NEW BERN, N.C. -- The most expensive Senate race in history is hard to escape. It’s present on the radio, commercials on television, plastic signs in the median in small towns and on a beautiful fall day in late October, at the front door.
It’s just another day in what’s shaping up to be the most expensive, and bitterly fought, elections in Senate history, with outside groups alone dropping more than $55 million.
Odell, a field director for AFP in North Carolina, and her team are part of a massive get-out- the-vote effort by Americans for Prosperity -- a conservative advocacy group backed by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch.
The group and its affiliated organizations have spent millions of dollars hammering Sen. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.) on the airwaves since early this year. Left-leaning groups have returned fire, to the tune of $26 million, making her opponent, Republican Thom Tillis, the most attacked candidate this cycle.
Hagan holds a one point lead over Tillis, according to an average of recent polling by Real Clear Politics and in the final days before Tuesday's election -- it’s all about the ground game.
AFP’s get-out-the vote operation goes beyond going door-to-door. Odell and each of her fellow cavansers are armed with an iPad displaying a map dotted with multi-colored pins.
Green pins denote contact with a voter; blue pins are houses that still need to be visited, and red indicates no one was home or the address was incorrect.
Odell’s team has knocked on 17,000 doors.
Statewide, AFP’s 45 paid staffers and volunteers have hit more than 186,000 doors and made at least 1 million phone calls, according to AFP spokesman Levi Russell.
But AFP isn't the only outside group blanketing neighborhoods with volunteers and phone calls.
About 114 miles away in Raleigh, clad in a bright pink shirt with matching sunglasses, Rebecca McCarter starts to make her way down Primland Lane for Planned Parenthood Votes.
McCarter, a recent law school graduate and volunteer, has accounted for about 400 of the 306,000 doors that have been knocked on by Planned Parenthood Votes volunteers. It is a part of its “Women are Watching” campaign, according to Sarah Eldred, a spokesman for Planned Parenthood Action Fund of Central North Carolina. The $2 million effort is the largest the group has launch in North Carolina.
Planned Parenthood Votes and its related groups have also been on the airwaves, casting Tillis’s record as the speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives as anti-women.
McCarter reiterates that Hagan is Planned Parenthood’s preferred candidate as she goes door-to-door and at several houses she walks voters through where they can vote early and the best hours for them to do so.
In addition to door-knocking and phone calls, Planned Parenthood Votes launched a program called “catch and release” in which they asked voters earlier in the cycle to record a message about why voting is important, according to Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of Planned Parenthood Votes.
Languens said the message will be played back for the voters on Election Day.
Back in New Bern, the streets are dark and Odell’s team packed into their SUV to head in for the night.
Before powering her iPad down, Odell looked at the map in her hand with satisfaction.
“Got a lot of green,” she said.