Obama, Romney unveiling their Ohio strategies
TROY —
The ground war for Ohio is taking shape five months before the presidential election, and the Dayton area is shaping up to be a key battleground.
President Barack Obama’s campaign got an organizational jump on Republican challenger Mitt Romney while the latter was still wrapping up the Republican nomination. Obama had 18 field offices open in Ohio before Romney’s first.
But now Romney’s campaign is starting to launch its Ohio ground game. Romney had eight field offices open this week, half of them in southwest Ohio, with six more expected to open within 10 days, including one in Centerville.
Campaign offices for Obama are popping up across the Dayton-Cincinnati region, and some of the sites come as a relative surprise, as they’re in heavily Republican territory.
More than 60 people crowded into a steamy storefront Tuesday night, opening an office in downtown Troy despite the fact that Republicans have dominated recent presidential votes in Miami County.
Obama has five field offices in Dayton and the surrounding area, and the Troy office is not the only one in a Republican stronghold, as Organizing for America is also established in Beavercreek and Mason.
While Obama supporters have few illusions about beating Romney outright in places like Miami or Warren counties, they do hope to narrow the gap by a few thousand votes in multiple counties, which could be crucial in deciding Ohio’s 18 electoral votes in the race for president.
“We believe that there are votes to gain in every corner of this state,” said Greg Schultz, state director for Obama for America, during his visit to Troy. “Democrats historically … focused a lot of our efforts in what some people would call more traditional Democratic areas, at the expense of not having conversations with people in other parts of the state.”
Christopher Maloney, the Ohio director of Romney’s campaign, said he couldn’t speak to the president’s motives in what he called “ruby-red Republican counties” but added that the Miami Valley remained “a very critical component” to their own efforts.
Republican counties
In the past three presidential elections, Miami County voters’ support of Democrats has been very consistent, and very low. Al Gore drew 36 percent of the vote there in 2000, John Kerry 34 percent in 2004 and Barack Obama 35 percent in 2008. In Warren County, those percentages were 28-28-31, and in Greene County it was 38-38-40.
In Miami County, the Democratic Party didn’t even put anyone on the March primary ballot for the nine countywide offices up for grabs this fall.
The Obama supporters who gathered in Troy were aware of those numbers, but some, like retired Troy resident Russ Wheeler, said campaigning has changed their outlook.
“I’ve worked the phones this spring, and it’s been a good experience for me,” Wheeler said. “I’ve always had the feeling that I’m a small voice in Miami County. But the more time I spend on the phones, the more I realize that there’s a lot more people out there like me.”
John Green, director of the Bliss Institute for Applied Politics at the University of Akron, said many campaigns would love to hit as many areas as Obama is, but don’t have the funding to do so. He said Obama has both the money and the time to do it, in part because he didn’t have a contested primary.
“The 30 percent of the vote that goes Democratic in Mason, those votes add up,” Green said. “And if it’s going to be really close, and a lot of people think it will, then that’s really important.”
Organizing, strategy
Maloney said he “accepted long ago” that Obama would open more offices and hire more staff, but he said the Romney camp is prepared to fight.
Schultz said this Obama campaign is focused on identifying neighborhood-level leaders, calling the one-on-one and small-group connections they make invaluable.
“You win Ohio by neighbors talking to neighbors,” he said. “Yes we have a lot of excitement in places like Cleveland, but the fact that we have as much excitement in this room in Troy, I think it says something about the reach that this president has.”
Studies have shown those individual contacts can have a big effect, even in this era of saturation media ads, Green said.
“By the time November rolls around, most people will have seen an incredible number of commercials for both sides,” he said. “The campaigns get some benefit out of that, but there are diminishing returns. And that’s where that personal contact can break through when the media saturation builds. ... There is some real value added.”
One of those local volunteers in Miami County is Daniel Pfister, a University of Dayton student from Tipp City. Pfister will work on the Miami County vote this summer and continue his activism with UD’s college Democrats in the fall.
“It’s about getting the president’s message across — about what he’s done for us — to everyone else in the county,” Pfister said.
And Maloney said the Romney campaign will be doing the same.
“We’re going to match them volunteer for volunteer, call for call and door-knock for doorknock,” he said.