"Our voice is not nearly as loud in television advertising as it once was, but we really see power in mobilizing our members," Adam Ruben, political director of MoveOn.org Political Action, said in an interview. "One of the reasons to partner with Workers' Voice is that they bring the resources of the labor movement, which includes physical infrastructure all across the country. They have labor hall staffs and organizers all across the swing states. ... They bring a lot of their own expertise in how to do labor targeting. We bring our own expertise in how to reach voters, communication and online organizing and how to mobilize our 7 million members." [...] According to Eddie Vale, a spokesman for Workers' Voice, the groups already have identified 14,000 worksite and canvass coordinators. That's "the most we've ever had, and the earliest they've been ready," Vale said. The goal is to mobilize some 400,000 volunteers by Election Day.

Facing that avalanche of outside money coming in to bail out Mitt Romney and other Republicans who can't win on the strength of their ideas, Democratic-allied groups are working to leverage grassroots strength. Tuesday, MoveOn.org Political Action and AFL-CIO Super PAC Workers' Voice announced that they'll be joining to get out the vote for President Obama this November:The groups will share data and use micro-targeting to get people across the country to make 1.5 million calls into battleground states.

Aside from the groups' strategy of responding to the Republican advertising war with one-on-one volunteer organizing, the launching of such a far-reaching partnership between the union movement and MoveOn is an interesting development. Michael Podhorzer, executive director of Workers' Voice, said, "Our goal was to make this as broad a movement as possible and go well beyond the traditional union universe." This certainly does that.