Upset Victory in Delaware – Grassroots Action Produces Results!

I’m pretty tired but delighted to say that our endorsed candidate Jack Markell is now the Democratic nominee for Governor of Delaware. Not content to “wait his turn” and just let the current Lt. Governor step up the ladder, Jack took on the establishment in his upset victory (the vote margin was only 1737 votes).

Democratic Primary - Governor

Candidate	Votes	Percent
Jack Markell	36,622	51.2%
John Carney	35,162	49.8%

338 of 338 Precincts Reporting (100%)
Have we mentioned that close election are won in the field? In addition to having a strong record as state treasurer and progressive plans to move Delaware forward, Jack put together a top notch campaign with a strong emphasis on voter contact. His hard-working and knowledgeable field staff was supplemented by an outstanding outreach effort by ACORN in Wilmington.

A critical element of field work is volunteer recruitment, and the Markell team did a remarkable job engaging and activating volunteers. On Election Day alone, 900 volunteers were working the polls, knocking on thousands of doors and making tens of thousands of calls. I can’t remember a campaign phone bank where the volunteers flooded in like I saw these past two days, and I was only seeing the main phone bank not the seven other locations across the state.

Usually the last three days of a campaign are full of stress and chaos; what was amazing was how together things remained (day and into the wee hours of the night). Besides being smart and professional, this field team had a well prepared GOTV plan, and they were intent on executing it. When a volunteer didn’t show up to greet voters at a polling place, no one panicked or shouted; the field organizer just got on the phone and convinced another volunteer to run out the door and cover that position. Did I mention that most of the field staff were young people working on their first or second campaigns?

I worked most closely with the field director, Dana Rohrbough, and members the great field team in Wilmington - Chris Waters, Phill Davis, Sam Scharf, Dave Sammarco and Josh Schoenberg, and they had 8 other field staffers across the state who contributed strongly to their success. Bill Rose was the field organizer (who must have lost a rock-paper-scissors contest) was had to fetch me at the airport at midnight on Saturday night. Or maybe it was because his family was kind enough to host me in their home. His parents Bill (a professor at the University of Delaware) and Karen (an active Board Member with the Delaware Children’s Museum currently under development) were highly engaged campaign volunteers and delightful hosts. The three Rose sisters, Emily, Allison and Michelle, were kind enough to let me disrupt their normal sleeping patterns to accommodate my visit. Everyone on the Markell staff made me feel welcome and seemed happy to have me around to pitch in wherever needed during the GOTV crunch.

I was a utility infielder for the field team, and they did a great job of plugging me in to projects. I learned to use their voter file program to help print walk lists. I longed for the simplicity of the mapping function in Votebuilder/VAN that so many other campaigns are using as I struggled to highlight the targeted streets for the GOTV canvass. I fielded calls from voters looking for their polling places, assigned volunteers to tasks and helped organize the phone banks.

And let me repeat that I was floored by the tremendous turnout of volunteers for the phone calls. In our trainings, we instruct campaigns to recruit twice as many volunteers than phone lines because of drop off. The Markell team had all the seats filled and had to find space for folks to sit and make calls from their cell phones. In fact, I had worked to set up some calls from home/work for a handful of volunteers, and I ended up not having any lists to send them because the on-site volunteers were devouring the 30,000 calls we needed to make. In most cases, we called through the targeted lists two-three times.

My final task before the end of Election Day was to be a greeter at a polling place. My right hand volunteer of the day Jon and I had a great time chatting with voters and knew from their response that we were at least winning at our location. And let’s not forget that “Victory” Parties are always more fun when your candidate wins.

Let me return to the big picture to mention something I found shocking and disturbing - the Delaware Democratic Party spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in this Primary battle. If you know anything about me, I personally get involved in LOTS of Primary races, taking an active role in the selection of progressive candidate. Nonetheless, I think it is dead wrong to use Democratic Party funds in Primary campaigns. We should be fighting the GOP, not each other! I am very concerned, yet hopeful, about the work Jack has ahead of him in terms of rebuilding the Party.

There is nothing like the feeling of a great GOTV effort, and I so enjoyed playing a small part in this victory. Those who know me well can tell you that I have an odd capacity to work without much sleep. In a strange way, I thrive on the kind of pressure that one finds in such time constrained circumstances. Yesterday, I felt great even though I only had a couple of hours of sleep Monday night. Today, however, I’m feeling old and slow. After I figure out how to send the pictures from last night from my new phone, I have to run catch the train back to DC, so let me close for now.