Reporting The Obama Campaign Coast-to-Coast: Democrats More Undecided Than Polls Suggest

As the Barack Obama campaign canvassed door-to-door this past weekend in scores of communities across the country, a snapshot of a campaign fueled by an unique mix of a non-confrontational style, a message of hope and sometimes unwitting amateurishness emerges.

This mid-fall freeze-frame also paints a picture of a Democratic electorate significantly more ambivalent and undecided than recent polls indicated and perhaps less motivated by the war in Iraq and more by domestic issues than previously suggested.

The portrait of the Obama campaign operating at ground level among national Democratic voters is a product of a new type of citizen journalism. In an unprecedented effort of campaign reporting, nearly two dozen Off The Bus correspondents monitored Obama Canvass for Change events in fourteen cities in nine crucial states during the past 48 hours and contributed to this report from venues as disparate as Keene, NH, Des Moines and Dubuque, and Minneapolis; Studio City, Corte Madera, Berkeley, Sacramento, Koreatown - Los Angeles, and Altadena, CA; from Boise, Brooklyn and Ballard; from Manhattan, KS, Memphis and Charlotte, NC.


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It's difficult to draw hard and fast conclusions from such anecdotal material but it might suggest that the slew of recent polls giving Hillary Clinton a commanding lead in the race for the nomination may be of limited utility. Correspondent Hova found widespread indifference toward Clinton as he went door-to-door with the Obama canvassers: "This was a fairly affluent suburb north of Los Angeles and I was really surprised not to find a single Hillary supporter in the neighborhood."

It's possible that numerous Democrats who have declared for Clinton to a pollster are like the shopper who hoists a likely candidate from the pumpkin bin inside the supermarket door. Maybe a keeper, maybe not, for there's the possibility of a better find further along in produce.

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Countering some this Obama magic, however, is a growing frustration among his volunteers that he is not moving up in the polls. Ethan Hova from Studio City again: "We encountered several households of fervent Obama supporters and their mood could be summed up as frustrated. They seemed mostly concerned about his perceived lack of traction in the polls...." But the grassroots volunteers slog on. As Deborah Phelan reports from Corte Madera, "Volunteer Sandy Grant laughs about the big Barack Obama supporter she talked to who showed up later to register to vote at the booth. 'Look at us, so excited about one teenager when there are millions of people across America who have to register.' Everybody nods. They're all thinking the same thing. One vote at a time."

(Indeed, Deborah Phalen and I found such contrasting pictures of the Obama campaign in Northern California and Tennessee respectivively that I will detail the differences in an upcoming report).

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Off The Bus campaign monitors (Jason Barnett (Uptake.org), Al Cannistraro, Sheila Condit, Beverly Davis, Christine Escobar, Mayhill Fowler, Richard Greenwood, Ethan Hova, Saba Kennedy, Noah Kunin (Uptake.org), Phoebe Love, Daniel Macht, Kim Mack, Laura Martin, Kelly Nuxoll, Deborah Phelan, Deborah Plummer, and Jeremy Thompson) contributed to this report. If you'd like to work wtih us on future campaign reports, join our OffTheBus Campaign Monitors team. -END

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mayhill-fowler/reporting-the-obama-campa_b_68440.html

First, of course, is that modern technology (cell phones, voice mail, etc.) prevents many one-on-one attempts at polling, thus limiting phone bank polling to those that will answer the phone.

Also with all the shenanigans with exit polling that has gone down in the past several years, I wonder if this too is yet another tool of forcing a result through manipulation. That cat has been let out of the bag and I seriously doubt anyone feels any confidence in the system.

Gobama.