In this installment, we will discuss how hard it is to get new voters to turn out for the Iowa caucuses. (For the basics on the caucus system, you can find parts 1 and 2 of this series here or here.)

A few weeks ago Mark Kleiman wondered whether Barack Obama's incredible fundraising and charisma would enable him to win Iowa by flooding the state with paid field organizers late in the game.

Kleiman figured that since turnout for the Iowa caucuses in 2004 was about 125,000, and that was considered relatively high, a candidate could "blow the field away" by turning out 100,000 supporters. If Obama used his charisma to excite the public and then hired 2,000 field organizers for the final two weeks of the campaign, each field organizer could turn out 50 voters, and presto! Obama could win Iowa by spending only a small portion of the money he has raised.

Um, no. Follow me after the jump as I explain why Iowans do not say, "Get hot, get hot, get hot and organize at the end."

Here's how Kleiman explains his thought process:

Let's say a field organizer has to be paid $750/week, which might be on the high side. Then 2000 organizers for two weeks would cost $3 million. Double that to include supervisors and supervisors-of-supervisors (say, 100 supervisors managed by ten senior supervisors; presumably these folks would have to be paid better and hired for longer periods), 10,000 vans and drivers for the actual night of the caucuses, and office space. So it looks to me as if the whole thing could be done for $6 million.

Iowa has just under 2,000 precincts. He's talking about putting a brand-new field organizer on the ground in every precinct in the state with two weeks to go, hoping to turn out 50 people who otherwise would not show up for the caucus.

I worked my precinct hard before the last Iowa caucuses. We had about 175 voters in the room on caucus night. I would estimate that at most, my efforts over a period of months turned out 20 people who otherwise would not have voted. Perhaps another dozen or so who would have voted anyway ended up in my Kerry group, but might have supported another candidate if not for my efforts. That is a generous estimate. I may have influenced a smaller number than that. And I live in the neighborhood, and I walk my dog on the neighborhood streets every day.

There were plenty of people in my precinct whom I failed to turn out. Some were out of town. Some were elderly and in frail health, and didn't want to leave home at night. Some had young kids and didn't want to disrupt dinner/baths/bedtimes. One had just had her third child (she would have voted if we had a primary in which voting takes a few minutes, but she wasn't going to haul her whole family out of the house for more than an hour on a cold night). One had recently had an operation on her foot. One was extremely shy about talking to strangers.

I'm not talking about people who are disinterested in politics. I'm talking about people who vote in every general election (often by absentee ballot), but who did not show up at our precinct caucus in January 2004 despite multiple contacts by me, a neighbor.

This is not to say that I had no impact. Kerry ended up with three of the six delegates assigned by my precinct. If not for my efforts, he might have won only two delegates (or he might have won three anyway--it is hard to say). Edwards had a pretty big group in our precinct, but his precinct captain had not done much GOTV ahead of time, due to a state job that limits what he can do politically, and our crowd was that little bit bigger.

But let's not exaggerate how many new people an active precinct captain can bring to the room.

A certain percentage of people are highly involved in politics and will find some way to make it to the caucus no matter how inconvenient it is. That would be people like me--there in 2004 on a bitterly cold night with my baby in a sling. Or people like the elderly veteran who walks with a cane, whom I picked up because he called the Kerry campaign himself to ask if anyone could give him a ride. Of those 175 people who voted in my precinct, most fell into this category. They were following the campaign closely, had probably attended campaign rallies and were not going to miss the chance to participate in the process, no matter what their age or family circumstances.

A certain percentage of people just don't care about politics enough to attend a caucus. Nothing any field organizer says will change their minds.

A smaller group of people are kind of interested in politics. They read the paper, they watch the news, they vote in general elections. They may not be familiar with the caucus process. They may be unsure about where the caucus meets (the locations are almost always different from the polling stations people use on election day in November). They may wonder whether they will know anyone else who is going. They may be shy about voicing a preference in public. They may not realize that if they are registered as an independent or Republican, they can change their registration right there on caucus night and participate in the Democratic caucus.

These are the people who can be influenced by contacts from a field organizer or precinct captain. I was able to tell these people where the caucus was meeting, I reassured them that others on the same block would be there, and I got at least a couple of Republicans to change their registration so they could be there for us.

Could field organizers who parachuted in for the final two weeks identify and turn out 100,000 such people in Iowa? I seriously doubt it. I'll let Kevin Drum of Political Animal make the case:

I think there's something more fundamental here: all the money in the world isn't going to raise total turnout all that significantly. At least, it hasn't in the past. So what's more likely is that total turnout will remain at around 125,000, or maybe increase modestly to 150,000 or so, and the candidates will simply be spending more money per vote. And as Howard Dean discovered in Iowa last year, there's a limit to what money and sheer numbers of ground troops can do. Ringing someone's doorbell five times just isn't going to do any good if you haven't been able to make the sale after ringing it twice. And running ads ten times a night buys you barely more than running them five times a night. Once you saturate a market, there's nothing more that money can buy.

Kleiman responded to Drum's post, saying

All of that may be right. But let me be clear on what I was trying to say. The job of my imaginary organizers wasn't to "make the sale." I'm assuming that the Obama campaign will, using rallies and the internet, have already "made the sale" to many more voters than he actually needs to win. I was imagining the organizers as overcoming inertia and helping turn out those already-committed voters. The Iowa process is designed to de-mobilize ordinary citizens in order to empower the party and union insiders. The question is whether there's a way to spend money to reverse that.

My proposition is that, if you call an already-sold Obama voter two weeks before caucus night and say,

Can we count on you to turn out? Yes? Great! Where would you like to be picked up? The van can be there at 5:15 and get a cell phone number, and follow up with two calls and two emails in the meantime, and the van shows up on time, that person (1) will feel committed to going to the caucus (2) won't have to worry about finding it (3) won't forget and (4) can go over caucus tactics during the ride, and will therefore, with high probability, show up and act in concert with the other Obama folks at the same caucus. Just knowing that you're going with a group of people and won't feel like an idiot when you show up and have no idea what to do next ought to make a big difference.

I am not saying the people Kleiman describes do not exist. But I don't think there are enough of them to dramatically alter the outcome on caucus night. The strong campaigns will have people working their precincts months in advance. Even then, a lot of people just do not want the hassle or are not healthy enough to go out for a few hours on a January night. Or they're busy, and by the time they get off work and grab dinner, they don't feel like going out again.

Now, Obama fans, before you flame me in the comments, let me make clear: I am NOT suggesting that Obama is following Kleiman's hypothetical game plan. I've been called by two different field organizers for Obama already. I have no doubt that Obama will have a very strong army of field organizers and precinct captains working on his behalf for months.

Hillary Clinton seems to have brought on her field staff a little later, but I was recently called by a field organizer for the Clinton campaign. She hired some of Tom Vilsack's former staffers, and they obviously understand how important a strong organization is in Iowa. Whether she will be able to find a lot of volunteer precinct captains is a question for another diary.

John Edwards starts the process with a bunch of precinct captains who supported him last time, and his field organizers have also been calling active Ds trying to recruit precinct captains (I'm going to be volunteering for Edwards this time).

If you are interested in this kind of thing, check out this post by Cliff over at Iowa Progress on the hiring approaches taken by the big three Democratic presidential campaigns in Iowa.

Thus ends my lecture on getting voters to the room. Once the caucus has convened, field organizers and precinct captains can help in other ways, and I will get to that in a future diary when I talk more about screwy caucus math.

Meanwhile, take the poll and share your thoughts about the caucus process in the comments. If you've voted or volunteered in Iowa before, tell your stories!

(cross-posted at Daily Kos)