Pros and Cons of Contact

The contact gap (Ben Smith The Politico)

I've gotten lots of email over the last few days in response to a request for anecdotes of what sort of contact readers are getting from the campaign on the ground, and virtually all of the stories run the same way: Obama has been contacting these voters many, many more times than McCain.

This may be a self-selected sample, of course -- blog readers lean Obama. With that caveat, here are a couple of (lightly edited) samples:

An Obama supporter in Indiana:

I am a lifelong Republican. I have served on the local county Republican finance committee in the past. I am not supporting the Republican presidential candidate for the first time in my life. I have been contacted during the primary by Rudy Giuliani. No other Republicans have attempted to contact me at all, with the exception of local Indiana candidates. I have had no contact from the Indiana Republican Party and no mail from the McCain campaign during the entire campaign.

The real story though, is about my 24 year old son.

He attended college at the University of Hawaii. He graduated in May. He enjoyed his last summer in Hawaii and traveled to China before returning to Indiana in early September. One week before returning to Indiana, he changed his cell phone number to an Indiana area code. After arriving at the Indianapolis airport, we drove home. Two hours after his plane arrived in Indiana, he received a phone call on his cell phone. It was a local Obama campaign office. They welcomed him to Indiana and asked if he needed assistance in getting registered to vote. He did register and both of us have already voted for Obama.

How is it that an active Republican gets no contact from any Republican office or candidate (except the gubernatorial candidate) and a two hour resident of Indiana gets a phone call from the Obama office?

A ...non-Obama supporter in NoVa:

The Obama campaign has been obsessed with every detail of my life. The morning Obama announced that Senator Biden was his running mate, I had an Obama campainger at my door no earlier than 9:30am. A few weeks later, I was in my front yard cutting the grass and a campaigner had the audacity to interrupt me while I'm running a lawn mower to ask who I was voting for.

The best encounter thus far, though, was with the "lost" woman on my street. Walking home from work one day, I ran into a young woman who looked frightfully lost in my Arlington neighborhood. I made myself available to her, sensing that she caused no harm, and she immediately began drilling me about who I was voting for and why I haven't thought seriously enough about this election. Upon making it clear to her that I didn't have time to argue with her, she arranged herself more in my personal space and began to discuss abortion, volunteering to me that she had lost a friend to illegal abortion. This woman was obviously born after Roe v. Wade, which led me to conclude that her friend's illegal abortion must have occurred in another country or that maybe this woman was telling lies to solicit my emotion. Being a nimble, petite woman, I navigated myself around her and left her calling out after me in the streets. I walked around the block to make sure that she wouldn't discover which house I live in.

Speaking of my house, I have received enough Obama propaganda that I could literally wall-paper my entire living room with it....

I have been receiving numerous unknown cell phone calls as of late. I once answered during a thunderstorm, and an enthusiastic young man asked if I was planning on voting for Obama. I told him that I didn't want to talk about it and would prefer it if he didn't call back. He understood, apologized, and, to make up for it all, called me back five minutes later to ask the same question....