Six months ago, I wrote about how we got our butts kicked in the PA primary election.

Here's a comparison of May's primary with Tuesday's general election at our precinct. More after the fold.

In May, I came to the polling place after working a half day. This time I took the day off and stayed at the polls all day. I was a poll watcher and was at the polling place for 14 hours.

Back in May, I was the only (D) who worked at all, and I was just there for a few hours. In November, we had three (D)'s all day, plus one other person who came for a few hours. One of the guys was our local committee chair. So we actually outnumbered the (R)'s and among the three of us (D)'s we knew darn near everyone who came in to vote. Wow, what a difference.

Back in May, I had no party literature at all, only stuff from individual candidates. In November, we had a "sample ballot" that was full color, with pictures of the candidates on it. Wow. It made the repub's literature look half-baked by comparison. No joke, we could see that the (R) workers were surprised (and not in a good way) by how good our literature was.

Sestak's campaign had recruited over 100 lawyers to help cover the 400+ polling places in the district. We had two lawyers covering our poll plus four nearby spots. Our spot went very smoothly so we didn't need their help, but you can imagine how nice it was to have them swing by every few hours. By the end of the day, they were old buddies and familiar faces.

Back in May, I said we had 5 months to build a ground game that could compete. I saw it on election day. Turnout was very high. Very high. We were within a couple of dozen votes of 65% of registered voters. All the poll workers said it was unprecedented for a non-presidential election.

The Sestak folks had told me to expect a call asking for the number of voters several times during the day. The calls were prompt, pleasant, and easy. They even provided a prepaid cell phone to our polling place.

The Dem's won all of the races at our precinct. Rendell and Casey cruised. Sestak won 60%. And our state house and senate candidates won small victories. They both lost their district-wide bids, unfortunately.

The Sestak campaign brought lunches for us. Three of the four of us could walk home for lunch, so it was unnecessary, but we got big kick out of it and two of us actually wound up eating them.

There was clearly coordination between the party and the campaigns, too. Rendell's campaign did the GOTV and we had a nice lady drive up with an elderly voter to help her vote and take her back home. The literature was the county party's contribution to the effort. And Sestak handled staffing. Our state rep candidate stopped by to shake a few hands. She said she was hitting about 20 polling places. We saw 4 or 5 Rendell volunteers going door to door to check that people had voted.

Bottom line: We were organized. We had good literature. We communicated with each other. The money for the ground game was well-spent and everyone focused on winning.

And win we did.