This article from the New York Times has made a splash in the liberal blogosphere:
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York has nearly doubled the size of her staff in Iowa and has substantially increased her advertising here as her campaign reinforces its effort to prevent Democrats from coalescing around a single alternative to her candidacy.
In the four weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, Mrs. Clinton, whose campaign has been on the defensive lately because of her own missteps and increasingly aggressive attacks from her rivals, is moving to double or triple the amount of time she has spent here in recent months. Seldom will a day go by, aides said, when either she or former President Bill Clinton will not be on some patch of Iowa soil trying to solidify her support and win over an unusually high number of uncommitted voters.
“We’re going to begin using all the assets we have,” said Tom Vilsack, a former governor of Iowa who serves as co-chairman of the Clinton campaign. “We haven’t been bashful about asking for the moon here.”
If I were running Hillary's campaign, I would also use Bill as much as possible. His favorables have been higher than Hillary's for the last 15 years, and he generates a lot of excitement and free media coverage everywhere he goes.
That said, to my mind this is the key passage in the article:
More than 60 percent of those who have identified themselves as Clinton supporters, senior strategists say, have never participated in the Iowa caucuses. It is a far higher share than the campaign had been anticipating, which suggests that many of the reliable rank-and-file Democrats have chosen another candidate. So the Clinton campaign is working to expand its universe of supporters to women who have never participated.
If Hillary can turn out tens of thousands of Iowans who have never caucused before, more power to her. I will be impressed. I am also trying to turn out people who support Edwards but have never caucused before.
At the same time, I would be extremely nervous if more than half of my coded Edwards supporters in my precinct had not attended the 2000 or 2004 caucuses.
The New York Times article goes on to say that Hillary now has 34 field offices in Iowa,
arriving in many cities more than two months behind the local operatives for Mr. Obama or Mr. Edwards. Last week, the Clinton campaign’s national headquarters sent a top communications operative to Iowa and hired eight deputies charged solely with drumming up media coverage in smaller cities across the state.
The big question is, will Clinton's staff be able to get those first-time caucus-goers to show up on January 3?
I know Hillary has been doing lots of robocalls. I've received several myself. Presumably those are aimed at all Iowa Democrats, not just the universe of past caucus-goers. Hillary is talking about whatever issue, and then at the end she says, press 1 if you are ready to support me, press 2 if you want more information about my campaign.
It would take very little effort for a non-regular voter to listen to this call and press 1. I imagine that is how they are compiling a large list of supporters who have never caucused before.
If she can turn those people out, she deserves to win, and the Iowa Democratic Party will benefit from having more people engaged in the process.
A diary on the New York Times article generated a heated discussion last night on Daily Kos.
Jerome Armstrong posted an interesting commentary on the article at MyDD. He inferred that
The Clinton campaign must have polled and segmented and projected that, with the given caucus universe, they just can't win in Iowa– recall their internal memo earlier this spring that considered ditching the state. So instead, the focus moves to the technique of expanding the caucus universe.
This post by Nate Willems seems to support this analysis as well, especially his observation that
In making calls through a list of rural Democrats who are consistent primary voters, but who lack a history of attending a caucus, my anecdotal notes show that Clinton is significantly stronger than any other candidate. Accordingly, it does seem that she would benefit from a larger turnout.
Amongst rural Democrats with a record of attending their caucus, my notes show a very competitive race between Edwards and Clinton with Obama distinctly behind.
What do you think? Is the Clinton campaign truly concerned that recent Iowa polls showing her in the lead include too many people who are unlikely to caucus? Or are they mainly trying to lower expectations for their candidate in Iowa?
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