In Alaska's remote villages, Begich quietly builds an advantage on the ground

[Blue_In_AK]

This is a really good article and gives me a lot of hope.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/in-alaskas-remote-villages-begich-quietly-built-an-advantage-on-the-ground/2014/10/04/219c6756-4a9f-11e4-891d-713f052086a0_story.html

QUINHAGAK, Alaska — One of the Alaskans who might save Democrat Mark Begich’s Senate seat had just returned home from a moose hunt.

Jackie Cleveland is a third-generation resident of Quinhagak, a coastal village of 700 so remote that no roads lead to this bleak patch of frigid tundra. Cleveland and the other Alaska Natives here speak the indigenous language Yup’ik, brave unforgiving winds along the Bering Sea and proudly hunt, fish and gather their own food.

On the gravel lanes and mucky yards of Quinhagak, this fall’s urgent fight for control of the U.S. Senate feels a world away. Yet this is where you’ll find Cleveland, 35, stepping into one living room after another to register her neighbors to vote and make the case for Begich.

Cleveland is part of Begich’s secret weapon: an expensive, sophisticated political field operation that reaches into tiny villages along rivers and in mountain ranges throughout the vast Last Frontier. The Begich ground game — which the senator and his campaign detailed for the first time to The Washington Post — is on a scale far beyond anything that has been tried before here.

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[femmocrat]

1. Hope it works for him. We need him.

I doubt if anyone is polling in those small villages.

[Blue_In_AK]

2. He's really smart to build that ground game.

Everybody knows everybody in those villages, and if he has ground workers with convictions making sure all their family and friends get to the polls and vote for him, it will be an advantage. I'm sure Sullivan is mainly concentrating on the cities and larger towns.

Close elections are not uncommon here. It wouldn't surprise me if we have to wait a week or two to find out who wins, like the last time when Begich beat Uncle Ted Stevens.

[Dawson Leery]

3. Tim Johnson did the same thing in 2002.

He defeated Thune by 524 votes when all the polls had him losing by 3-5 points.

[mopinko]

4. shoe leather can beat big bucks.

nothing beats face to face support. when you talk to people, they vote.
watch kelly westlund beat sean duffy the same way.