From the Democratic Strategist blog, here's an interesting take on the sad failure of Prop 8 in California by Jasmine Beach Ferrara, a Harvard Divinity School student who was active in the campaign.
She says the national campaign was slow to start, and swing voters weren't properly identified and brought to the polls. On the second point, which seems to me the more salient, she writes:
On Election Day – when one would expect a targeted turn out effort -- the campaign instead decided to deploy all its volunteers in one of the least effective forms of GOTV strategy: visibility (holding up signs at intersections and near polling places). The campaign paid a firm to make turn out calls to voters through Election Day, but to the best of my knowledge, no attempt was made to flush identified supporters.
This is an important lesson of these things. Polls indicated that Prop 8 could have been defeated. But you have to identify your voters and make sure they vote.
