Millions of cell calls for Clinton

Last Sunday, on the same day Sen. Barack Obama marshaled glitzy supporters like Oprah Winfrey, Maria Shriver and Caroline Kennedy to rev up a UCLA crowd for a surge to victory in California, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton quietly enlisted a far less glamorous team to reach voters in the nation's most populous state.

Averell "Ace" Smith, Clinton's California campaign manager, directed a statewide army of volunteers with cell phones dialing furiously for voters. The team made 2 million calls over the final weekend of the campaign - and a million more from 5 to 8 p.m. on Super Tuesday alone - to reach the absentee voters, women and Latinos who had been identified as likely Clinton supporters in the Democratic primary.

"We did something that, to my knowledge, no one has ever done," Smith said Wednesday. "We talked to every one of those people we knew were Hillary supporters - and we made sure they cast their ballot."

The unprecedented scope of the effort blunted Obama's surge and brought Clinton a 10-point win in California.

"California is too big, too expensive and too unwieldy to run a 'movement campaign,' " such as Obama was mounting, said Dan Newman, a Democratic strategist not affiliated with either campaign. "You need something that's efficient, surgical and targeted - and that's the stuff that Ace perfected."

The precision of Clinton's effort, and its unusual emphasis on the increasing number of mail-in voters, suggests a potential model for what successful presidential efforts will look like in diverse, voter-rich states holding primaries over the next two-plus months.

"California is a template for what the campaign can do in the big three states on the horizon - Texas, Pennsylvania and Ohio," said Democratic strategist Chris Lehane, a former spokesman in the Bill Clinton White House. "If you can put together that coalition - working class, Latinos and women - that is a winning hand in all three states. That is a coalition that cannot be beaten."

The single biggest factor of the Clinton victory in California may have been Smith's insistence that the primary was not a one-day event but a month-long drive beginning Jan. 7, the first day of early voting.

Starting then, he monitored returns from an estimated 1.8 million absentee Democratic voters in the state's 58 counties every single day. Smith kept track of who had returned ballots, who had not and who still need to be contacted so the campaign could make its case.

"Ace literally knew every single person in California that the Clinton campaign viewed as their supporters - and over months, talked to them, sometimes over and over," said Peter Ragone, a Clinton campaign aide. "It was literally person-to-person contact on an enormous scale every night."

Smith paid particular attention to the 120,000 Latino absentee voters and Latinos in general, enlisting surrogates for face-to-face campaigning who included Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez and United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta.

The payoff: The Clinton campaign won the absentee vote by an estimated margin of 20 percentage points. Among Latinos, exit polls showed Clinton winning at least 2-1.

Bill Clinton and daughter Chelsea Clinton also worked to underscore an economic message that resonated with working-class Democrats in events such as the ex-president's visit last month to an Oakland barbecue restaurant, where he heard from people who were falling behind on their home mortgages.

"Take a look at the color code on the map in terms of how votes broke down outside of places like San Francisco and Marin," Lehane said. Obama won many of the highly educated, upscale "Starbucks latte Democrats," he said, but Clinton was more successful with the "Dunkin' Donuts Democrats."

The double-digit margin of Clinton's victory came as a surprise to most pollsters, who believed Obama had surged into a near-dead heat by election day.

The final Field Poll, completed Friday, gave Clinton a lead of 36 percent to 34 percent, with 18 percent undecided. But the actual election day turnout was very different from what was predicted, said Mark DiCamillo, director of the poll.

Exit polls conducted for the television networks found that 29 percent of Tuesday's polling place voters in the Democratic primary were Latino, well above the expected 20 percent. Black voters, on the other hand, accounted for 6 percent of the election day turnout, half what the Field Poll expected.

While the exit polls don't include the millions of absentee voters, the numbers still are eye-opening, DiCamillo said.

"That is just a huge turnout for Latino voters, who strongly backed Clinton," he said. "On Obama's side, the African American voters who were going to show up and make a difference, didn't."

DiCamillo said the final Field Poll showed that 20 percent of women were undecided, but when election day arrived, they voted for Clinton.

"When voters come in conflicted, women tend to vote their gender," he said. "We saw it in New Hampshire, and we saw it again here."

Obama also failed to pile up the strong Bay Area numbers he needed to offset Clinton's strength in Southern California.

"We expected Obama to carry the Bay Area by double digits, and he had a 10-point lead in our last poll," DiCamillo said. "But on election day, the Bay Area broke 48 percent to 46 percent for Clinton."

The low African American turnout might represent a self-fulfilling prophecy by black voters who discounted Obama's chances in the state, said Daria Roithmayr, a USC law professor.

"There was a sense among black voters I talked to that Obama was going to lose anyway, since Latino voters were going to turn out in force," said Roithmayr, an expert on race and gender in politics.

Democratic Rep. Hilda Solis said the Clinton campaign's aggressive courting of Latino voters helped produce a 71 percent Latino vote for her in Solis' East Los Angeles district.

"Latinos have loyalty, Latinos are looking for leadership ... (and) the Clinton campaign did something that Barack Obama did not," she said. "The door-to-door, traditional advocacy."

Wade Randlett, a leading supporter of Obama in California, said the challenges in the state included "the huge number of people, the expensive media markets" and the "very big brand" of the Clinton name in California.

"For anyone to come from zero and try to overcome (that) is an uphill climb," he said, "and we didn't get over the top of the hill."

The California win bodes well for Clinton as she moves on to the next states on the presidential primary calendar, Clinton campaign aide Ragone said.

"California is the only state effort that is akin to running a national campaign, because we are America," he said. "We have rural, urban, agriculture, every ethnic group, huge media markets.

"It's a nation state," he said. "And winning California is the best indicator about whether you can win nationwide."