Things like this, from Bill Bradley's New West Notes:

As he steams smartly toward hoped for re-election four weeks from today, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has a secret weapon, the largest and most technologically sophisticated voter mobilization operation California Republicans have ever seen...

For $20 million, which is what the Team Arnold-led Victory ‘06 program is costing. What that not so small fortune has bought is a state-of-the-art computerized telecommunications system, highly sophisticated “data mining” to enable “micro targeting” of potential supporters, and a cadre of some 75 staffers working for the Republican Victory ‘06 and Schwarzenegger campaign operations. Beginning last spring, working outward through concentric circles of core Republican activists and Schwarzenegger admirers to entirely new people, this group set about the task of recruiting 90,000 volunteers to work, at various stages of the campaign up through election day get out the vote operations, a universe of some 1.5 million voters.

Many Republicans were skeptical, and that is putting it mildly, hearing of the goal of 90,000 volunteers. “Arnold’s Texans are crazy,” one ranking Republican said. Despite a lot of talk, in the past, the party and its standard-bearers had had at most perhaps a tenth of that many volunteers.

They don’t have 90,000 volunteers, says campaign chief Schmidt, they have some 60,000 volunteers, with “over 70,000 by the final push.”

Last week, he says, the operation had “300,000 completed phone calls to targeted voters.”

“We’ve never had anything like this,” says state Republican chairman Duf Sundheim. “Steve Schmidt and his colleagues are a godsend to this party. With the approach of this governor and these techniques, we can put California back in play in presidential politics.”

We'll see if it works a month from now - but my bet is that it will, and the GOP will at least losen the political left's stranglehold on California politics. And while Schwarzenegger's effort is first class, similiar efforts are being put together by the GOP around the country and the nature of these efforts means that people who aren't likely to show up in polling samples are precisely those who will show up in the voting booth.

This will still be a race primarily between the two Parties - mid-term elections just don't get independents to the polls like Presidential elections do - but the GOP will be the bigger Party; perhaps the much bigger Party. Democrats are still counting on their corrupt unions plus "527" groups to do their work for them - but the unions and the 527s aren't interested necessarily in victory...they are more interested in themselves and their pet issues. Meanwhile, the people the GOP has are definitively interested in GOP victory - so interested that they keep pestering me to volunteer, even though our big Nevada efforts (governorship and Senate) are cake-walks (and, no, I haven't volunteered this year - just been too busy with the book, etc).

Just watch and see what happens November 7th...I think we'll see Carville with a trash can over his head again.

HAT TIP: Dean's World

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