Want to know how to win an election?

Never having had worked for a campaign or lived in a swing state, I read all the articles about massive GOTV effort like I'm reading a novel. I think that it's one of things you must experience to truly appreciate. That being said, the New York Times Magazine article that focused on the Republican effort in 2004 was one of the best insider views I have read on the topic. Ohio will one day become a classic case study in how to win (or lose) and election. The viral method that the Republican party picked up on and exploited to their advantage is a lesson every successful campaign manager must learn.

Rove and Mehlman gleaned a critical lesson from the 2002 Congressional and 2003 gubernatorial elections, Mehlman told me excitedly: the way to build a grass-roots movement is to get one volunteer to recruit several other volunteers, and so on, so that the organization is constantly growing, feeding off itself. The campaign provided various ways for people to volunteer, he said, and ''the big thing that brings them all together is viral activity.''

The way that they targeted potential voters by the cars they drove or the neighborhood they lived in was smart, in a creepy sort of way. I wonder what one of them would think of me, from a red state, daughter of small business owners, single college educated female in her early 20s, drives a Corolla, lives in an apt in downtown DC, Jewish...I am a mess of contradictions when it comes to party ID. I would love to ask a canvasser how often he is accurate in pinpointing exactly who a person is apt to vote for and how long it takes them to make the correct assumption.

The woman in the article who was 25 and had never voted because of excuses such as working two jobs, going to school, babysitting on the side would be a Democrat in my book, but the Bush team pegged her as Republican because she, "does all that work and works that hard," so she has to be.

To see grassroots as the next phase in campaigning, now that unions and parties are losing their hold on constituents seems natural with the technological advances of the past decade. But what it really comes down to these days is an ability to read people and tell them what they want to hear, and that's why Bush won in 2004. That's why canvassing in Ohio matters, and that's what campaigning has always been and remain to be about, no matter what else evolves.