It's mid-afternoon on March 8, the special election for the 14th Congressional district is well underway, and Democratic precinct captain Pete Judge is starting to get jittery.
"It's the way you feel this time of day in any election," he tells me while rushing from volunteer to volunteer, pausing occasionally to check turnout numbers.
Pete has been organizing the local get-out-the-vote effort for Democratic candidate Bill Foster from the Elgin Labor Temple. His people intend to knock on 27,000 doors in the Elgin area before the polls close and have already hit so many that they've started branching out into new neighborhoods to help other volunteers. They don't know it, but they're about four hours away from a victory that will be viewed as a "shocking upset" in Illinois politics, and a major win for Democrats nationally.
Before that day, the Illinois 14th had been considered solidly conservative for over a generation. Stretching from the Northern suburbs of Chicago to near the Iowa border, it was just the kind of rural and exurban area that has been a GOP bulwark for decades. The district was represented for 20 years by Dennis Hastert, the longest serving Republican House Speaker in history. It went 55 percent for President Bush in 2004.
It is not surprising that a competitive Democratic campaign in a place like that would attract national attention. Both Barack Obama and John McCain cut ads endorsing the candidates of their respective parties, and financial support flooded in from the congressional campaign committees.
"It was a better turnout than I anticipated," Republican County Clerk John Cunningham told me, "but I think the reason for that is that the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee really bombarded the people with phone calls and fliers."
With so much attention on the national angle of the election, another story has been overlooked: the grassroots effort that helped turn the 14th blue.
"We had about 770 volunteers on election day," Foster press secretary Andrew Dupuy told me following his candidate’s victory. "725 people knocked doors, people were doing the hard work on the ground.” Dupuy estimated that Foster volunteers reached approximately 100,000 doors.
A lot of factors go into generating that kind of enthusiasm during a special election, not all of them advertising-based. Some observers have pointed to the tightly contested Democratic presidential primary, shifting demographics, and a reinvigorated progressive consciousness as possible factors in Foster's victory. All that and more was on display at the Labor Temple.
"You talk to so many people who are Republicans and Independents who are coming to the Democratic side, I mean not even just to vote but to volunteer," Megan Ryan told me on election day as she took a break from knocking on doors. Ryan and other Students for Obama had driven from Chicago to lend a hand. She saw the enthusiasm for Bill Foster as part of Sen. Obama's promise of change.
Sitting across the room Bernard Revollo agreed, to a point.
"I myself am working for Hillary Clinton," he said "but there are a lot of people here working for Obama, and it’s the same spirit that’s driving it. On the local level we are together."
Revollo, an engineer, describes the increased Democratic presence in Elgin and in his neighboring town of Streamwood as a "systemic" shift of attitude in the areas around Chicago. His canvassing partner, Dana Wallbridge, is a living example of that shift. Wallbridge had lived for nearly 20 years in the 14th.
"Having Denny Hastert be the congressional representative for that time," he said, "I really have felt the need for a change ... so this is the first time that I have done any work for a political campaign."
Along with Revello, Ryan, and Wallbridge there were hundreds of other volunteers in Elgin alone. Labor unions made a strong showing throughout the district as did allied campaigns from other districts. Supporters of Rep. Melissa Bean from the 8th and congressional hopeful Scott Harper in the 13th came out to canvass along with local Democratic organizations. The trick for the Foster campaign was not to simply attract volunteers, but to use them wisely. It was here -- in the realm of organization -- where the Foster camp may have truly won the day.
About a year before he decided to run for his own seat in Congress, Foster volunteered to walk precincts for Patrick Murphy, a Democratic congressional candidate in Pennsylvania. Before entering politics, Foster worked as a scientist and his experience as a volunteer led him to develop new computer programs and equipment to make canvassing more efficient. Pete Judge saw the campaign’s GOTV approach as "one of those things where [Foster] looked at it in the most logical and scientific way." He applied this “scientific" approach to both the high technology of precinct mapping and the more low-tech business of designing walk lists.
A seasoned canvasser at the Elgin Labor Temple might have noticed the absence of a normally ubiquitous object in get-out-the-vote efforts: the clipboard. Canvassers are normally equipped with maps and lists: maps to find their target locations and lists to check off the addresses they’ve visited. While the clipboard helps, it can become a confusing stack of papers, and part of Foster's innovation was to do away with all those sheets.
"It condenses a walk-list into one page card stock," Judge said of Foster's alternative system. "It's less cumbersome to get around with, you can fold it up into a trifold and it fits right in your pocket."
The high-tech side of Foster’s innovation was a new mapping system to plot assignments for individual canvassers. The approach increases efficiency and volunteer morale.
"You can cut down precincts from 100-plus voter blocks to more manageable 40 or 80 or 50-voter blocks," said Judge. "People can go out hit doors for 90 minutes, come back, warm up, go out do it again. You know, it chops it up into smaller bits."
Judging from those I spoke with on Election Day, the Foster system was working like a charm. Volunteers from other towns said they found it easy to navigate the neighborhoods of Elgin with their precinct maps, and nobody had been stuck outside in freezing weather for too long. Even other elected officials were beginning to take notice.
“It's a very effective campaign here,” said State Senator Michael Noland as he surveyed the room. “We are definitely going to be looking at the materials that are being used in this campaign and seeing how we can use it not only in future congressional races … but then in our state races and our local races as well.”
And the results spoke for themselves. Foster won the 14th district, a supposed bastion of conservatism, by a decisive six percent of the vote. The turnout numbers were low compared to a presidential election, but surprisingly high for a special election held on a Saturday. The campaign credits its get-out-the-vote effort.
“I don’t think there’s any question that it’s a key component of the victory,” Andrew Dupuy said while running down the results with me. “Especially [in] a special election, where turnout is going to be an issue.”
If the Foster campaign has demonstrated one thing to Illinois progressives, it is that they can win in places where victory was once thought impossible. With high grassroots participation and a well-organized campaign, the Democrats now represent a district that, five years ago, was given up for lost. The question that remains is whether the Foster results can be repeated in other parts of the state. Anna Novokova, a high school student and Foster volunteer, says she is sure it can.
"I think the reason that we haven't been winning is that we haven’t been trying,” she told me on Election Day. “Obviously, we're committing to this one and look at what a difference it makes"
