By Scott Powers and Jim Stratton, Orlando Sentinel –
ORLANDO, Fla.—Smartphones, tablet computers and Joyce Prewitt’s 2002 Dodge Caravan are weapons in the final 2012 battle for the White House.
Florida is considered a must-win state for Republican Mitt Romney if he is to capture the presidency next Tuesday. President Barack Obama’s campaign wants to end Romney’s bid here. So both campaigns and their allied groups are chasing every last vote they can find in the Sunshine State.
The road to victory in Florida is called Interstate 4. Prewitt’s minivan, and others like it, are the conveyors of precious votes.
On a recent afternoon, Romney’s Osceola County Victory Office sent Prewitt, 75, to get Linda Peevey, 62, an Osceola County secretary with car problems. An hour later, Peevey was back to work, wearing her “I Voted!” sticker. For Prewitt, it’s not a chore; it’s an honor.
“I love taking people,” she said.
The campaigns also are turning to complex voter demographic data and high-tech devices like smartphones to identify occasional voters, new voters and others who might not actually turn out. Armies of volunteers have been assembled to reach out to them, and pools of vehicles are ready to drive away last excuses.
For both the Romney and Obama campaigns, this “ground game” operation is the culmination of organized efforts that — in Obama’s case — never really ended after the president carried Florida in 2008. Obama’s campaign has more than 100 offices in the state — about twice as many as Romney’s — and each has thousands of volunteers.
“For about a year and a half, we have been building, even during the primary, a grass-roots organization and infrastructure statewide that really leads to this final push,” said Romney’s senior adviser in Florida, Brett Doster.
“It’s really going to come down to who comes out,” said Ashley Walker, director of Obama’s Florida campaign. “And we’ve put together the largest grass-roots effort the state has ever seen.”
Four years ago, Obama was strong across the I-4 corridor. He won in Orange County by 85,000 votes and flipped four counties that had gone Republican in 2004: Osceola, Pinellas, Hillsborough and Flagler.
The massive get-out-the-vote efforts can be surprisingly personal. In addition to chauffeuring voters to the polls, the campaigns get reports from supervisors of elections of who has voted early or absentee; the names are crossed off target lists so workers know not to bother contacting them.
On Tuesday, Republican precinct captains will try to identify individual voters as they exit, then relay that information via smartphone so those names, too, can be crossed off the call lists.
“In Florida, this election will likely be decided by between one and three (percentage) points,” Doster said. “When you’re playing with those kinds of margins, it’s important to identify and reach those pockets of voters who have not voted yet. We’ve done it before. The technology makes it easier now.”
In 2008, Obama won Florida by first registering tens of thousands of new Democrats, and then pushing them to the polls with relentless follow-up. In the I-4 corridor, so called “persuadable voters” received on average of 10 calls from the campaign, according to estimates at the time.
In Orlando, the Obama campaign estimates that 5,400 volunteers have racked up more than 71,000 hours of work this fall. Once again, the campaign has targeted those casual voters likely to support the president.
“Our grass-roots operation,” said Walker, “is all about reaching out to occasional voters.”
Romney organizers expect a big Election Day turnout of Republican “super voters,” so named because they vote in every election. So they’re trying to clear the lines for them by encouraging others to vote early.
“A lot of our hard-core Republican voters want to go on the day of the election,” said Sarah Frazee of east Orange County, who has been volunteering full time for six months. “They don’t even want to go early. They just want to go on the day of the election. That’s what we’re trying to do, get the other Republicans that are willing to vote early, to get them out.”
At the University of Central Florida, Obama volunteers and young Democrats were camped out in front of the student union for much of this week encouraging classmates to vote.
Jordan Allen, a UCF senior from Tampa, said the 2008 election was “significantly different” because of its historic nature. It has been difficult to recapture that level of enthusiasm, he said, because Obama is no longer a new figure on the national stage and because the nation has endured four tough years.
Consequently, Allen said, “The youth engagement is just not there at the same level. That’s why we’re out here reminding people.”
The political campaigns are not alone. Latino organizations, including La Raza, Mi Familia Vota and The LIBRE Initiative; Muslim-American groups such as EMERGE USA; and other groups such as the Apopka-based Farmworker Association of Florida and Orlando-based Federation of Congregations United To Serve are running get-out-the-vote campaigns, and many are providing rides.
Last week, PICO United Florida, a coalition of churches, ran an event called “Souls to Polls.” Although officially nonpartisan, PICO tapped deeply into Obama’s 2008 black community base, busing thousands of voters in to vote early. The related group, Federation of Congregations United to Serve (FOCUS), is continuing the effort in Orlando all week.
“The Souls to Polls effort was really exciting,” said FOCUS executive director Liz Buckley. “It was just a great day. I think people felt really inspired.”
Officially most of the allied groups are nonpartisan, though many lean to one or the other party. It doesn’t matter, said Pablo Pantoja, regional coordinator for the conservative group The LIBRE Initiative. “If someone tells me they want to go to the polls to vote for President Barack Obama, I will try to give them a ride,” he said.
Mi Familia Vota estimates it has knocked on at least 20,000 doors and phoned thousands more Latino voters, targeting new and occasional voters.
Yulissa Arce, Mi Familia Vota’s coordinator in Florida, said the organization is reminding Latino voters that they can have an enormous effect on Tuesday’s outcome and that their numbers can have an enormous effect on how politicians view Latinos.
“Florida is important and the I-4 corridor is very important,” she said. “People realize that.”
One they reached was Karen Santiago, 40, of Orlando, who, like Peevey, had car trouble this week. Unlike Peevey, she’s an unabashed Obama supporter. Friday morning a Mi Familia van picked up her and her 18-year-old son, Max.
“Everybody has to vote, everybody,” she said. “That’s what I tell my son: Just vote.”
