The Left's Well-Oiled Machine

ORLANDO, Florida – I have seen the present, and it works – I think.

I have spent the past week observing the official Democratic Party and unofficial 527 field operations in the battleground states of Ohio and Florida. And I have found something I've never before seen in my 36 or so years as a progressive activist and later as a journalist: an effective, fully functioning American left.

Those liberal organizations that already knew how to do politics – the AFL-CIO, the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) and a few others – are doing it better than they have before. Those liberal groups that stayed aloof from elections or phumphered ineffectually are now playing the game like seasoned pros. New organizations have arisen to mobilize sometime voters; the largest of them – America Coming Together (ACT) – will have 12,000 staffers in each of the three biggest battleground states (Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida) on Election Day.

And most amazingly, all the 527s – ACT, the AFL-CIO, the LCV, the Sierra Club, the NAACP, Emily's List, MoveOn and 25 others – are working together under the umbrella of a single coalition, America Votes. They meet together, plan together, divvy up turf, parcel out messages, coordinate their mailing and phone banking.

Here in Orlando, ACT is getting out the vote in the black and Latino communities, while the LCV targets more upscale white suburbs. The Sierra Club plays the LCV's role in Tampa, where it has a thriving chapter. "On the environmental side, we never figured out how to work together before," says Allan Oliver, who heads the LCV's Orlando operation. "Now, I'm on the phone to the Sierra Club every week; we say, how can we do this better?" The 527s even share their private polling – a common-sense pooling of knowledge that was utterly unthinkable before the prospect of four more years of George W. Bush concentrated the progressive mind.

The groups draw as well from a pool of progressive activists, who have journeyed from all across the nation to Ohio, Florida and other battleground states; I was reminded – minus the ideology – of the migration of leftist young men to Spain in 1936. The Orlando headquarters of the LCV was overflowing with preponderantly young staffers and volunteers on Monday afternoon, two-thirds of them, by Oliver's count, from out of state. Matt, one of four people mapping out the Orlando get-out-the-vote program, came here from Oregon State during spring break. He's still here.

In the Cleveland office of ACT, I met Ed Cyr, who came out from Boston on October 18 and, with his experience in voter mobilization in Cambridge city elections, found himself coordinating Election Day transportation in Cleveland. ("We've rented every minivan in Ohio and Western Pennsylvania," Ed says.) Carolyn Jackson arrived in early October from New York's Upper West Side ("no need to preach to the choir," she notes), and is now running the office. Every time the phone bankers recruit a new Election Day operative, Carolyn sees to it that a bell – the kind they used to put on registration desks at hotels – is rung. For the 20 minutes that I'm in the office, the place sounds like a pinball machine.

The Democrats will have lots of people – party people, 527 people – getting out their vote in Ohio on Election Day. Putting together the estimates of the various party and non-party groups, I got a total of somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000. For a state of 10 million, with a potential electorate of 5 million, having 50,000 people to get those Kerry voters who need an extra zetz to the polls is nothing short of astounding. Partly due to these groups' efforts, Kerry has already pulled ahead in Ohio, and I'm confident he'll take the state next Tuesday.