Progress Illinois

Think that trip to Denver in August is going to be all fun and games? The Obama campaign says think again:

Those 75,000 Democrats who will pack a football stadium for Barack Obama's convention speech won't be there just to whoop and holler on television. They'll form the world's largest phone bank to boost voter registration -- fired-up supporters using computer targeting the campaign has spent months putting together.

The move to the Invesco Field at Mile High stadium for the convention's final night next month -- at an additional cost of $5 million—will capture a huge crowd the Obama campaign plans to put to work. They'll be armed with data gleaned through "microtargeting" unregistered voters the campaign believes are ripe to back Obama if pressed to get on board.

What has the Democrats "micro-targeting" gleaned? By comparing registration lists with lists of potential voters gathered by mining consumer databases, deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand says the campaign has identified 55 million unregistered voters across the country, two-thirds of whom would vote for Obama if they were "registered and motivated." Like Nate Silver, the campaign sees the advantage in motivating underrepresented populations:

The campaign has found about 8.1 million unregistered yet eligible blacks, another 8 million unregistered Hispanics and nearly 7.5 million unregistered people between the ages of 18 and 24. Officials also are looking at more women versus men, more highly educated voters, people on fixed incomes and those who have moved across state lines in recent years and could change the voter makeup

Hildebrand's faith in the plan is obvious. "If we do this right," he says, "we'll be unbeatable."