Carol Shea-Porter was a guest blogger here on johnkerry.com on October 13th. One of her campaign team members, dkulju, has written about the experience of working with Carol on her campaign both in the run up to the primary election and the regular election on dailykos. It got the honor of being front-paged by Markos and we have to agree with that assessment.

It’s a wonderful story of just doing it. He talks about what they had to start with and what they had to accomplish. And after an appraisal of who was where in the primary race, he said, “At this point I pretty much felt we needed a miracle.”

And then they went on to create their own miracle. <!-more->

We had a bit of a problem getting our ground game going due to the fact that the State party charges a significant amount of money to access the voter file. We simply didn’t have the money… so we did what any bunch of crazy Carol supporters would do – we built our own voter file one town at a time.

Volunteers went town to town getting paper check lists and scribbling down who pulled a Democratic ballot in the 04 state primary. As we would find out later this data was not in the voter file the state sold. This was a gigantic advantage for us as we could target our limited resources solely at the voters we knew would show up in what we knew was going to be a low turnout election. I had the nasty job of taking this information from some 80-90 towns, all in different files, all formatted differently and creating 18,000 mailing labels for our personalized postcard mailing. I didn’t sleep that week.

Our postcards, all 18,000 of them, were hand signed by our volunteers in nearly every town in this district. They were mailed locally first class. Our volunteers wrote little notes asking people to support Carol. We let them do their own thing with that. This well targeted personal contact was the only way to combat the slick DCCC style mailings of our opponent. We could only afford one touch via direct mail so we had to make it count.

We did literature drops. [...] in the larger towns and we empowered our supporters to do whatever they could in their communities. Ours was a fun campaign to work for. Our volunteers wrote volumes of letters to the editor, all passionate and personal, not from dictated bullet points. Getting my hands in yet one more area I wrote an application to make it easy for them to mail every paper in the district. Not having an office or any physical infrastructure we ran decentralized phone banks by sending out phone lists to individuals so they could make local calls from their homes.

He wound up the primary adventure with

Our opponent had a 10-1 money advantage, multiple union endorsements, the big DCCC endorsement, paid DC staffers and some quiet support from the State party (which officially remained neutral). We had a wonderful candidate, an energized grass roots army, a great strategy, and the technical ability to target our efforts better than the professionals. We didn’t just outwork them, we out smarted them as well.

And that would be a really great story of people powered politics…except we were about to write a better one.

The rest of the story is even more inspirational.

Congratulations to Carol and all of Carol’s team—you did a remarkable job!