The roots of Students for Barack Obama are the stuff of legend: 

In the summer of 2006, on July 7th, some eight months before Obama announced his run for president, Bowdoin College junior Meredith Segal created a Facebook group that went on to reach fully-fledged PAC-status before being rolled into Obama's campaign organization as its official student wing.

By February when Obama's campaign was actually launched nine months ago, Students for Barack Obama was already:

a political action committee with nearly 62,000 members and chapters at 80 colleges, the most structured grass-roots student movement -- there's a director of field operations, an Internet director, a finance director and a blog team director -- in the presidential campaign so far.

Many of those student leaders are still involved in what is a fully-fledged student leadership.  As of October 22nd, according to a campaign press release, Students for Barack Obama has more than 600 chapters on college campuses and high schools across the country.

In Iowa, because of a state law that young voters be able to caucus so long as they turn 18 in time for the November general election, nearly all of high school seniors will be eligible to vote.  Students for Barack Obama has responded by organizing chapters at more than a third of Iowa high schools.

In all, by my count, they have chapters on at least nineteen college campuses and at a stunning 144high schools across Iowa, with new chapters being added daily. 

In New Hampshire, Students for Barack Obama has chapters at all of New Hampshire's twelve college campuses with five full-time campaign staff members aiding student organizing efforts.

No matter which candidate you support, this level of grassroots organization among students bodes well for the future of Democratic Party politics. 

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At my college in Pennsylvania this year, I personally designed the GOTV strategy for campus.  What we did was:

1) Set up a dorm captain system, modeled on the precinct captain system.  We had 1-2 people in charge of each dorm. They were told to register everyone, keep track of their leanings (on a 1-5 scale) and note whether anyone needed absentee applications.  

2) Convince people to not only register, but register in the college's town, so that they didn't have to worry about absentees.  

3) We tried to build a master email list of all liberal-leaning groups on campus (Dems, Students for Environmental Action, ACLU, etc) as well as a separate list of swing groups or ones to reach out to (the Catholic group, especially with Casey being Catholic, was the big one).  

4) Using this list, we sent a few reminder emails (about deadlines and Election Day).  More importantly, though, we made handwritten, colorful notes that we sent to everybody reminding them to vote.  Don't underestimate this part.  For a college student, mail is rare.  Colleges aren't recruiting us anymore, so that one yellow piece of paper will really brighten our day.  Also, the handwritten part was vital.  We were asking not for votes in general, but Sally's personal support and help.

5) We coordinated to have 1 essay per week published, on a different topic, in the campus newspaper.

6) We have a debate every semester between the College Dems and College Repubs.  This fall, we had it less than a week before Election Day.  It got everybody really excited before the last push.

7) The night before the Election Day, dorm captains slipped reminder fliers under the door of every Dem-leaner in the building.

As a result of our efforts, we actually had a higher turnout in our precinct in 2006 than in 2004.  This may be due to the fact that more people were registered in Meadville rather than at home, so perhaps overall turnout for the student body wasn't as high, but the town still noticed.  I'm really proud of what the group accomplished.  There are a few areas I think we could improve in, though.

1) I didn't keep as close a track on the dorm captains as I should have.  So how much work they did, I'm honestly not sure, particularly with the dorm storm the night before Election Day.

2) Our attempts to create a database of students kind of fell flat.  Official voting rolls are extremely out of date (as is the case with any college town).  What we would have liked to do is come up with a list, sorted by class, of who is registered and who is not, who is conservative and who is liberal.  That way, when 2008 rolls around, we know who's still on campus, and who we need to register and we're not rebuilding.  

3) We didn't have as many bodies as we needed, despite the large turnout early on. This made it particularly hard to help the county party out with canvassing down there.  We thought that assigning tasks at the first meeting would keep people active, and it did, but not as much as we would have liked.

I'd love to hear other College Dems' stories or suggestions/ideas.  Hopefully ours has been helpful.

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