SAN FRANCISCO — In no-contest California, where polls show Barack Obama leading by miles, what’s a campaign volunteer to do? Up and leave, of course.
Californians who are eager to have an impact in the presidential election, Republicans as well as Democrats, have been heading to the nearby swing states of Nevada and Colorado by the hundreds, even thousands, during the homestretch.
So many, in fact, that some Obama supporters have gone back to California to concentrate on local races for the final week of the campaign.
Some of those who have been exported to other states are part of coordinated efforts by the campaigns of Democrat Obama and Republican John McCain, which help volunteers find carpools and lodging. Others have simply headed out on their own, showing up at campaign offices asking how they can help. Many come for a day or two, others for longer.
Neither campaign will say how many volunteers from California are traveling to swing states, nor how they are being deployed. But the McCain camp has been chartering buses to Reno, Nev., and Las Vegas over the past several weeks.
And the Obama side, with a flood of San Francisco Bay Area volunteers headed to Reno, four hours away, has been diverting some to Las Vegas or even Colorado for the last week of the campaign, according to several volunteers in San Francisco.
“We have an enormous number of excited, energized volunteers who want to be part of this historic change,” said Gabriel Sanchez, the spokesman for the Obama campaign in California.
Rick Gorka, a regional spokesman for the McCain campaign based in Reno, said California Republicans were just as enthusiastically traveling for their candidate.
“The voter contacts we’re making in Nevada are at historic levels,” he said. “We’re getting an equal number of volunteers from all three sections of California — southern, central and northern. They bring so much energy. They’re on a charter bus, and they’re phone-banking on the way out here.”
Nick Johnson, a 25-year-old substitute teacher from Oakland, moved to Denver in September to register to vote for Obama and has spend six weeks as a full-time volunteer for the campaign.
“I just think there’s a tremendous amount at stake,” said Johnson, adding that half the volunteers at the Denver field office where he works are from the San Francisco Bay Area.
With polls favoring Obama, some volunteers are on the move yet again, returning to California from Nevada or Colorado to focus on local races.
Enrique Asis, a sociologist who teaches at the University of California-Santa Cruz, has traveled to Nevada twice and Colorado once for the Obama campaign. But during the last, crucial days of the campaign, he has decided to stay home in San Francisco to work on local supervisors races.
In Denver, he said, the campaign expected 70 to 80 people for a training session for Spanish-speaking volunteers and wound up with more than 150.
“Clearly,” Asis said, “I’m needed more here.”
