Ground Game

No one's exactly sure how much endorsements matter, but it's fair to say MoveOn's endorsement of Barack Obama should make some difference in targeted states on Super Tuesday. Nearly 300,000 MoveOn members voted in an online poll of whether the group should endorse Obama or Hillary Clinton. Obama won in a landslide, with 70.4 percent to Clinton's 29.6 percent. Despite the lopsided Obama victory, endorsements rarely move an entire organization's membership. And it's likely that a strong majority of MoveOn members already support Obama. But the money, phone-banking and other primary state organizing efforts could make a measurable different in tight contests. From the group's endorsement email:

There are lots of ways to help. You can call voters from home, go door-to-door with others in your community, travel to "Super Tuesday" states, donate, put up a yard sign, volunteer in a campaign office, or join a local meetup. Senator Obama is running a grassroots campaign, and there's a role for everyone.

Open Left's Matt Stoller adds more details on the effort:

I just spoke with Ilyse Hogue, communications director for Moveon, and she tells me that the group is going to mobilize volunteers for Obama in key states and use call for change technology. That's the stuff that lets their members do phone-banking with their browsers to targeted individuals, and often what Moveon will do with this is have Moveon members in non-key states call other Moveon members in key states for GOTV. We'll see what they do.

Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin describes the anti-war group who stirred up some controversy with their "General Betray Us" ad campaign a few months ago as “Military smearing”