O’Brien hopes energetic field campaign can overcome Kanjorski

SCRANTON—Corey O’Brien is moving, and he’s moving fast. It’s a sunny Tuesday afternoon in May, and a brief rain shower has just let up. O’Brien is racing—literally, running—down the streets of a Scranton neighborhood in full work garb, tossing a football back-and-forth with campaign aides who struggle to keep up while an RV plastered with his face trails behind him playing contemporary Rock and Roll.

“You should have worn your sneakers today,” one aide remarks to a reporter.

This is how O’Brien, a Democratic Lackawanna County Commissioner, has spent evenings and weekends for the last several months, and how he’ll spend his days and nights for the final two weeks—he’s officially on vacation—before his primary showdown with Congressman Paul Kanjorski (D-11). Unseating an incumbent in a primary is one of the more impossible political tasks out there, and O’Brien has his work cut out for him. Kanjorski entered the homestretch with a campaign war chest totaling about 25 times what O’Brien had in the bank, and the longtime congressman has all political benefits incumbency provides in a primary, with few of the liabilities it yields in November.

But O’Brien is unfazed, confident—and more full of energy than one is used to seeing in politics. He’s been called the most competitive House primary challenger in the country, and while conventional wisdom says he’ll get blown out of the water on Tuesday, O’Brien says his upset win will be nothing but expected.

“I don’t care what some pundits might say about the race,” O’Brien told pa2010.com while riding on his campaign RV earlier this month. “I see it every day. People are going to say on May 18 that this is ‘a shocker, a surprise.’ I’m not going to be surprised.”

The RV is very much the hub of his campaign, and contained within it is a full-office-hybrid of old-school retailing campaigning and savvy, technology-driven voter targeting and database management. O’Brien can’t compete with Kanjorski’s presence on TV in the closing weeks, nor with the name recognition afforded by more than 20 years in office. So he’s going door-to-door.

But he’s doing so with precision. Though the RV travels far and wide, his campaign is most heavily targeting a strip in the northeast part of the district that accounts for more than two-thirds of the Democratic electorate. Using barcoded lists of voters, O’Brien and his aides knock on doors, talk issues and gauge whether a potential vote is there (voters are ranked 1-5, one being a definite O’Brien vote, five being a definite Kanjorski vote). For anyone but the staunchest Kanjorski supporters, the respective barcode is scanned once back on the RV, information on what issues were discussed is input, and a form letter to be signed by O’Brien is instantly generated and printed in the RV, which has all the trappings of a mobile office.

All of this stays on an organized campaign database, and anyone whose door O’Brien knocks on will get a letter from him within two days. The ones most on the fence will surely hear from him again personally. As of early last week, 35,000 voters had been contacted. His campaign predicts 70,000 will cast their ballots in the primary, and plans to have contacted 50,000 by then.

“This is a very high-level, very technology-driven field operation,” O’Brien says. “I don’t think you’re going to find a field operation anywhere near as well organized as this one.”

It has to be pretty much perfect. There’s no margin for error in this kind of a campaign. He took a risk by going on the airwaves all the way back in January—insanely early to most political operatives—hoping to break through while televisions were still devoid of political ads. He started pulling back when statewide candidates began saturating the airwaves, and went dark in late April (there’s a particularly high concentration of commercials here right now because of a competitive state Senate race).

Kanjorski, meanwhile, has run very much the classic incumbent campaign, seemingly far more concerned about a rematch against Republican Lou Barletta in the fall. He’s sent the franked mail from Washington that all incumbents do, had aides on the ground more recently, and has flooded the airwaves late in the game. What little institutional support O’Brien enjoys has come in the form the occasional labor backers here or a newspaper endorsement there.

Ed Mitchell, Kanjorski’s longtime campaign spokesman, says his boss isn’t worried.

“Corey O’Brien is broke, he hasn’t been on TV since April 26, he has done no mail and basically it’s been a failed campaign,” Mitchell said. “He has the benefit of the wind at his back because of the anti-politician feeling in the country, so I don’t know whether he’ll benefit from that or whether [voters will] see that Congressman Kanjorski stands up them here.”

O’Brien campaign manager Justin Carroll says it’s all part of the plan.

“We always knew that Paul Kanjorski was going to outspend us by some large margin to one,” Carroll says. “Knowing that, and knowing his campaign style—which has no door-to-door but involves touting his accomplishments from Washington—we had to determine how to use our resources.

“We’ve had a tight rope to walk this whole time,” Carroll adds, “staying on message, getting that message out to voters and doing it in a cost-effective way.”

To see O’Brien in action on the ground is to see the kind of campaigning that seemed lost to earlier days and hyper-local races, deemed obsolete in an expensive TV state like Pennsylvania. O’Brien and four staffers fan out on the streets, while the driver stays behind the wheel and inches behind them. Aides knock on doors, and when a voter is located, they wave over O’Brien—who will stop mid-sentence and break into a sprint in that direction. One voter says his grass is growing in poorly, so O’Brien crouches down to the ground and checks it out. Another man says taxes are issue No. 1, and O’Brien quickly rattles off statistics about how taxes were kept steady in Lackawanna County. A couple of voters teach him about how car brakes work. One elderly woman say she hasn’t heard from Kanjorski in a while.

“Do you know the last time Paul Kanjorski knocked on her door?” O’Brien asks later. “It was never. That matters.

Before long, the team has made three dozen contacts in less than half an hour.

“We have to move fast,” O’Brien says bluntly, somehow not sweating from the sun-soaked jogging session he’s undertaken.

In the end, the results on Tuesday will prove a test case of whether this type of campaigning can work when scaled to the level of a vast congressional district. One Democratic insider familiar with the district says O’Brien just might be able to pull it off.

“The guy works,” the insider said. “He works his butt off. He’ll knock on his many doors as possible in a 10- or 12-hour day, and that’s what he’s been doing. It’s still a tough task, but I think he’s got a really legitimate chance.”

But another Democratic insider said Kanjorski’s financial advantage would simply prove too great to overcome.

“It doesn’t seem like he has enough money to mount a genuine challenge in a Democratic primary where Kanjorski still retains broad popularity,” this insider said. “You need a lot of money if you want to topple the king.”

For now, in between stops, campaign aides run slant patterns and O’Brien throws the football half-a-block. Holding clipboards, they’ve clearly grown adept and one-handed catches. One aide laments that the football occasionally hits a car—hardly good politics. But O’Brien says it’s a worthwhile trade-off.

“Imagine if we didn’t have the football, the music, the RV—how boring it would be,” he says. “You’ve got to keep the energy up.”