While Senate Democrats were busy maintaining their insiders' club on Tuesday, the grassroots activists behind Democrats Work were doing something useful.

They launched a Yes We Cans Virtual Food Drive"to let you donate to the food bank of your choice and help those in need in your own community."

For instance, they have selected five Iowa food banks where donors can direct their giving.

Click here for more information about the food drive.

There are many ways you can help combat hunger in America. Some churches have "adopt a family" programs during the holiday season. Or, you can volunteer directly for a shelter or food bank. The Democracy Work organizers suggest that volunteers check out the Feeding America site to find a food bank in your area. You can let Democrats Work know what you're doing to help by e-mailing info AT democratswork.org.

When thinking globally is too depressing, you can always act locally.

This thread is about any worthwhile grassroots activism going on.

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This is a quick reminder that the runoff election for U.S. Senate in Georgia will be on December 2, and there are many ways you can help Democrat Jim Martin beat Republican incumbent Saxby Chambliss.

Depending on how the recount in Minnesota turns out, which won't be resolved for a few weeks, Martin could be the key to getting Democrats a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

1. Go donate to Martin's campaign. It will only take a minute of your time.

2. Help google-bomb Saxby Chambliss. This is easy, and Chris Bowers explains why it is helpful:

Have you started linking to Saxby Chambliss yet? The more people who do, the higher it will appear in search engine rankings. If we can push it into the first ten results for Saxby Chambliss in Georgia, then it will result in a lot of excellent voter contacts. Everyone who encounters the site will be a voter looking for more information on Saxby Chambliss, and we can show them this great website made by an enterprising activist.

Log on to the various blogs where you comment, and click on your user page. Then click "profile" (or at MyDD, "display"). There should be an area where you can write text that will be your "signature," attached to all comments you make.

You want to embed a link to the Saxby Chambliss website. Here is what I did:

See if Saxby Chambliss is helping you.

If you don't know how to embed a link, write this all on one line with no spaces between:

<

a href="http://saxby-chambliss.com/"

>

Saxby Chambliss

<

/a

>

3. Kick in a few more bucks to Martin's campaign.

4. If you live in Georgia or close enough to travel there, sign up to volunteer for Martin's campaign during the next few weeks. You were planning to take some time off for Thanksgiving anyway, right? Set aside extra time to volunteer.

Remember that there are many ways to volunteer besides knocking on strangers' doors and calling strangers on the phone. You can help sort literature for the canvassers. You can help stuff envelopes. You can bring a home-made meal to the campaign office for the staff and other volunteers. I heard of one woman in Iowa who used to do laundry for field organizers renting apartments without washing machines. Every hour that staffer doesn't have to spend in a laundromat is an hour he or she can be getting out the vote for Jim Martin.

5. Ask some friends or relatives to make a campaign contribution. Explain to them that this race will affect the Republicans' ability to obstruct the change we need.

Please feel free to suggest other ways activists can help Martin bring this race home.

UPDATE: From the comments, Georgeo57 reminds us that

people can make GOTV calls from other states into Georgia. President-Elect Obama can release his list of most active phone bankers and volunteers to the Martiin campaign, and Martin can feature a GOTV phonebank list on his site. Everyone is still revved up from November 4th, and we could easily flood Georgia with calls from many other states. We can only do this if Obama and Martin facilitate the calls through the Martin site, or if organizations like MyDD, DailyKos, or MoveOn step up to the plate to recruit callers and provide on-line voter lists.

ATL Dem offers another great idea:

Upthread comments are right about doing GOTV, and I'll be making calls. In the meantime, I'm also running this Google ad to assist in desmoinesdem's project No. 2: Hi from Saxby Chambliss Read about my work in D.C. Too bad it's not for you! saxby-chambliss.com It's getting monster response -- over 15 percent of people searching for "Saxby Chambliss" are clicking it. The bad thing about that is that my $10 a day budget gets used up pretty fast, so if you're of a mind to, go to Google and click on "Advertising Programs" and set up another ad.

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We have an enemy besides McCain and the Republicans, and it's not Barr or Nader.  

I work facilities for a major financial institution, taking calls from advisors and their staffs who are too hot or too cold, have spilled something, broke their desks, or the like.  Most mornings I take my break with some of the furniture guys; they're decent folks: blue collar fellas who are wary of politicians.

This year, though, things inevitably turn to politics, because it seems like it's all anyone ever talks about.  An older guy I sit with has seemed to be in favor of Obama, but I suspect that he just wanted him to knock off Clinton; the race issue quietly makes a difference to him and he sometimes gets his news from FOX.  We're all pretty respectful, for the most part, though, and don't let disagreements get in the way of our friendship or work.

Which brings us to today.  Today the manager of the furniture team was there, which is unusual.  He doesn't usually take breaks with the plebians.  When politics eventually came up, he was going on and on about how all politicians are crooks and liars who had no conception of the troubles of the average person, and that included Obama.  I said that that my research suggested otherwise and I wanted Obama to win, he laughed in my face, said, "I'm really sorry," and walked away.

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Sarah Palin is coming to Des Moines on Saturday, and the Iowa chairman of Veterans for Obama is organizing a clothing drive for Disabled American Veterans across the street from her rally. Great idea for a visibility event.

I noticed in the e-mail call for volunteers that the DAV apparently gives Barack Obama a 90 percent rating but only gives John McCain a 20 percent rating, presumably because of all the Senate votes he's missed this year.

Speaking of scorecards, the non-partisan Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America released their own scorecards for members of Congress recently.

McCain earned a D, because he did not co-sponsor the post-9/11 GI bill and voted for only three of the nine bills supported by the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. The only other senators to receive a D or lower from this group were Tom Coburn (R-OK), Jim DeMint (R-SC), and Mike Enzi (R-WY).

Obama earned a B for co-sponsoring the GI Bill and voting with veterans five out of nine times. Obama has also missed quite a few votes while campaigning this year, though not nearly as many as McCain.

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In August I compared Barack Obama's field operations in several states to what John McCain's campaign was putting together and concluded that Obama's small-town outreach would crush McCain's.

Keeping Republican margins down in small towns and rural areas has the potential to put many more states in the blue column. This diary by ManfromMiddletown shows why with lots of maps.

I am happy to report that with less than a month to go, the Obama campaign is deploying its army of staff and volunteers to get out the vote in scores of cities and towns where the McCain campaign is nowhere to be seen except on television.

Iowa isn't much of a swing state, with five recent polls putting Obama over 50 percent and beating McCain by at least 10 points. Nevertheless, the Obama campaign is taking no chances here. They've got more than 40 field offices. They've been canvassing in dozens of communities, large and small, every weekend since July. During the week, surrogates for Obama are regularly holding "rural roundtables" and other campaign events.

It's easy for volunteers in larger communities to sign up to help in small towns. One of my friends showed me the Obama 08 application on his iPhone yesterday. Among other things, it shows you volunteer opportunities in your area. For instance, he saw that they need people to hand out Obama-Biden stickers in the Covered Bridges parade this weekend in Winterset (25 miles from his home in the Des Moines suburbs). Contact information for the relevant Obama office and field organizer was right there, along with a link he could click if he needed directions.

When early voting began in Iowa the last week of September, Obama's campaign organized 21 phone banks and 17 supporter gatherings around the state within a 24-hour period.

Today the Obama campaign in Iowa launched an early voting RV tour. Click the link for a list of stops this RV will make just in the first two days of the tour. There is a particular focus on small college campuses and high schools in small cities and towns.

This pattern is being repeated around the country. While McCain and the Republican National Committee are scrambling to move staff into states like Indiana and Virginia, Obama has had field offices up and running for months.

The level of activity in Obama offices is very high. To cite just one example, Obama has more than 40 field offices in Missouri. McCain has 15 Missouri offices, up from six in August. But as Sean Quinn noted in this post about his road trip to Missouri, hardly anything is happening in the typical McCain field office:

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.

Only for the first time the other day did we see a McCain organizer make a single phone call. So we've now seen that once. The McCain organizers seem to operate as maître Ds. Let me escort you to your phone, sir. Pick any one of this sea of empty chairs. I'll be sitting over here if you need any assistance.[...]

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.

A ground game can't win an election by itself, but it should help Obama squeeze many more votes out of a favorable political climate.

I was a precinct captain for John Kerry in 2004, and Obama's ground game is several orders of magnitude better. Kerry's GOTV mostly focused on cities and suburbs, and in particular on heavily Democratic precincts. In many cases, MoveOn or America Coming Together volunteers were duplicating our efforts by knocking on the same doors and calling the same people.

Obama is getting the vote out in cities and suburbs, but I suspect his investment in small towns will give him the decisive edge in enough red states to put him over 270 electoral votes. It's been a while since Republican presidential candidates had to work hard for votes in those areas, and McCain's campaign doesn't seem up to the task.

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