally maxed-out Buckeye State, where some of the Bush guys have been shaving their heads.
The way it works is, a guy at Bush campaign headquarters makes 5,000 phone calls to Ohio voters, then celebrates his achievement by going bald for Bush. And that's just one measure of the intensity level in this pivotal state on the eve of this rancorous presidential election.
In one suburban campaign office the other day, a score of phone canvassers for President Bush were bent over their tasks, murmuring their talking points, oblivious to the costumed Halloween children who were clamoring past the storefront, trailed by a guy in a chipmunk suit.
Ground game
It's a ground game in the final hours now, an unprecedented competition to goad people to the polls. Everybody toiling at that task 20 hours a day knows the history:
No Republican has ever won the presidency without winning Ohio.
They also know that because folks in this state are so evenly divided, there is no guarantee of a decisive result Tuesday night. Sunday, the Columbus Dispatch newspaper announced that Sen. John Kerry had prevailed over Bush in a scientifically representative mail survey of 2,880 Ohioans.
Kerry's statewide margin of victory: eight votes.
No wonder the worker bees are strung so tight. All they can offer, for the moment, are statistical testimonials to their own labors. The state Democrats, for example, claim that 27,957 volunteers have made 3,019,798 phone calls and knocked on 549,451 doors since August, and that the party will put 48,261 volunteers on the street for the election.
Sunday, however, when Bush campaign aide David Beckwith studied those numbers on his Blackberry, he laughed dismissively. He said he doesn't believe the Democratic numbers. He said he believes the Bush numbers: 85,612 volunteers, 2,406,788 volunteer phone calls, 349,032 doors knocked on, 100,000 yard signs ...
No concessions, no proof
You get the idea. Neither side wants to concede anything. Neither side can prove that any of these numbers are truly meaningful, or that they will mean anything Tuesday. What matters, really, is that Ohio has never witnessed such a ground fight.
Busloads of Texans have been showing up at GOP headquarters, offering to wear out their shoe leather. Canvassers for Americans Coming Together (ACT), an independent group sympathetic to Kerry, have been knocking on doors here for 14 months, armed with Palm Pilots that play "issue" videos.
"What's going on right now in Ohio is unprecedented, because both sides learned some valuable lessons in 2000," said Jason Mauk, a top aide for the state Republican Party. "The Democrats learned that they should never pull out of a battleground state before the battle was done. Which is what Al Gore did. On Oct. 4 that year, he went dark on TV and pulled his surrogates out, basically because the polling showed that he was losing to Bush by 10 points. Well, he ended up losing by less than four points -- because organized labor had a great ground game and performed beyond expectations" in Cleveland and nearby cities.
"And that's why Ohio was a wake-up call for the Republicans: Because we took our base for granted and underperformed. So for the past three years, we have overhauled every aspect of our operation. So we've geared up, and so have they."
ACT, heavily financed by anti-Bush billionaire George Soros, has been a big player in the statewide voter registration boom -- as many as 1 million newly registered Ohioans could show up Tuesday -- but Mauk insists that the group will fail in its bid to convert most of its signatories into voters. He scoffed, "It's a phantom organization. Soros ought to ask for his money back."
The ACT people have a riposte for that: 3.7 million doors knocked on, 1.1 million doorstep conversations ...
Mobilization
But enough with the stats. Here's what ACT operative Tom Lindenfeld said Sunday, as he ignored the din at headquarters and his perpetually ringing Blackberry: "We're deploying 17,000 workers on Election Day, with maps and vans and routes and literature. No work force that size has ever been deployed for this purpose before, in any state. We will have a major numerological impact."
Actually, some Republicans privately concede that Kerry may prevail in Ohio, citing the state's sluggish economy. Roughly 250,000 blacks have been added to the voter rolls; if only half show up, and pick Kerry over Bush by a 9-1 ratio (as polls indicate), that's a serious share of votes. (In the Philadelphia mayoral race last year, ACT says it registered 86,000 city voters and 44 percent went to the polls.)
And there are indications that more black Ohioans are motivated this year. Take, for example, Crystal Watkins, who was helping her pastor clean out an old church Sunday on the east side of Columbus. She willingly took some ACT literature from canvasser Crosby Lindquist, and she later explained why: "I'm 32, and this is my first time voting. I never paid that close attention before, and wasn't into politicians at all. But now I know that people have to get mad and vote."
"Because of the miscount," said her sister, Tammy, referring to the Florida election crisis in 2000. "We feel everybody should have been able to vote all over again, just to get it right. It would've only taken but one more day."
"That's right," Crystal Watkins said. "It's all about the way that [Bush] got in. If you're gonna get in, get in right."
ACT anticipates that if Kerry ekes out a narrow Ohio victory, the Republicans will challenge the results in court, alleging that Kerry's vote total was fraudulently inflated. To ACT, that argument is code for the suppression of minority voters.