Today, as I was doing my early morning email check, I learned that Kerry broke expectations and now is one point ahead of both Gephardt and Dean in Iowa. While statistically this is still considered a dead-heat between the three (and Edwards at 17%), it brings the big "mo" to the campaign that was expected so long ago.
How does this show up? In our inbound emails which has gone overwhelmingly positive with comments like "Way to go!" and "I always knew you would be the one" and "I have always been a Kerry supporter" to the online donations which have increased incredibly in this month - compared to the month following last quarter. Site usage is up, volunteerism is going through the roof - and all because of a simple poll that is a statistically moving average of a three day polling sample.
What does this say? Kerry and our team have been working incredibly hard in the past few months - working to overcome the comments from the "washed-out front-runner" and "troublesome campaign" - which in my five months with the campaign has shown nothing but growth and improvement. The teams are tighter, the energy is focused, the growth in measured and enthusiastic. While there are always things to improve, a campaign is not the glamour it promises from the outside. In ways, I envy the person who I was when I contemplated joining the campaign six months ago. It was a magically thing - to be part of changing the course of history and all that rot. Now, it is a race -- not a sprint as it might seem, but as Marcus put it "a marathon". And our team is definitely a bunch of marathon runners.
