Volunteers for Obama Begin Massive Voter Registration Drive, Keep Working in California

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Pamela Coukos
Volunteer, CD-9 Team
Obama For America/California

Disclaimer: I am a volunteer for Obama for America in California, but I am speaking for myself and based on my personal experience as a volunteer, not for the campaign in any way. You can read my other posts about the campaign here.

More than two months after the California primary, Obama campaign volunteers are still organized and working around the state. Having built a cadre of trained grassroots organizers to contend for votes on February 5, the campaign isn’t letting this resource go to waste. Here in the Bay Area we have been busy running volunteer-based phonebanks to call other states, including Texas, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Oregon. Right now we are sending teams of volunteers to help out on the ground in Oregon.

Last week the Obama campaign announced a new priority for volunteers here in California and across the country: Vote For Change. This new nationwide volunteer voter registration program will go on throughout the summer to register huge numbers of new voters in every single state across the country. It is part of Senator Obama's plan to start gearing up to win the general election, and to keep building a grassroots movement for change. It is no surprise, because Barack Obama has made voter registration a key priority since his earliest day in politics. But it isn't politics as usual - no national candidate has ever proposed a program like this.

Last week I wrote about the parallels between this initiative and the broader “50 Strategy” that many progressives have championed:

Rather than take the existing electoral alignments as a given, the Obama campaign will be out expanding its base in a concrete way, by bringing many new people into the fold.

Here's how Howard Dean famously described the new approach of the Democratic Party, the so-called 50 State Strategy:

“Election by election, state by state, precinct by precinct, door by door, vote by vote . . . . we're going to lift our Party up and take this country back for the people who built it.”

This massive voter registration drive is just that kind of painstaking grassroots work that can win elections but also build the party in the long term. We will be registering new voters in some states that probably will go for McCain in November. We will of course be registering all comers, Democrats, Republicans and Independents. But some of those new voters just might make the difference to Democrats fighting key downticket races in red states. And they may help the Democrats carry key swing states, or move previously red states to the blue column.