How Clinton hit pay dirt: The keys to her Nevada victory: a huge wave of new voters

[Herman Munster]

http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2008/jan/20/how-clinton-hit-pay-dirt/

If you want to know how Sen. Hillary Clinton won a convincing victory in Saturday’s Nevada caucus, look back to a meeting Dec. 15 at William E. Orr Middle School in Las Vegas.

There, Robby Mook, Clinton’s state director, told 600 of the campaign’s most committed volunteers that he wanted to enlist many more supporters to caucus for the candidate -- more than twice what he asked for in August.

It was a startling move coming nearly a year into the Nevada campaign -- and just five weeks before the caucus. It also was a strategic risk because it would divert resources.

Mook’s colleagues in Clinton’s Iowa campaign paid no attention to his move. Turns out, they should have.

Clinton’s Iowa team would be blindsided three weeks later by a big turnout that favored Illinois Sen. Barack Obama. The Clinton team there hadn’t thought to consider Obama might draw out many voters who normally don’t participate in elections.

In Nevada, Mook looked at the landscape and found the following: Democrats, despite the predictions of naysayers, had taken a real interest in the presidential caucus. He feared that the campaign would fail if it limited itself to rounding up support only from voters with a history of participation.

So as he spoke to volunteers that cold December Saturday, Mook’s usual confidence was clearly shaken. Clinton needed to mine the electorate for voters the campaign originally thought would not participate.

It was a tall order. Campaigns have an easier time if they can work from lists of “likely voters.”

“We need to work hard now,” Mook told the group. “If the caucus were held today, we’d do OK. We would not be as successful as we want to be.”

The Sun was given access to the Clinton meeting, as well as to other internal discussions by the Clinton campaign, while also conducting background interviews with Obama staff, under the condition the paper not publish any of what it learned about strategy until after the caucus.

Mook said in an interview Saturday that his staff groaned at the suggestion of expanding the universe of voters, especially to such a radical new goal: Find 60,000 more. Some analysts estimated that was as much as the entire expected turnout statewide. (In August, the Clinton goal was 24,752 supporters.)

[jbnow]

1. Nice article

I'd looked for info on their ground teams before and Clinton and Obama definitely both had good, well organized teams of people on the ground.

The main difference I saw in earlier reading was that Clinton had many more paid ground workers (paid for by a union) and had 100 vehicles set up to give rides compared to 50 for Obama.
I also learned a lot of the main Obama volunteers go to "school" for a week in Chicago to get training.

A couple funny things in the article you linked was that the lawsuit seemed to help them

And even though Clinton fared well at the Strip sites, she also benefited from the lawsuit filed to have the sites closed, according to interviews with voters, who expressed anger that Culinary workers -- and by extension, Obama -- were given disproportionate influence in the total delegate count because of the at-large sites.

The claim about delegate allocation wasn’t true, but many voters believed it to be so, which is all that mattered.

And you wonder why the hype or the lawsuit at all since
"Although the Clinton team won’t admit it publicly, the campaign had been working Culinary Union members hard and organizing them for the past year." and that it had to be done secretly to keep the union from finding out.

[aquart]

2. "Given access."

Now that, my friends, is a lovely CHANGE.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

3. Good news for us from both Iowa and Nevada.

If we can translate this into new votes in the general, I think we have a good shot of winning this thing. I cannot imagine new voters comming out for fossil McCain or empty suit Romney.

[robbedvoter]

4. Great!

[LiberalFighter]

5. I don't believe it was a wave of new voters but a wave of new caucus voters

They were supporting Clinton and probably going to vote for her in the General but either as reported in the story were not familiar with caucuses or they normally don't bother voting before a General.