200,000 NEW REGISTERED VOTERS: If you add up the numbers in the last few paragraphs of this morning's Plain Dealer story, it looks like new voter registrations in Cuyahoga County had topped 140,000 by the time the deadline passed last night. Judy Gallo of the Cleveland Voter Registration Coalition told me yesterday that the county's total is actually more than 200,000. The number in Franklin County is more than 90,000. Statewide, the PD story predicts more than half a million people added to the rolls for this election.

Pretty incredible.

The Ohio GOP can put on a brave face, but the fact is that most of these new voters were recruited by anti-Bush registration efforts in the big cities. This was far and away the most serious, professional VR effort in modern history. To get an idea of its importance, you only have to consider one simple fact: if 120,000 more Ohio Democrats had turned out in 2000, Al Gore would have won Ohio and would be in the White House today.

Of course, signing up to vote is one thing, and turning out to vote is another. In the past, newly registered voters -- especially in low-income neighborhoods -- have been among the least likely to actually show up at the polls. In fact, Cleveland has never had a particularly low percentage of our eligible adults registered to vote -- we just don't show up on Election Day.

This year, everything rests on changing that pattern. Instead of the 130,000 votes cast in Cleveland in 2000, the Democrats need at least 200,000 -- 60% of the city's adult population. Is this possible?

Yes, it is. There are at least two big differences between 2004 and previous years that make it possible:

First, every effective political player in town is on this case. Nobody -- not even the school levy campaign -- is obsessing about "likely voters" this year. The entire, unprecedented focus of all efforts this month will be the city's "unlikely voters" -- registered voters (new or old) who haven't voted recently. The newly registered are all either databased or soon will be; thousands of others have been canvassed in the last few months, and had their preferences and current contact information uploaded to the same databases. This is a new kind of voter ID. Its implications for a city like Cleveland are enormous, and not just in Presidential years.

Second, the pockets for this effort in Cleveland are probably the deepest in the country. You've heard people talk about the election being won or lost in Northeast Ohio? They're not kidding. A hundred thousand extra Democratic votes in Cuyahoga County are worth millions of dollars to the national Dems and their allies, and they're spending it... not on media, but on "the ground war".

Just one example: Move On PAC has just sent a couple dozen paid organizers into the county, opened two field offices, and is holding daily orientation meetings in each office for new volunteers to work on their precinct-by-precinct "Leave No Voter Behind" campaign. I went to the 7 pm West Side meeting last night... the office's second meeting of the day. It was standing room only -- over thirty volunteers, mostly campaign newbies from Move On's vast e-mail base, there to sign up for door-knocking duty in their own neighborhoods. At least ten of us agreed to be precinct captains, which means taking personal responsibility for a list of 150 "infrequent voters" in our own home precincts: finding and talking to them, getting them into the organization's web-based data system, and doing whatever it takes to get them to the polls on November 2.

Move On PAC has targeted 10,000 precincts in swing states across the country for this campaign. From what I saw last night, they seem to know exactly what they're doing... not surprising when you consider that this is the group that built a three-million-member email list from nothing, virtually invented online political fundraising for liberals, and taught Joe Trippi how to do politics on the Net. What is surprising is that this year in Cleveland, Move On's campaign is just icing on the cake... a final layer of new grassroots capability on top of an already huge, sophisticated turnout operation.

So, yes, all these new registrations really might turn into votes his year. If they do, John Kerry is our next President. And Cleveland politics is a whole new ball game.