Developmental update: Age 3.5, Part 1.

It's been a while since I did a developmental update, and suddenly Alex is three and a half. This got long, so I'm splitting it into two parts.

( Verbal/Cognitive Development )

( Physical Development )

Developmental Update: Age 3.5, Part 2.

( Social/Emotional Development )

( Imagination )

The ground campaign.

There's an interesting post up at fivethirtyeight.com, my new favorite blog. They've been traveling around the midwest visiting campaign field offices, and have made some startling observations:

Let’s be clear. We've observed no comparison between these ground campaigns. To begin with, there’s a 4-1 ratio of offices in most states. We walk into McCain offices to find them closed, empty, one person, two people, sometimes three people making calls. Many times one person is calling while the other small clutch of volunteers are chatting amongst themselves. In one state, McCain’s state field director sat in one of these offices and, sotto voce, complained to us that only one man was making calls while the others were talking to each other about how much they didn't like Obama, which was true. But the field director made no effort to change this. This was the state field director. [...]

Given a choice between taking embarrassing photos of empty phone banks, we give McCain’s people the chance to pose for photos to show us the action for what they continually claim we “just missed.” No more. We stop into offices at all open hours of the day, but generally more in the afternoon and evening. “Call time,” for both campaigns, is all day, but the time when folks over 65 are generally targeted begins in late afternoon and goes til 8 or 9pm. Universally, McCain’s people stop earlier. Even when we show up at 6:15pm, we’re told we just missed the big phone bank, or to come back in 30 minutes. If we show up an hour later, we “just missed it” again.

The McCain offices are also calm, sedate. Little movement. No hustle. In the Obama offices, it's a whirlwind. People move. It's a dynamic bustle. You can feel it in our photos.

Up to this point, we’ve been giving McCain's ground campaign a lot of benefit of the doubt. We can’t stop convincing ourselves that there must – must – be a warehouse full of 1,000 McCain volunteers somewhere in a national, central location just dialing away. This can’t be all they’re doing. [...]

You could take every McCain volunteer we’ve seen doing actual work in the entire trip, over six states, and it would add up to the same as Obama’s single Thornton, CO office. Or his single Durango, CO office. These ground campaigns bear no relationship to each other.

Differences in ground campaigns probably don't show up in the polls. What ground campaigns do is get supporters who might not otherwise have voted to come out on Election Day. They change unlikely voters into likely voters. They may change some minds as well, but the primary purpose of a ground campaign is to get out the vote.

When we were in Charlottesville for our Wild Woman Weekend, we went by the Obama campaign office a couple of times. That place was hopping. It was a large, deep storefront, absolutely packed with people - even at 10 o'clock at night. And it looked like a place where people did stuff, not just a showroom. I didn't see the McCain office, though, so I can't compare.

Has anyone had contact with the McCain ground campaign? Any data points out there? I'm curious to know whether the fivethirtyeight.com guys' observations are accurate. ...Why would they be? How could there not be a ground campaign? And yet.