Campaigns lie, certainly to reporters and often to their own people, but I'd wager it tends to balance out evenly. But here I think it's journalists lying unwittingly. Dems focus on urban areas, it's vote dense and easy to knock doors at, plus it's Dem favorable. The GOP needs to focus in less dense areas, but what matters here is the usual, journalists may be biased but mostly they're just lazy. A reporter is going to look at contact at a spot near their facility which is usually right in the middle of town, so to speak. Anecdotal reports then probably will be true in a 3 or 4x capacity. But both parties use the same core model, the RNC and DNC have HQs, a dozen to a hundred in a given state, who run the ground game, by getting volunteers to go hammer on doors, usually selected doors generated off some model of optimization, and have paper sheets or phone apps to report the results. Those get reported up each day as a number and God Alone knows how much and who fudges those to look good and if it balances out but State keeps track and usually competes with their fellow state's figures (same party) while trying to compete with their opponents in-state. We just know our reported figures exceeded the Dems figures in 2008 and that all our intel said they weren't managing to get those 2008 totals. Anecdotally I know the local Dem apparatus held the DNC operation in contempt for laziness compared to 2008 because we chat with our local counterparts, its something of a game and all local Dem or GOP groups (in NE Ohio anyway) - whether they benefit from it or not - kinda loathe presidential years because they screw up the downticket races. You can run a drooling moron or convicted rapist and get them elected if the tide breaks your way and a strategist can't not but dislike the taste of that. Plus we spy on each other a lot.

In any event I doubt GOP volunteers are lazy and more dishonest then Dem volunteers, generally speaking, as you know I'm sure, volunteers of any group tend to be pretty damn reliable sorts who are very dedicated to the cause.




I think that is it, mind I am doubtless biased and the data is still coming in and I haven't had the energy to really give it a good going over. We got the shit kicked out of us in my zone on all the partisan races though but all my non-partisans kicked butt and took names so I have to believe we had our act together and just got rolled by turnout.