367: Ground Game

Ira Glass

John McCain spends a lot of time in Pennsylvania these days. Last week, he hit Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Moon Township, and Bensalem. The week before, he was in Montgomery County, Downingtown and Chester, and Governor Palin was in Lancaster and Scranton. Not many states get this kind of attention. Pennsylvania is the one blue state, the one state that went for John Kerry in 2004, that John McCain is vigorously campaigning in.

In the last few weeks, a lot of people have been asking, why? Barack Obama has held double-digit leads over McCain in nearly every poll in the state. He's heavily outspending McCain on TV ads here, as he is everywhere. He has a bigger field operation in Pennsylvania than McCain's, more offices, more people, and they've been in place for months longer. And finally, thanks to voter registration drives, there are now 1.2 million more registered Democrats in the state than Republicans. That's twice as many as in 2004. And remember, the Democratic presidential ticket won the state in 2004, just as it won in 2000, and 1996, and 1992.

So why is John McCain fighting so hard for this state? Well, part of it is pure electoral college math. He needs Pennsylvania. He needs it badly, because winning Pennsylvania is the only way he'll be able to make up for red states that might go to Obama, states like Colorado or New Mexico. And apparently, McCain sees an opportunity in Pennsylvania. This is the state where Hillary Clinton trounced Barack Obama by nine points. And so, there are tons of working class Democrats who McCain sees as persuadable.

McCain campaign officials have told The New York Times and others that their internal polls show that Obama is just seven or eight points ahead, which seems less daunting when you realize that five or six percent of the voters are still undecided and up for grabs. And in this last week, most of the polls, even the ones you read in the paper, show McCain gaining on Obama in Pennsylvania. And closing that gap is what these rallies are all about.

Ira Glass

After this rousing introduction by Congressman Charlie Dent, everybody leaps to their feet, the houselights go black, spotlights swoop and circle, and then nothing, absolutely nothing, no McCain, no Palin. After six minutes on our feet, some people start to sit down. A couple minutes later, "Eye of the Tiger" comes on the PA and everybody jumps to their feet again, but nope, false alarm, no candidates still.

Finally, 43 minutes later, the Straight Talk Express bus pulls right on to the floor of the arena. Governor Palin and Senator McCain take the stage.

Ira Glass

For the last month, our radio staff has been in Pennsylvania to try to understand what is happening on the ground in this election. We chose Pennsylvania because it's one of the true battlegrounds this year. We chose Pennsylvania because it's a microcosm of the country, with a couple big cities and sprawling rural areas and small towns and suburbs.

We wanted to see firsthand what arguments were affecting undecided voters, and making decided voters change their minds. And all this hour we will be deep inside the field operations in both camps, McCain's and Obama's.

And so, as we head into this last week before Election Day, we bring you the ground war in this crucial swing state. We're going to be hopping around the state throughout this hour. And so, before we start, a quick Pennsylvania electoral primer.

It's pretty simple really. There are two big cities, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, one is on the right side of the map of Pennsylvania, the other's on the left side of the map. Those are the Democratic strongholds. The reliable Republican territory is the vast area between those cities, which is farmland and small towns.

James Carville once famously described the state as Philly and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between. So, what's up for grabs? Well, a lot maybe.

Ira Glass

Now, officially, this is a citizen's for McCain office, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in the northeast part of the state. But the office is run by Democrats, and the name that they have given on the phone speaks for itself. Democrats are the key to McCain's strategy in Pennsylvania, his campaign told us. This is the Hillary vote, which, as I said, was huge in this state.

And McCain's campaign is unabashed about the pursuit of it, both in Pennsylvania and nationwide. Check out this ad.

Ira Glass

One of the producers of our show, Nancy Updike, spent some time in Scranton at the Democrats for McCain office.

Nancy Updike

When I told an Obama supporter that I was doing a story about Democrats for John McCain and that I was on my way to interview one of them, she said, oh, so you're going to interview an ass [BLEEP]. Other names she could have used, according to the McCain Democrats I talked to, based on their previous experiences: whack job; dumb, racist KKK bitch; and a word I can't say on the radio that begins with the letter "C."

Nancy Updike

These are former Hillary Clinton supporters, about 40 of them, who've ridden two-plus hours in cars and a bus from New York on a Saturday to canvass in Scranton for John McCain. They overwhelm the tiny Democrats for McCain office, and fill it up with the squeals of long-lost friends reunited, and the enthusiasm that comes from working very hard for something you believe in with all your heart, for no money.

This type of commitment is not to be trifled with. After a long, tough primary, the people in this room are tenacious, experienced, organized, and very, very mad. They're also impossible to dismiss as racist KKK bitches. A lot of them are not white, including the two I ended up following as they were canvassing.

[KNOCKING ON DOOR]

Nancy Updike

The one giving the good, long knock is Chris, a tall, courtly, 28-year-old African American policy analyst with a graduate degree in economics. The shorter one next to him, giving Chris a look like, why are you knocking so much, is his friend Jessie, a 35-year-old African American software tester who's taking a week off from work to campaign for John McCain. They met on the Hillary campaign trail.

Nancy Updike

Scranton is overwhelmingly Democratic, and Chris and Jessie have been given a list of registered Democrats and Independents, so it wasn't surprising that they were encountering some McCain resistance. What was surprising was how ripe for conversion most of the supposed Obama supporters were. Take this guy, Paul [? Volpe ?]. It took Chris and Jessie about one minute to start wearing him down, and the more they talked about McCain, the more skeptical of Obama he seemed.

Nancy Updike

From I just wanted something different, [? Volpe ?] went on to say about Obama:

Nancy Updike

And from that, he went to this.

Nancy Updike

When we left, [? Volpe ?] was still uncommitted and leaning toward Obama. But if I was a pollster, I wouldn't put him in the Obama column. He'd been a Hillary supporter just like Chris and Jessie, and for him, Obama seemed like an uncomfortable bench he'd only sat down on out of exhaustion. That's what made Chris and Jessie so persuasive. They'd left the bench, and they seemed to be thriving.

Canvassing is usually a big time investment for a small return. In studies, canvassers had to talk to an average of 14 people to get one extra vote. But Chris and Jessie seemed to be doing a lot better than that. I watched them make inroads with one wavering Democrat after another. A whole family sitting on their porch:

Nancy Updike

A young woman voting in her first presidential election, a woman with three sons who's worried about the economy and the Iraq War and Sarah Palin. Everyone was charmed and, frankly, mesmerized by Chris and Jessie. And finally, the woman with three sons said to Chris straight out:

Nancy Updike

Chris and Jessie went to 16 houses in this neighborhood in Democratic Scranton, PA, and only one was a definite Obama vote. Four were firm McCain supporters, and this was without hearing Chris and Jessie's spiel. And of the four undecided houses, Chris and Jessie flipped one to McCain and made serious headway with the other three.

For these undecided Democrats, it was like they were wearing handcuffs, and Chris and Jessie were walking around with the keys, unlocking them. Suddenly, former Hillary Clinton supporters could consider voting for a Republican and against a black man and not feel racist, or dumb, or crazy.

At the end of that day, I thought, John McCain really could win Pennsylvania. For anyone wondering why he's still pouring money into the state, this is it. Ambivalent Democrats live all over Pennsylvania, and with their votes, he could do it.

Nancy Updike

The bottom line for Chris is this, he thinks Obama is little more than a marketing campaign, not a man of demonstrated principal or grit. And compared to all that, so what that he's a Democrat?

Ira Glass

Nancy Updike. We'll return to her in Scranton later in the program. Now, while the McCain campaign is hoping to pick up votes in territory that is normally strongly Democratic, the Obama campaign is fighting to pick up extra votes in that vast territory in the center of Pennsylvania that has always been strongly Republican.

You've probably heard about the massive voter registration drives that Obama has run around the country. In Pennsylvania, a big part of that push was for young voters on college campuses, especially right in the heart of red Pennsylvania, a town called State College, smack dab in the middle of the state, where one of the biggest schools in the country is, Penn State, with 44,000 students.

The John Kerry campaign had only one paid staffer in State College back in 2004, and they lost this county. Obama has seven paid staff and tons of volunteers trying to register and get out the student vote. One of our producers, Sarah Koenig, went to see how they were doing.

Sarah Koenig

It's September 24, 13 more days until the October 6 deadline to register voters in Pennsylvania. The registration goal for campus is to sign up roughly half the student body, 21,000 students. It's a number the campaign wouldn't allow anyone to discuss with me on the record, but it's also a number that every single person involved with voter registration on campus was talking about.

On the wall of the Obama office in downtown State College, there's a drawing of a giant thermometer climbing to the ceiling, with the number 21,000 at the very top. Every day, they fill in their new registrations in red marker. As of this day, they're at about 12,000, a little more than halfway there with less than two weeks to go.

Besides the Obama campaign, there are a bunch of other groups trying to register voters, all with their own goals.

Sarah Koenig

They began in the summer. And when classes first started in late August, there was a rash of registrations, but it's slowed since then. And now, people are starting to get a little antsy and sick.

[GIRL COUGHING]

A girl collecting registrations for MoveOn is looking miserable with a cold. The guy running a student group called PSUvote is cranky from a stomach bug. I meet Jonathan [? Burkhart ?] at a diner, a place he goes about once a week for breakfast. This is one luxury during campaigns. Jonathan was sent here by the Service Employees International Union, SEIU, with the singular task of registering 2,500 people by himself. He's getting sick, too.

Sarah Koenig

By the time the registration deadline came, that minor infection turned into a major infection, the worst eye infection, in fact, that I or Jonathan's doctor had ever seen. He ended up needing surgery. But right now, taking a break is out of the question. He's still less than halfway to his goal. He's got what you might call the Schindler's List syndrome.

Sarah Koenig

Jonathan's worked in field politics for five years. He's 30, which gives him near-geezer status in the registration crowd. The guy in the Obama office who's running the 10-county region for the campaign is just 23. And mostly, other people doing registrations are in their teens or 20s. You have to be young to do this job.

Jonathan's the guy people come to for advice. He knows all about data analysis and attacks his goal of 2,500 as scientifically as possible. He keeps a tally of every registration he gets, sorted by day, time, sex of registrant. He notes the weather, the football games. This way, he knows, or thinks he knows, the preeminent registration times, which, so far, are 1:00 to 3:00 on Tuesdays. He's figured out that a beat-up sign gets better results than a fancy one. And he's done experiments with his pitch.

Sarah Koenig

The built-in pisser of this whole endeavor is that, as each group tries frantically to reach its goal number, the pool of non-registered students is always shrinking. It's harder and harder to find someone who isn't already registered.

Sarah Koenig

Enter the master, Casey Miller. She's 22, a fifth-year, cigarette-smoking, hard-drinking senior, originally from Pittsburgh. She's in A Xi D, a sorority, and has a tattoo of a blue lion's paw on her left foot, the logo of the university's football team. On her MySpace page she lists the following interest: cars, Steelers-- the football team-- parties, late-night Cinemax, bottles of mousse, very large beer bongs.

Sarah Koenig

A situation like this, where someone says he's going to vote absentee, this is where many volunteers fail to persuade or just give up. But Casey goes on for a full 40 seconds. He's still not convinced.

Sarah Koenig

At this point, the full-on flirting kicks in. Casey presses Obama stickers onto the boys' chests, uses their full names with ironic formality. Steven, what's your political party? Gregory, is that a 16803 zip code?

Sarah Koenig

Here's what you can't appreciate about Casey on the radio. She looks like a small, brunette Brigitte Bardot. Long, wavy hair swept up with a clip, thick black eyeliner painted on '60s style, huge perfect smile, knockout figure. This, in no small part, is why her registration numbers are consistently higher than anyone else's. Boys will listen to anything she has to say for however long she chooses to say it. Girls too, actually.

Sarah Koenig

There's a good chance, statistically speaking, that Keith won't vote at all. Students have a terrible track record of actually making it to the polls once they've signed up. That's just one reason this whole registration drive is something of a gamble for the Obama campaign. Even the gurus of get out the vote campaigning, two Yale political scientists named Alan Gerber and Donald Green, can't say for sure how effective registration drives are at increasing voter turnout.

With a new voter, first you have to sign them up to vote, then you have to convince them to vote for your candidate, and then you have to make sure they get to the polls. The experts simply don't know if, dollar for dollar, it's worth all the time and money. Limited resources in any campaign.

[FOOTBALL CHEER]

Sarah Koenig

Nine days before the deadline, there's still about 8,000 registrations to go. We're at a vast tailgate party outside Beaver Stadium before a football game. It's the largest stadium in North America. There are easily 100,000 people here, a crowd I'd characterize, overall, as drunk. Penn State is playing Illinois.

Sarah Koenig

We're going to kill Illinois. That's what they're screaming. Casey, though, is unphased, fearless in fact. And this is what makes Casey so valuable to the campaign. She fits in where other volunteers don't. Two nights running, she surreptitiously registered people in the women's bathroom of a nightclub. She registers people at frat houses, wanders uninvited into apartment parties.

Sarah Koenig

The Obama campaign has set up a tailgate here and invited former NFL players to come sign autographs and register people. Casey's job today, besides registering people herself, is to send fans to the tailgate. She goes up to a group of friends having a party under a tent and does her pitch.

Sarah Koenig

One of the girls gestures at a cooler, offers an alternative.

Sarah Koenig

No one she tells is nearly as excited about these players as Casey is. Franco Harris is her hero. She knows all about his 1972 Hall of Fame play for the Steelers, called The Immaculate Reception. She can't wait to meet him. It's tough going here. It's really loud and a lot of people, when they're not hitting on Casey, are just obnoxious. Still, she gets some registrations.

I stopped to talk to a voter for a few minutes, and when I find Casey again, she's somehow rounded up eight more. Then we hit the porta-potty line, which is good for another half dozen. After that, Casey ventured into the middle of a huge crowd of mostly men, who were circled around two shirtless guys covered in white body paint and wrestling.

Sarah Koenig

A guy shows Casey the screen of his cellphone, which plays a little video of Barack Obama's face, which then turns into a monkey's face.

Sarah Koenig

That's what we think of Obama around here, they tell her. Get the [BLEEP] out of here. We hurry away, but Casey doesn't miss a beat, on to the next group.

Sarah Koenig

We rush back to the Obama tailgate so Casey can meet the NFL stars, but we're too late. They've all left.

Casey turns away. She's sad about Franco Harris, but my guess is that's not why she's crying. She's kind of jangled right now. Registration is all she thinks about or cares about. She's devoting most of her time to more or less begging other people to care about it too. And mostly, they don't.

Ira Glass

Sarah Koenig. We will hop back over to her, and to the students, as they try to make their goal in State College, in a little bit.

Ira Glass

There's this speech that's been making the rounds for the last month on YouTube and the political blogs and the news. It's by the secretary treasurer of the AFL-CIO, Richard Trumka. He's been traveling the country making this speech to unions. In it, he recounts a conversation that he had with a woman right here in Pennsylvania, in his hometown, a Democrat who said she couldn't bring herself to vote for Barack Obama.

The woman tells Trumka that the reason that she can't is that he's a Muslim. Trumka tells her that's not true. She then says that it's because he won't wear a flag pin. Trumka points out that he isn't wearing a flag pin, neither is she. Finally, the woman says she feels like she just can't trust Barack Obama.

Ira Glass

As he travels around the country making this speech to union members, Richard Trumka tells the audience, you have a responsibility to stand up about race. You have to deal with it directly. Other union leaders are saying the same thing, which is an incredible assignment to give to people. This is a subject that most people have trouble confronting and talking about honestly.

There are a lot of union members in Pennsylvania. A third of all voters in 2004 came from union households, according to CNN exit polls. And we wondered if these union members were taking up the charge, talking about race. And we wondered how they did it. One of our producers, Lisa Pollak, spent the last month traveling around the state to find out.

Lisa Pollak

In early September, I went to a phone bank in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. And I wasn't there long, maybe 15 minutes, before I saw someone right in front of me confront the same sort of racism that Richard Trumka talked about in his speech.

Lisa Pollak

We were in a conference room at a local union headquarters. There was a big whiteboard on the wall where someone had written, smile while you're on the phone, and, be polite, even when they're not polite to you. Helen, smiling, asked the man if he'd chosen a candidate. John McCain, he said.

Lisa Pollak

This was not the conversation I'd imagined when I first heard Richard Trumka give that stirring address on the need to stand up to prejudice. And I don't mean Helen backed down, because she didn't. In fact, what she did next is exactly what union organizers have told me a person in her situation should do. She didn't call the man a racist. She changed the subject from race to the issues, and started trying to persuade the man that voting for Barack Obama was simply in his best interest.

Lisa Pollak

When you actually hear one of these conversations, you realize they're not always particularly eloquent or uplifting. They can be awkward and frustrating, and even a little wonky. In the end, after seven minutes on the phone with Helen, the guy who wasn't, quote, "ready to vote for a black man," had moved from John McCain to undecided.

Lisa Pollak

And even that much progress took a lot of effort, not to mention patience and confidence, and a degree of nerve not everyone has. I can't do it, one woman, a shop steward, told me, right after she heard Trumka's speech at a training. I'd be intimidated if they said they couldn't vote for someone who's black. And I've seen even the most fearless talkers hit a wall when race comes up.

At the same union hall in Johnstown where I met Helen, I listened to a group of guys from the Laborers Union Local 910 work a phone bank for Obama. Incidentally, if you're one of those people who still thinks the phrase, white male union member from Pennsylvania, is a euphemism for, won't vote for the black guy, you clearly haven't been to a union phone bank lately. I listened to one of them, Barry, single-handedly convert one undecided union voter after another to his side.

Lisa Pollak

Put me down for Obama, the guy said. But a little later, Barry had a conversation that didn't end so well.

Lisa Pollak

Ray, another guy working the phones, chimes in.

Lisa Pollak

I have no idea how many people have been in Ray or Barry or Helen's shoes, confronted by somebody bold enough to admit, with little or no coaxing, that the problem with Obama is his race. I've talked to people who say they've never had this happen, and people who say they've heard it a lot.

A union organizer who's traveled the state told me that one in 10 voters he talked to said something to his face about Obama's skin color, only they don't always put it in such civilized terms. Mike Harms, a bus operator with the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 85 in Pittsburgh, saw this firsthand while canvassing recently.

Lisa Pollak

That's Michael Fedor, a union organizer in central Pennsylvania, teaching a training session I attended in Johnstown last month. Michael's message to union members was utterly practical: some people's minds can't be changed no matter what you tell them, and the best way to sway the others is with the facts. He cited research showing that the more union members know about Obama's record and positions, the more they like him.

Unions have gone to a lot of effort and expense this year to get that message out, with all sorts of mailings and voter guides and videos that emphasize Obama's support for labor and the working class. Like this one from the building and construction trades.

Lisa Pollak

This is a nonpartisan commercial from the American Federation of Government Employees.

Lisa Pollak

This is a training tape from the United Steelworkers.

Lisa Pollak

But for all the statistics and talking points, what I realized, listening to union members in Pennsylvania, is that when you're actually face to face with people who say they won't vote for your candidate because he's black, you're on your own. You have to muddle through and figure out your own way to do it, to navigate this touchy emotional subject, with people whose beliefs may never have been challenged before.

And union members are doing this. Some have had so much practice that now they've got their response lines down cold, their own favorite combinations of issues and zingers. They try everything from, if you were drowning, wouldn't you let a black guy save you? To, white guys have messed this country up plenty, so why not give a black man a chance? I heard one union official quote a Chris Rock line, "was America ready for a black baseball player in the '40s? No, but Jackie Robinson was better than everyone."

And then there was the union local president, who said he actually got out a globe to prove to an elderly relative that no less a revered figure than Jesus must have been black. Here he is, Wendell Young IV, explaining to members of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1776, how he made that argument.

Lisa Pollak

A couple people even told me that, as a last ditch effort, when they can't change the subject to the issues because race is the voter's only issue, they'll ask the person to please consider not voting for a president at all. The most intense conversations I heard about weren't between strangers on a phone line or a front porch, but face to face between coworkers and friends.

In my search for people willing to share their stories from the field, I was introduced to a man named Dan, who's not from Pennsylvania but from Maryland, where he's in the Steamfitters Union. He told me about a conversation he had with a friend about the election.

Lisa Pollak

I would end the story there, were it not for all the people who've insisted to me, that as disappointing as it can be, speaking up is always worth it. One of those people is John Cunnard, a machine operator and president of United Steelworkers Local 1211, in Beaver County, Pennsylvania. He says he's had a lot of these conversations with his members the past few months. He's got his own favorite tactics and comebacks. And he's seen them work.

Lisa Pollak

John, of all people, should know voters can change. During the Pennsylvania primary, he was a fierce supporter of Hillary Clinton. But when Obama got the nomination, John joined the ranks of the undecided, worried about Obama's lack of experience, even though he knew that Hillary and Obama had much more in common than Hillary and McCain. To my surprise, John said he still might be undecided if he hadn't gone to a union meeting and heard none other than Richard Trumka bring up the subject of race.

Lisa Pollak

John told me he's never put as much effort into pushing a candidate as he has this year. And I get the feeling that goes for a lot of union members in Pennsylvania. According to polling numbers from the AFL-CIO, Obama's lead over McCain among union households in Pennsylvania rose 11 points between mid-August and early October. That poll gave McCain 27% of those voters, and Obama, 63%.

Ira Glass

Lisa Pollak. Coming up, we take another turn around the state, and along the way we checked back in with the college students and the Democrats for McCain that we heard from earlier. That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today, with a week to go before election day, we are spending the hour in one of the hottest battleground states this year, Pennsylvania, to see how the ground war is playing out there. Earlier in this hour, we heard college students who were struggling to make their voter registration goal for Barack Obama. That goal was 21,000 new student voters, and it was not going well.

Sarah Koenig picks up the action where we left off, with one of the volunteers she's following, one who is incredibly skilled at getting registrations, Casey Miller.

Sarah Koenig

Casey basically lives in the Obama office. She's earned her own corner there. She's got a little desk with a vase of dying flowers on it, sent by her mother for her birthday. And there's her computer. Four backpacks are lying around, cigarettes, nail polish. She keeps a curling iron in the bathroom.

She dropped three of her six mechanical engineering classes to do this, and she's way behind on the ones she didn't drop. She didn't plan on any of this. She's not someone who ever worked on campaigns before, but she took it pretty hard when John Kerry lost.

Sarah Koenig

Six days before the registration deadline, the campaign throws a party for all the volunteers. Outside the room, the registration thermometer is at about 14,000, 2/3 of the way toward their goal. There's a DJ, but people are so tired and rundown, no one dances, except, briefly, Casey.

Then, as some sort of scared straight motivation tool, they play them what passes for a campaign horror movie. It's a fake video of NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw announcing a McCain victory. Afterwards, stunned silence. It seems like the next logical thing is for everyone to burst into tears, but they quickly move on.

Next up is Jay Paterno, son of Penn State football coach slash legend, Joe Paterno. Paterno the son is the team's quarterback coach, and he brings three football players along, two of them had to be registered on the spot. Meanwhile, he delivers a halftime locker room pep talk to roughly 50 kids listening.

Sarah Koenig

His message is, don't stop, don't relax. And for the next six days, no one does. The workers are put in competition with each other. Prizes are announced. And everyone starts fighting everyone else to boost their own numbers. People are encroaching on other people's turf. Some registrations are getting double counted. Someone is spotted swiping completed forms from another organization's drop box.

But, of course, this 11th-hour frenzy is choreographed by the campaign, because the last thing anyone wants at the end of all this is to have to admit that they didn't meet their goal. Though, in reality, the 21,000 goal has a cushion built in. It's more than Obama needs, but only people at the very top of the campaign know how much more.

It's Sunday night, October 5, the night before the deadline. There's a party atmosphere in the campaign office, except everyone at the party is seriously sleep deprived, and also, working. Zack Zabel, the head of Students for Barack Obama, comes in with some forms.

Sarah Koenig

If you listen closely, you can hear Ben Flatgard, the regional director, singing from his office. He's doing who knows what on his computer, coughing. Then Casey comes in a few minutes before midnight. She's been at some student apartment buildings, and now she's delivering her forms for the daily count.

Sarah Koenig

It's their best Sunday yet, but Casey's not comforted by this milestone.

Sarah Koenig

Casey goes back out to keep registering. It's past midnight now. She heads to a crowded below-ground bar where there's a live band playing. It's so loud I can barely record.

Sarah Koenig

I assume she's going to want to leave, since no one can hear a word she's saying, but she stays and she gets 12 registrations.

Sarah Koenig

In the end, they didn't make their 21,000 goal, but they were close. They registered 16,904 students. And if you add in all the other groups, MoveOn, SEIU, Sierra Club, over 23,600 people were registered in the county.

Casey, of course, registered more voters than anybody else, and won a prize: football tickets. As a result of all this work, Centre County now has over 100,000 voters for the first time ever. And also for the first time, Democrats outnumber Republicans in the county by 5,000 registrations.

Dianne Gregg, chairwoman of the County Democrats, is pretty happy. Her county, she says, is now in a position to have an enormous impact on the outcome of this election. Dianne keeps a poster of James Carville in her office to reminder of his infamous comment, that Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and Alabama in between. Her goal, she said, is to make Carville regret that quote.

Ira Glass

Sarah Koenig. And, before we go, let's take one last trip around the state, and turn from Obama volunteers to McCain volunteers. Back at the beginning of this hour, we were in Scranton with our producer Nancy Updike, and the group, Democrats for McCain.

If you remember, that group was going door to door, having remarkable success in nudging Democrats into the Republican column. Now we return to Scranton.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

Nancy Updike

The Democrats for McCain office in Scranton is run by people who give serious chunks of their lives in service to others. One woman who's been a foster parent for 22 years, another, covered in paint, who came to the McCain office straight from her stint at Habitat for Humanity, and Judy O'Connor, a 59-year-old single mother of three on a fixed income, who pared her life down to a financial minimum to help her son, a fireman and military veteran, achieve his dream of becoming a policeman. All of them lifelong Democrats, never voted for a Republican presidential candidate in their lives.

Nancy Updike

This is Judy O'Connor.

Nancy Updike

For Judy and everyone else here, the primary battle was not a tough fight with equally questionable maneuvers on both sides. Chris and others at the office talked about personally seeing Obama supporters at caucuses, especially Texas, keeping Hillary supporters out of caucus rooms, shouting at them, preventing them from bringing in Hillary signs, all of which, not surprisingly, they say is more egregious than any tactics used by the Clinton campaign.

Challenges were filed at the Texas State Convention, but the relative unethicalness and, more important, the legality of what Chris and others saw, is hard to evaluate in the absence of a lawsuit, and no lawsuit charging caucus fraud by the Obama campaign has been filed nationally or in Texas.

The question I kept asking Judy and the others was, how does a person go from supporting a pro-choice candidate who gets a grade of 100 from unions and wants to raise the capital gains tax, to a pro-life candidate who gets a zero from unions and wants to cut the capital gains tax? Everyone had his or her own answer, but no answer went without an enraged retelling of the primary fight, especially the day the Democratic National Committee divided up the delegates from Michigan and Florida, a compromise using debatable math and logic that seemed to a lot of people not just unfair but undemocratic.

Nancy Updike

This was a theme with everyone I talked to. I like John McCain, but more than that, I'm worried about Obama, worse than worried, scared.

In four days, I heard a lot of fear and some outlandish theories, that George Soros orchestrated the global financial crisis to give Obama a boost in the election, that Palestinian professor Rashid Khalidi secretly paid for Obama's Harvard education, possibly related to a terror financing scheme, that Obama is a crypto-Marxist, a socialist who will somehow take over the world economy, and most spectacularly, Judy met someone on the campaign trail named Larry Sinclair, a man with a 27-year criminal record, a 16-year prison stint for forgery, and 13 aliases, who's been going around saying Obama is a homosexual, a crack cocaine user, and possibly, a murderer.

Nancy Updike

The thing all these Obama stories made me stop and think was, this reminds me of how people used to talk about the Clintons. Thieves, murderers. Hillary Clinton a lesbian, a radical, her college thesis on Saul Alinsky, her health care plan a socialist takeover. It was as though disagreeing on policy was simply not enough for some people to express just how alien the Clintons seemed.

So if winning over Democrats is key to McCain winning Pennsylvania, how can we estimate the number of Democrats who are in fact turning to McCain? Until the election, all we've got to go on is, insert gagging sound here, polls. A Pew Research poll last month said only 12% of Hillary Clinton supporters nationwide said they'd vote for McCain. And a more recent Pew survey said only 4% of Democrats support McCain. Polls, of course, are frequently, and sometimes wildly wrong.

Ira Glass

Nancy Updike.

Ira Glass

While spending weeks in Pennsylvania, we listened to talk radio around the state, and we close our program today with this air check from WILK-FM, 1300 AM, in Scranton/Wilkes-Barre/Hazleton. On October 8, their local drive time host Steve Corbett spent his whole air shift talking about Bill Ayers and Bill Ayers' association with Barack Obama.

Ira Glass

Then, for the next four hours, from 3:00 in the afternoon to 7:00, he got this huge range of callers taking every position on this. One woman worried that Obama would make Bill Ayers secretary of education. A man accused Corbett of finding fault with Obama only because he, Corbett, had wanted a woman president, that is, Hillary. There was a long conversation with a guy who once lived in a house that the Weather Underground bombed. And then, towards the end of all this, there was this call.

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by our senior producer Julie Snyder, with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Production help from Seth Lind and P.J. Vogt. Music help from Jessica Hopper.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

Our website, www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International.

[FUNDING CREDITS]

WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia. During this pledge drive that's going on right now, a woman actually tried to get him to pledge. And he said:

Torey Malatia

Are you out of your ever-lovin' mind, lady?

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.

Announcer

PRI, Public Radio International.