The Clinton campaign has established two state headquarters, one in San Francisco and the other in L.A., and has hired seven full-time staffers. Obama has an L.A. office and four paid staffers, with another likely to be added soon. Both have fleshed out the staffs at their headquarters with a raft of volunteers.
The Clinton campaign has focused on high-density Democratic regions such as L.A. and the Bay Area. The Obama campaign is trying to build networks in each congressional district; most state Democratic delegates are awarded to candidates based on how well they do in each district, not statewide. So far Obama has committees in 40 of the 53 districts.
Yet the overriding question for both campaigns is not where to find Democrats but how to motivate them.
"Every campaign is about the art of the possible," said Democratic strategist Rose Kapolczynski, who directed Sen. Barbara Boxer's campaigns but is not involved in the current campaign. "Obama couldn't rack up the endorsements that Hillary can after her years in the White House or in the Senate."
And if you can't get the big endorsements, then you stack up the little ones. "Endorsements of elected officials are powerful -- but so is the endorsement of your best friend," Kapolczynski said. "So grass-roots programs have some of the same goals as big-time endorsements."
Although the Democratic field remains crowded, recent state polls found the campaign apparently distilling into a two-person race, with about two-thirds of likely Democratic voters supporting either Clinton or Obama. Clinton enjoys the clear advantage, with 49% support in an early-August Field Poll, compared with 19% for Obama and 10% for former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina.
Clinton's strategy is to consolidate and extend that lead. A major component will be the HillStars program, under which the campaign hopes to train 1,000 unpaid leaders statewide to oversee groups of 20 local volunteers -- the "Hillary Corps" -- to use their personal networks of relatives, friends and co-workers to identify Clinton supporters.
Using a software program called Voter Activation Network, the campaign plans to build a database from the information gathered by the Hillary Corps to target voters for early absentee voting -- which begins Jan. 7 -- and for follow-up efforts on primary day, Trujillo said. They hope to contact 2 million potential voters by primary day.
