Ohio, election night. Polls close. And at the local election campaign HQ of the AFL-CIO, the US trade union confederation, the 400-strong phone bank's computer is re-targeted. No time to rest despite a gruelling day. There's still two hours polling in New Mexico, half a continent away, and the local political director has just faxed in the updated target phone list.
Within minutes, Cincinnati activists are talking to their union brothers and sisters in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, urging them to come out and vote. As each one puts down the phone, the computer dials another number.
Mr Al Gore won marginal New Mexico by 12,000 votes, two percentage points. And the AFL-CIO volunteers played no small part, redressing with troops on the ground the 15-1 spending imbalance between unions and the business community.
And African-American organisations were doing the same, with, from a Democratic perspective, even greater efficiency. Every five extra voters from their community meant four Democratic votes. The union ratio is lower at two to one.
Turnout is the great untold story of this election, almost forgotten. For one thing the US electoral system, unlike that in Europe, simply doesn't churn out the figure automatically.* For another, when it emerged, it didn't sound too impressive. Turnout of eligible voters increased 1.7 percentage points on 1996 to 50.7 per cent, just saving the country from the ignominy of headlines saying "less than one in two voted", but not lifting it out of 139th place in the international league of voter participation.
Yet, behind that figure is an altogether different reality. In the 12 marginal states targeted by both campaigns, voters were turning out in significantly larger numbers. Niche marketing of their electoral efforts at turning out core voters paid for both parties, though somewhat better for the Democrats.
Elsewhere, in places that mattered little to politicians, turnout was continuing on its remorseless downward slide.
But in Florida, where the fate of the next president now hangs, turnout was up 13 per cent or nearly 700,000 votes. Voting in the black community went from 527,000 to 952,000, and with 93 per cent of Florida's African-Americans voting Gore, according to exit polls, he clearly owes the fact that he is still in with a prayer to the mobilising skills of that community.
In Missouri, though won by Mr Bush, some 283,000 blacks voted, up from 106,000 four years ago. In Michigan, a marginal state won by Mr Gore, campaigning to increase the turnout raised it by some 10 per cent, particularly among union members and the black community. The United Auto Workers contributed in no small way by negotiating an election-day voting holiday for its 400,000 members and by running the largest phone bank in the state.
"If it were not for the minorities and the unions' get-out-the-vote message, George Bush would be the victor in Michigan," Mr Edward Sarpolus, a local pollster, told the New York Times. They didn't have it all their own way. The National Rifle Association turned out thousands of volunteers in Ohio, Arkansas, Tennessee, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, contributing to notable upsets, not least in the latter.
But, overall, the efforts of the unions and black organisations like the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People were critical to Mr Gore's narrowing of the Bush poll lead just as they mitigated in 1998 the Monika Lewinsky effect in the congressional mid-term elections. Mr Gore would have been nowhere without it, insists Mr Ruy Teixeira, an expert on voting trends at the liberal think-tank, the Century Foundation.
The techniques used borrow from modern marketing and the mobilising methods of the party machines in the old days - niche-based advertising and troops on the streets.
Ms Regeena Thomas, a Democratic organiser, is a mistress of the new art of political targeting, having honed her skills on the black community in New Jersey, helping this time to deliver a doubtful Senate seat to a multimillionaire Democrat, Mr Jon Corzine.
And Ms Thomas's turnout operation, developed in New Jersey, has been replicated to similar effect across the country. Programmes in Philadelphia and Detroit helped Mr Gore win the crucial swing states of Pennsylvania and Michigan. In New York, Mrs Hillary Clinton's turnout programme helped her crush Mr Rick Lazio by 12 points, with black turnout increasing two per cent on the 1998 Senate race.
Ms Thomas uses sociological and political data from research organisations to subdivide constituencies, prioritising precincts where history suggests there is a strong Democratic tradition but a low turnout. Then she sets vote goals for precinct organisers and starts to blitz the target.
Take Atlantic City. Ward One, Precinct Two: a history of 82 per cent Democratic voting and of 40 per cent turnout. A prime target. And 799 specific households got six pieces of mail, carefully drafted for the black community, reminder calls ahead of polling day, calls on the day, and several visits from paid canvassers (Mr Corzine has deep pockets). Car rides for the elderly. Ads running on local hiphop and R&B station. . .
On polling day Ms Thomas posted watchers at every polling station to monitor turnout every two hours and switched phone banks and canvassers rapidly to areas not performing to scratch.
To anyone brought up on the somewhat more laid-back and unscientific mobilising techniques of the Irish political class, it's a bit like running into a steam roller. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating - it works. Mr Al Gore can vouch for it.
* The turnout figure is calculated in the US as a percentage of those of voting age eligible to vote, unlike Europe where the figure is based on those registered to vote, but the figures are comparable as voting registration in Europe is largely automatic.