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BRANDON - Under the fluorescent lights of a stark strip center office, the Bush-Cheney machine produced a steady babble.
"President Bush has an optimistic vision for America, including strengthening the economy and keeping America safe ..."
"Are you worried about Democrats proposing to raise taxes as the economy is growing?"
Another night on the volunteer phone bank, as a dozen fervent Bush supporters dialed, queried, jotted notes, and then dialed again.
"One lady came to the office to pick up a bumper sticker 20 minutes after I spoke to her. She makes up for all the hangups," chuckled Monica Shaffer, who feels so passionately about Bush that she drove more than 45 minutes from Wesley Chapel to volunteer on the phone bank.
A few hours earlier and 20 miles north, about two dozen 20-something men and women gathered at a cinder block office off Dale Mabry Highway in Tampa. They picked up their clipboards and handheld computers and threw on red, white and blue America Coming Together T-shirts. ACT canvassing director Katie Allen gave a quick pep talk.
"You hit your 62,000th door yesterday," she said to cheers. "And health care came back really strongly yesterday (on their survey of top issues). Very interesting."
Then they piled into four minivans and headed to Palm Harbor for another sweltering five hours of door-knocking and surveying voters about their presidential preference and issue priorities.
These are the frontline soldiers in an unprecedented - and largely out of sight - grass roots contest playing out across Florida. Both sides are promising the biggest get-out-the-vote effort ever seen, but they're taking dramatically different approaches.
The centralized Bush-Cheney campaign is building a volunteer army and counts about 54,000 people signed on a volunteers so far. Much of their activity is phone banking, with every tidbit of data funneled to national headquarters in Arlington, Va.
Nine months after Bush-Cheney opened its Florida headquarters in Tallahassee, John Kerry has yet to set up a Florida headquarters.
But a Democratic ground operation is running full bore and growing, with offices opened in most major cities and hundreds of paid staffers spending almost every day tapping on doors and trying to identify and energize anti-Bush voters.
The effort involves dozens of different groups, from unions to environmental groups to newly created organizations like ACT, organized so that that it can receive unlimited political contributions that are now off-limits to political parties. Many of these independent groups have little idea what each other is doing in Florida, let alone what the Kerry campaign is up to.
But contrary to some early predictions, there are signs that the Democrats are outworking the Republicans.
Last week, the Bush-Cheney campaign touted a dramatically ramped up 10 days of grass roots campaigning, with thousands of volunteers to be mobilized across the state. In the Tampa Bay area - ground zero in America's biggest battleground state - the big push included nightly phone banks and a couple of Saturdays where a few dozen volunteers knocked on doors in Pinellas and Hillsborough counties.
By comparison, ACT and other Democratic-leaning groups do the same thing six days a week from Jacksonville to Tampa Bay to Miami, often with far more people. They are paid for their labor, but that doesn't necessarily diminish the numbers they touted last week: 272,845 doors knocked on across the state, 125,577 conversations with voters, and 31,791 voters registered since ACT opened its first Orlando office in February.
And that's just one of dozens of groups doing similar work independent of the Kerry campaign. The state and local parties are also manning phone banks and registering voters, and interest groups are fielding teams of volunteers. A political arm of Planned Parenthood, for example, expects to have 150 volunteers canvassing in Tampa Bay one weekend next month and aims to get 50,000 abortion rights supporters to vote early in Florida.
"John Kerry says he is against outsourcing, but it appears he has outsourced the grass roots of his campaign to other organizations," said Ralph Reed, the Southeast director of the Bush campaign. "That is not nearly as effective as building an indigenous, volunteer-based grass roots organization."
Reed suggested the Democratic reliance on paid canvassers points to grass roots weakness that could doom Kerry in Florida. But the women walking to select homes on Ohio Avenue in Palm Harbor last week appeared as committed as the passionate Bush-Cheney phone bankers in Clearwater and Brandon last week.
"This job is so satisfying," said Joanna Goplen, a 21-year-old University of South Florida student earning $8-an-hour working six days a week. "The stakes are so high. I'm studying to be a teacher, and I don't want to be teaching under Bush and his policies."
Voter registration figures suggest that the Democratic-leaning political groups are having some early success. Democratic registration outpaced Republican registration nearly two-to-one during the first four months of the year, with Democrats picking up nearly 105,000 new registrations and Republicans gaining more than 58,000. Depending on a group's efficiency, it can cost anywhere from under $2 per valid registration to $10.
Democrats, though, know not to underestimate the Republican ground operation, which helped sweep elections nationally in 2002. The Republican Florida effort started nearly a year ago and now includes precinct captains in most of Florida's nearly 7,000 voting precincts, county organizations in all 67 counties, and a database of volunteers expected to pass 60,000 by the end of June.
"We're so well organized and have so much going for us, it's much more enjoyable this year," Betty Hover of Dunedin, a veteran party volunteer, said last week as a dozen volunteers phoned Republican and independent voters in a Clearwater campaign office. "We used to waste so much time because if you needed phone callers or precinct walkers you had to call everybody. Now we can mobilize pretty fast. Everybody knows exactly what they're supposed to do, and they're doing it."
Some Bush volunteers are writing letters to newspapers; others are registering voters at churches; others are recruiting members for Bush-Cheney coalitions ranging from gun owners, to young professionals to African-Americans.
Hundreds of paid Bush campaign staffers will be in Florida as the election approaches, but the plan is to have a volunteer organization well established by then.
It's a very different story with the Democrats. While the state and local parties are working to mobilize voters and trying to coordinate with the fledgling Florida Kerry campaign, independent groups are doing the bulk of the ground organizing.
Under the arcane tax and campaign finance laws that govern them, these "issue advocacy" groups can't specifically solicit votes for Kerry or communicate with the Kerry campaign. In many cases, depending on their tax exempt status, they are barred even from communicating with each other. It makes avoiding duplicated efforts much harder.
"It's a big problem, and there have been some places in the state where groups ... have been bumping into other groups," acknowledged Bob Schaeffer, who works with National Voice, an umbrella organization for a number of liberal but officially nonpartisan groups.
The Florida branches of America Votes and National Voice are separately aiming to ensure coordination among the groups with whom they are allowed to work.
When Kerry's Florida campaign is fully running in a few weeks, their challenge will be to minimize overlap with the myriad organizations already targeting Democrats and swing voters.
"We don't know what they're doing, but we can make some assumptions," said Kerry's Florida campaign manager, Tom Shea. "Politics is part art and part science, but the field piece of it is mostly science and execution."
Not until Florida's 27 electoral votes are decided Nov. 2 will it be clear which side executed best.
- Adam C. Smith can be reached at 727 893-8241 or adam@sptimes.com