Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, November 7, 1994 TAG: 9411080039
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER NOTE: below
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Craig Hamilton is a foot soldier in Ollie's Army.
Until this past summer, the retired Roanoke auto parts salesman had never done anything more political than vote. Then he got a call from a Republican phone bank asking how he felt on a series of hot-button issues - guns, crime, the usual.
When the phone bankers determined that Hamilton's conservative views matched what they were looking for, they asked if he'd like to volunteer for Oliver North's campaign against incumbent U.S. Sen. Charles Robb.
Sure, he said. Now Hamilton spends several days a week working at North's Roanoke Valley headquarters, mostly making phone calls to recruit other North supporters and make sure they get to the polls Tuesday.
"I want to do something to help my country," Hamilton said as he took a break from dialing. "I can't think of anything better to do. He's the man for the job. What more could I ask?"
This is the ground war of a political campaign. And while polls show the Senate race remains too close to call, it's here that North has what appears to be an advantage.
During the past three elections, Virginia Republicans have built a grass-roots organization across the state that far surpasses anything the Democrats have mustered, in both numbers as well as intensity.
"Last year, we really started to see it in a big way, a grass-roots operation that was very, very fervent," said Mark Rozell, political analyst at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg. "There were signs inundating the highways and businesses favoring, generally, the Republicans."
This year, the Republican volunteers are back out there with their signs, as anyone who has driven down just about any highway in the state can attest.
But it's the less visible part of the campaign that matters more - the phone banks to identify likely supporters, the follow-up calls and mailings to help persuade them, the get-out-the-vote machinery on Election Day that makes sure those supporters actually get to the polls.
By the most common measures, Virginia Republicans are far ahead of the Democrats there, too - and independent Marshall Coleman isn't even in the game.
During the summer and fall, the state GOP mounted a statewide voter registration drive that the party claims added 40,000 to 60,000 conservative voters to the rolls.
Democrats, by contrast, did not make voter registration a priority this year. Traditionally, Democrats target black neighborhoods for registration drives, but party leaders - at both the state and local levels - privately admit they didn't spend time on that this year because they figured most of those they registered would have wound up voting for former Gov. Douglas Wilder.
When Wilder abandoned his independent bid in mid-September, there was little time left before the registration deadline for Democrats to gear up.
Republicans have also targeted college campuses for an absentee-voter drive. Field worker Roger Jarrell said the party has made sure 6,000 GOP-leaning college students have voted absentee; Democratic Party spokeswoman Gail Nardi said she doesn't know what her side has done.
But the Republicans' most impressive work falls under the general heading of "voter ID" - finding out who their supporters are.
In previous elections, Republicans say, they've never phoned more than 70,000 households. This year, the party hired a company that in June and July telephoned 600,000 households to identify conservative voters. It followed up with calls to another 500,000 households in September, to bring the total to 1.1 million - meaning the GOP telephoned almost half the state's homes.
That's the major difference between the two campaigns, boasted North campaign manager Tim Carpenter. "We know of 300,000 households that are for us."
The names and addresses of those conservative households were then forwarded to the Republican organization in each locality in Virginia, which followed up with more phone calls. "The first question we asked was, `Do you want to volunteer?''' Jarrell said, which brought Republicans an influx of new workers - such as Hamilton.
"We've had a huge infusion of new blood," Roanoke County Republican activist Trixie Averill said as she sat in party headquarters and gestured toward the phone-banking going on in the next room. "I only know one person back there."
How many volunteers do Roanoke Valley Republicans now have doing something for North's campaign, be it working the phone banks or running "lit drops" - political lingo for distributing literature door-to-door - or putting up signs?
"Hundreds," Averill said. "I've never seen as many strangers coming into headquarters as I have this year. They want literature, they want to volunteer, and they want to write checks. They ask, `Where can I work? What can I do?'''
And the Democrats? They didn't start phone-banking until October. When they did, they didn't have a whittled-down list of targeted, persuadable voters to work from. Instead, they had to wade through the entire list of registered voters - or the ranks of the already-persuaded, those who voted in June's Democratic primary.
To make those calls, Roanoke Valley Democrats can count on "about 100" volunteers, mostly longtime party workers, said Debbie Jordan, a Botetourt County activist. She and her husband are among Robb's local organizers.
That's a far cry from the "hundreds" the Republicans claim - the GOP had more than 100 volunteers show up just to decorate the hall at a recent North rally - but it's a lot more than Democrats could call on last year, during Mary Sue Terry's failed gubernatorial run. Terry's campaign is remembered as much for being an organizational disaster as it was an electoral one.
Last year, said Tommy Jordan, Roanoke Valley Democrats could count on "probably 16 workers, if we were lucky."
Democrats insist that, this year, they're as organized at the local level as well as they ever have been - and those claims may, in fact, be true. The catch is, they're up against a North campaign machine that's unlike anything Virginia has ever seen.
"We're aware of that," said Warren Campbell, a Democratic activist from Roanoke County. "They have a very dedicated cadre of supporters that's nothing to sneeze at."
But he and other Democrats insist North's organizational superiority, at least numerically, should be expected.
They charge that North's volunteer network consists largely of zealots. "Every campaign has dedicated followers," Campbell said. "His is one I consider comes from the radical fringe, and they have an agenda. We could energize the left with all sorts of things, but that's not Chuck Robb's style.
``When you're a centrist type of candidate like Robb, we don't have that hard-core group like that."
"It's a different type of commitment," Tommy Jordan said. "The Robb people are not going to go out of their way to help, but they are going to vote on Election Day."
Democrats also contend North's record-setting treasury has enabled him to simply buy an organization. "When you have money to burn, you have money to burn," Nardi says. "He's the $17 million man."
Indeed, it costs money to do many of the things North has done: contracting with professional phone banks at the statewide level and hiring field workers to organize volunteers on a precinct-by-precinct basis. North has had a paid staffer working in the Roanoke Valley since mid-January, and the operative he hired was someone who knew the region - Jarrell, a Rockbridge County native who worked on Bob Goodlatte's 1992 congressional campaign, then spent a year on Goodlatte's staff in Washington before returning to Roanoke.
Robb made do with part-time field operatives who held down day jobs, such as the Jordans, until late September, when the campaign sent in a field worker from its McLean headquarters to take over.
Republicans, though, insist money doesn't explain everything. Instead, says Carpenter, there's a very simple answer why the North campaign has put the most muscular organization in the field. "We've made it a priority."
That answer reveals what may be the most fundamental differences between the two campaigns.
Virginia Democrats prefer to husband their time and money for television advertising, and treat field operations as secondary. That's how Steve Musselwhite's 1992 congressional campaign and Terry's gubernatorial bid last year were run.
After those defeats, some Democrats did begin to question their TV-heavy approach. "I think for a while the party got more high-tech and forgot it needed a grass-roots effort," Campbell said. "I'll be the first to admit last year's get-out-the-vote was not very good, and the campaign was lousy.
``The campaign last year was run by [media] consultants. This year, that's totally different. The Robb campaign was out early, meeting with [local party activists], listening to what people had to say. I think they're listening and listening well. Last year's campaign was just too top-heavy."
Robb's campaign still borrows from the Terry model in one key respect. "Chuck has made a conscious effort to focus on the electronic media," said Del. Richard Cranwell, D-Roanoke County.
But Republicans, even when faced with a cash shortage, still devote a considerable amount of staff time to organizing volunteers - witness George Allen's gubernatorial campaign last year, which was kept afloat early on by grass-roots activists.
Virginia Republicans also have increasingly come to look on campaigns as year-round ventures, using the summer as a valuable time to begin recruiting their volunteers and identifying their supporters.
Democrats, by contrast, insist that voters don't start paying attention until after Labor Day - if then.
"The important time for this is now," Nardi says. "The professionals will tell you, if you want to amuse your troops and keep them busy in the summer, that's fine, but it's a waste."
She says it doesn't matter what kind of jump the Republicans got on identifying supporters during the summer, the Democrats have been making up for that during the final weeks.
Come Election Day, "you are going to see a monumental effort," pledged state Democratic Party Chairman Mark Warner. "We have a mail program. We have a phone program. Plus, the traditional sound trucks" that roll through heavily Democratic precincts, admonishing voters to head to the polls. "This operation has been building for some time. I think a lot of people are going to be surprised when they see it."
Maybe so. But many independent political observers are still betting that, for all the talk of correcting last year's mistakes, the Democrats will again be outmatched by the Republicans when it comes to the nitty-gritty task of identifying supporters and getting them to the polls.
"I haven't heard that concern expressed enough to think they clearly understand it," Rozell said. "I think the Democrats are clearly behind in the ballgame. They just don't do it as well as the Republicans."
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by CNB