Something Old. Something New.

On a morning commute not too long ago, I suddenly realized how little my professional life has changed in the last 20-plus years since I first became involved in the business of running political campaigns. Or, for that matter, how little campaigns have changed since Abraham Lincoln designed his brilliant campaign plan.

know who is registered to vote

know who is going to vote

know who is going to vote for you

make sure those are voters who vote on election day

Today we call that strategy GOTV - get out the vote. One of my most memorable GOTV efforts was in a North Florida county commissioner's race. The year was 1976. Jimmy Carter was squaring off against Gerald Ford in the presidential contest and I was in charge of Okaloosa County's phone bank operation for all Republican candidates.

Phone banks were still a novelty then. We had 10 lines. It was my job to keep every line operating, 12 hours a day, six days a week. I spent most of my time finding volunteers to man the lines (we couldn't afford to pay people), assigning them their hours, and then trying to convince them to be there when they said they would.

Every single GOP voter in Okaloosa County who had a phone heard from us. We gave them a simple message: If Okaloosa County is to ever elect a Republican, every Republican is going to have to vote. Then we put together a list of likely Democratic supporters and called all of them.

We would tell them our candidate's feelings about an issue then ask them whether knowing his position made them more likely to vote for him. An affirmative answer earned them a follow-up phone call. The calls to the Democratic voters served two purposes. It gave us a chance to tell them about the candidate, and helped us learn who his potential supporters were. On election day, we called them to remind them to vote and to offer our help. Did they need a ride? Someone to watch the kids?

It was a close race, but in the end there was a Republican county commissioner - by the slimmest of margins, 36 votes out of a total of 31,224 votes cast. Without that phone bank, there wouldn't have even been a contest.

When Abraham Lincoln first took national office (in Congress in 1847), Alexander Graham Bell was a nine-month old infant in Scotland. Lincoln's assassination predated Bell's first telephone call by 11 years. One hundred years after the invention of the telephone, the political genius of the one man combined with the technological mastery of the other helped a long-shot candidate win office in a quiet rural county.

The technology doesn't really change what we do, but how we do it. The 1998 campaigns I'm now preparing for are going to rely on many of the same tactics I used in 1976 (and that Lincoln used 150 years ago). The tools are different and we know how to use them better, but the same simple strategy still applies: know who is going to vote for you - and make sure they do it.