A VOLUNTEER at the Obama 2012 campaign office in Charlottesville, Virginia, explains how she reels in more recruits. First she mentions to friends in passing that she has been working for the campaign, and makes a note of those who take up the subject and ask her questions. Instead of inviting them to take part straight away, however, she makes a point of talking about all the fun she has as a volunteer, to stoke a little excitement. The next step, after a few weeks of such treatment, is to bring them along to a house party hosted by another campaign volunteer. The political content of such events is deliberately diluted with lots of coffee and cake in order not to intimidate the newcomers. Next might come a boisterous evening at the campaign office, where there is plenty of chit-chat and snacking on sandwiches between phone calls to potential supporters. Before they know it, her targets have a new social life built around Barack Obama’s re-election drive.

This is the essence of Mr Obama’s campaign strategy: to build up a vast but carefully co-ordinated network of volunteers in swing states, of which there are around a dozen, to register voters in their neighbourhoods, canvass friends and acquaintances and turn out supporters on election day. Voters are more likely to pay attention to people they know than they are to activists from other states, let alone television ads and flyers, Mr Obama’s strategists reason, and making the campaign enjoyable will help to expand its reach to those with relatively little taste for politics.

None of this is revolutionary, except the meticulousness with which the Obama campaign goes about it. Four years ago Mr Obama used such tactics to register lots of new voters and increase Democratic turnout in several states that had previously been Republican strongholds, including Virginia and neighbouring North Carolina. This year his campaign, unencumbered by a primary, started orchestrating a similar drive much earlier in the election cycle. It opened its first field offices in Virginia in December and now has 20 of them. Five more are scheduled to open next week. The Charlottesville office opened in March, four months earlier than in 2008. This network, it maintains, will offset Mr Obama’s expected disadvantage on the airwaves and win him the state once more.

At a recent event at the Charlottesville office, some 50 women gathered to call potential volunteers. Each was supplied with a mobile phone (if they had not brought one of their own) and several sheets of telephone numbers. The numbers come from the database of people who have visited a campaign website, given their contact information to a volunteer or taken part in Mr Obama’s previous campaign. Using a system of codes, the callers note down which numbers they have tried, whether they were able to reach anyone, what interest the respondent has in the campaign, when they should next be called and so on. All of this is promptly entered back into the database to generate future calling lists.

The Charlottesville office holds at least three such phone banks a week, along with many smaller registration and recruitment drives. Until mid-June, the campaign was concentrating on lining up and training enough volunteers to create a “neighbourhood team” for every precinct. Roughly 15 people per team, says a co-ordinator of one of them, should be enough to ensure thorough coverage of each electoral precinct. Team members should keep an eye on anyone who moves into their neighbourhoods, he says, and make sure they are registered.