DES MOINES, Iowa -- Like the first few snowflakes that precede the blizzard, supporters of Howard Dean flew in one by one, the forces gathering for the "Perfect Storm" get-out-the-vote (GOTV) effort for the former Vermont governor. One of those snowflakes -- John Lovaas, 60, of Reston, Va. -- was on my plane from Washington and landed in my hotel, where I asked, the next day, how his canvassing was going.
"The undecideds were leaning [Sen. John] Edwards [D-N.C.] and leaning Dean," said Lovaas. "I heard Edwards more than [Sen. John] Kerry [D-Mass.]. One lady told me she liked Edwards because he hadn't gone negative."
Perhaps in response to a precipitous decline in the Zogby polls tracking Iowa, Dean is pulling his negative ad dismissing the rest of the field as "Washington Democrats." It can't come a moment too soon for the erstwhile front-runner. Word on the ground matches what's happening in the polls: The race is too close to call. There is no clear leader, but undecideds seem to talk about Edwards and Kerry a lot.
I hear the same thing over at the Kerry headquarters, where senior staffers have flown in from Washington and were manning the phones Thursday evening with a handful of volunteers, calling undecided voters.
"He's not going to raise taxes on working people, which is important when you're trying to make ends meet," went the in-office end of one Kerry adviser's call. "I see. Who is your decision coming down to? Edwards? Why is that?"
The Kerry team has plenty of reasons to be optimistic. The daily Zogby tracking poll -- which is, to be sure, of dubious accuracy in predicting actual caucus-night outcomes -- now shows Kerry with a 5-point lead in a field that's deadlocked in a four-way tie. Organizationally, the Kerry team is in good shape. Where the Dean camp was still training Polk County precinct captains Thursday night, Kerry's had finished that task last weekend. A sense of confidence and optimism infused the office, where middle-aged veterans and glossy haired, stylish young women staffed the phone lines.
"Right now he's just fighting for every vote," says Kerry's Iowa communications director, Laura Capps, the daughter of Rep. Lois Capps (D-Calif.). "It's very close." That fight is being conducted mainly by phone, she says, and not by canvassers. "Our GOTV -- it's really a neighbor-to-neighbor program," she explains. Women who have promised to bring five friends to caucus. Veterans who are organizing other veterans. Iowa state legislators who have endorsed Kerry ready to speak up for him at caucus meetings.
"This is so typical of John," says volunteer phone caller Jim McDevitt, a Massachusetts prosecutor and 32-year friend of Kerry's. "He'll be a come-from-behind candidate, just as he has been in previous races.
"We're gonna win this thing and go on and flip New Hampshire," he adds, a look of certainty on his face.
Meanwhile, the Edwards team looks like it may not have the operational capacity or resources to capitalize on its candidate's soaring last-minute momentum. But its members sure are trying. On Thursday night, the Edwards script I overhead was, "One thing we're looking for in your precinct is -- I hate to use the word -- but a precinct captain." Edwards' staffers had been doing precinct captain trainings for three weeks and phone banking from several different sites around Des Moines, in addition to the main office, but four days before the caucuses they still had not nailed down enough Iowans to lead the charge for Edwards in each precinct. Finding those individuals is so critical that every time a caller identified a new captain, a volunteer rang a big bell while the whole office cheered and clapped.
"By or before caucus night we will have all of our precincts covered," predicts Rob Berntsen, Edwards' Iowa caucus director. "The momentum the senator has been generating over the past couple of weeks has done amazing things for our organization."
In fact, it's done such amazing things that the demand for Edwards campaign materials has begun to outstrip the supply. When a supporter comes in looking for Edwards buttons, volunteer Abraham Kneisley, 24, has to tell him: "The momentum has been so crazy we're out of everything. We're out of literature. We're out of books. We have yard signs, we just got those in." The man leaves empty-handed.
"FedEx doesn't move as fast as the momentum does," Kneisley adds.Located near the New Blue Nude Adult Entertainment Center on Grand Avenue, the Edwards office is a warm, cozy place that feels a little like a big family room, with boxes of clementines and piles of cookies and pizzas boxes for the volunteers stacked on tables. Big, chipper signs in multicolored Magic Marker add to the homey, Romper Room vibe -- I almost expect to see a stack of toys in a corner -- and so does the fact that Edwards' headquarters is smaller than Dean's or Kerry's. Most of all, though, it's the fact that Edwards is in the best position he's been in yet in Iowa, which means that he's already beating expectations. "The other campaigns have created these expectations that they have to come in first," says Berntsen. "We just have to be competitive."
As happy as the Edwards campers are, that's how stressed team Dean is. Several staffers are well into their tertiary wardrobes, wearing what's clean even though the clothes are no match for an Iowa winter. Hundreds of people zoom in and out of a warren of rooms with wires duct-taped to the floor at the Dean Des Moines headquarters and the Storm Center -- where Dean's massive, final GOTV operation is based -- next door. Papers have piled up in corners, boxes are everywhere, journalists and camera operators drift in and out, teenagers in corduroys and hoodies staff the phone lines, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) stops by to give the volunteers a pep talk, national finance Chairman Terry Lierman backslaps his way around the cavernous headquarters' front room before popping into an office marked -- perhaps in an attempt to discourage media and volunteer pop-ins --"Restricted Area Political and Scheduling We are as ugly as we are uncharismatic."
One reason Dean offices always seem high energy and chaotic, I've come to realize, is that their inhabitants are trying to do more than the other campaigns. Berntsen said Edwards was expecting about 500 volunteers. Kerry was getting about 1,000 statewide, said Capps. Team Dean will be getting 2,000 over the weekend alone, says Christy Setzer, press secretary for the Iowa Perfect Storm Project, for a total of about 4,000 out-of-state canvassers since Dec. 26.
And every one of those volunteers is being logged in and trained and oriented and housed and put to work canvassing and calling for Dean. "We have a good chance of knocking on every Democratic door in the state," boasts Chris Zychowski, a former software engineer who quit his job in San Francisco to become a full-time volunteer for Dean and is now coordinating part of the project. "I went out a couple of days and I didn't run into a single person" canvassing from competing campaigns.
Before they can be sent out, volunteers have to sign a volunteer-agreement pledge, the legacy of Rep. Dick Gephardt's (D-Mo.) accusation that Dean volunteers had been passing themselves off as Iowans. "As a non-resident of Iowa," the pledge reads, "I, [blank], hereby agree that I will not improperly participate in the Iowa Caucuses on Jan. 19, 2004. Further, I will not claim to be a resident of Iowa or attempt to change my voter registration in order to take part in the Iowa Caucuses." But the forms also means that the campaign will -- once they have time to log the them and get an exact head count of their ground force.
The Dean campaign is still training precinct captains, and lets me sit in on a training session. There're about 31 attendees -- more keep dropping in all evening -- and about a third of them raise their hands when asked how many people have never caucused before. Though the Dean trainers are young, the captains they're teaching range from the middle-aged to the elderly. Jan Evans, 60, a retiree from the south side of Des Moines, says she caucused for Michael Dukakis in 1988, but hasn't been back since. "We've come out of retirement to do this," she tells me. As the race comes down to the wire, it's starting to seem like a much closer one to her, too. "In my precinct," she says, "the scale is starting to tip to Kerry and Edwards, and I really think that some of the Gephardt negativism has cost [Dean]. All of a sudden, it's a four-way race."
But, she adds, Dean has one thing going for him despite the attacks he's faced: "This whole organization has just been beyond excellent. There are no holes."
Organization will matter more than anything this year, thanks to what is expected to be a record turnout. "It's gonna be a fight to the end, it really is," says Tricia Enright, Dean's perpetually swamped communications director, who's ensconced in her upstairs office near a couch where people line up to talk to her like guests on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. "The race is tightening up. Things are fluid."
One thing that's clear, though, is that Dean's Internet troops have turned out for him. At the Storm Center, I decide to randomly pick a couple of women to talk to. They turn out to be "Sally in SF" (Sally Pina, 52) and Jan Cadoret, 48, from "Dykes for Dean." They are regular presences in the comment threads of the Dean blog, and Pina is wearing a yellow "I blog for Howard Dean" sweatshirt and a "Dean for America: Iowa Storm Blogger" tag around her neck. In fact, she says, there are about 100 regular Dean bloggers who have formed a community and decided to come out to canvas this weekend. That's in addition to their regular donations to him, and fund raising for him.
Meg Timms, 75, is here, too, famous to blog readers for the 200 handwritten letters she's sent to Iowa undecideds from her home in Portland, Ore. Now she sits at a table in the Storm Center entryway, quietly writing another one.
Garance Franke-Ruta is a Prospect senior editor.
