In the fall, after learning that neither ACT nor the Kerry campaign was focusing on registering new voters in South Florida, Moira DeNike wrote a passionate letter to ACT's coordinator in Miami, detailing all the reasons why she and her band of dancers should be allowed to work on voter registration out of ACT's offices there. The coordinator liked her letter, and ACT acceded to her requests. "They weren't going to stand in the way of this group of nutty San Franciscans who wanted to come down," she says -- and anyway the registration effort she helped coordinate at ACT was exceedingly successful. In the week before the registration deadline in Florida, DeNike and the others working on new registrations in the Miami ACT office signed up more than 900 new voters.

DeNike says she wasn't surprised by this success; she'd expected it. But other blue-coast volunteers who flew into Florida and Ohio to get out the vote did report initially feeling uncomfortable about their status as carpetbaggers in a contested land. It wasn't just that the progressive volunteers weren't locals -- although many political analysts, remembering the Howard Dean campaign's not-so-hot experience with invading political operatives in Iowa, had warned that voters in swing states might not take too well to outsiders telling them how to vote. But in third-party get-out-the-vote campaigns, the geographic distances between the volunteers and the locals often seemed secondary to the cultural distances -- in many cases the volunteers who flew into the swing states were whiter and wealthier than the neighborhoods they were hoping to mobilize, and some volunteers reported being on guard about, or at least very aware of, the differences.

"They sent us to some 100 percent minority areas, places where being white and having a sticker on your shirt that said your name and walking around with a bunch of flyers -- you stuck out like a sore thumb," said a white 20-something volunteer from California who asked not to be named in this article. "And ACT sent us to some really bad places -- there were people who were obviously prostitutes and drug dealers on the corner. But, that said, a lot of people there did appreciate the information. You took 30 seconds of their time, you told them about voting early, and then you went on your way." Indeed, the volunteer added sheepishly, "in some sense I realized that I became much more comfortable with being around black people. I don't consider myself a racist. I didn't realize that I was uncomfortable before. But on my way back to the airport I noticed that."

Rorer, who canvassed for the Kerry campaign in Ohio, says that he'd initially expected some criticism from the locals as well. "All the canvassers were white, and here we are walking in a lower-middle class black neighborhood," he says. "I would have thought there would have been a sense of, What are all you white people doing in our neighborhood? But when people saw us they were like, 'Kerry!' -- like pumping their fists! -- and old women would come to the door and invite us in to eat."

Several canvassers reported similar scenes, and ACT officials say they ultimately saw no real problem with using out-of-towners as their get-out-the-vote volunteers. Though they'd been wary of the possible culture clash, such disturbances never really occurred. Still, says Gensemer, "the quality of the contact when it's a local canvasser is much better," and one of the group's goals for the future is to assemble a cadre of activists in the swing states to work on mobilization efforts, "which is what the right does infinitely better."

A bigger problem with ACT, some volunteers say, was that in the rushed end to the campaign, the local offices became especially chaotic, and disorganization reigned. "Even with all of George Soros money, in the most contested state in the country, and in the largest county in that state -- with all that riding on this effort, the level of organization was not impressive," says DeNike of the Miami operations. "They had not done that much research. The offices were run by enthusiastic and energetic 20-somethings, and I loved them, but there wasn't the experience that needed to be there."

Another volunteer at the Miami ACT office told of his annoyance at being ordered to spend two whole days at Kinko's to make copies of canvassing maps. This volunteer had spent a considerable bit of money and time to fly out to Florida to help get out the vote, "and here I was making copies -- one day I literally copied 12,000 pages. They spent over $2,200 on copies that day."

Meanwhile, in the final weeks of the campaign, ACT began hiring a large number of local people on a day-labor basis to help with the door-to-door canvass. But volunteers said that ACT put in place no real method of monitoring these paid staffers' progress -- it did not ensure sure that they were rewarded if they worked well, or they were not rehired if they didn't. ACT essentially hired anyone who showed up every morning on a first-come, first-serve basis (the pay varied, though many people said they made between $50 and $100 a day.) The trouble with this arrangement was that ACT wasn't building "a core group of committed people," one volunteer said. "And to be honest I heard a lot of volunteers who worked with the paid people from the community say that the paid people weren't effective. And they would have been more effective if ACT had trained them better, or cultivated the sense that they were working for a cause," rather than for a day's wage.

Looking over ACT's work, it's possible to find many similar logistical and operational flaws. For instance, Bonnie Maslin, a psychologist from New York who canvassed with ACT in the last two days of the campaign in Ohio, said that her canvassing group was given flyers to affix to people's doorknobs, but none of the houses in the neighborhood she was in had accessible doorknobs -- they all had screen doors. Another difficulty: Many of the doorbells in poorer neighborhoods seemed to be broken, and consequently few people came to the door in those areas.

Volunteers emphasize that they don't believe that any of those problems contributed to Kerry's loss. They were simply the kinds of flaws you'd expect to see in an effort like this, and it's a testament to ACT's operational prowess that the effort worked as well as it did. "We were never really expecting we'd have 120,000 contributors" to the get-out-the-vote effort, Gensemer says.

Gensemer's right. Despite the problems, from an operational point of view what the various third-party groups accomplished in the months before Nov. 2 seems quite extraordinary. Still, notwithstanding the agility with which ACT and other groups expanded to accommodate the demand of thousands of volunteers, and the enthusiasm and hard work of many of those volunteers, the plain fact is they lost. And now, in defeat, the groups are being asked to explain themselves -- which is a difficult thing to do because, it turns out, many volunteers and staff at those campaigns genuinely find it hard to conceive of what happened on Nov. 2 as a failure.

And by many measures, the effort was not a failure. In Ohio, Kerry won 554,000 more votes than Al Gore won in 2000. In Florida, Kerry beat Gore's total by 544,000. In all of the urban centers where ACT and MoveOn and the other groups concentrated their door-to-door activities, Kerry's share of the vote went through the roof.

There were other wins for the advocacy groups. ACORN, a group that aimed its efforts at minority voters in Florida, scored a huge win with the minimum-wage ballot measure it sponsored in the state -- the amendment passed with 71 percent of the vote. The League of Conservation Voters, meanwhile, strongly opposed the Republican senatorial candidate Pete Coors in Colorado, and it won that race.

Compared to the presidency, those may seem like small victories. But for the thousands of activists who participated in the race, perhaps there's nothing wrong with taking pleasure in small victories. At the moment, just a month after the election, the future of the various groups that launched the historic get-out-the-vote campaign this year is, at best, cloudy. ACT and MoveOn say they're determined to stay strong and relevant. But people close to some key funders of the groups point out that the legal landscape isn't clear -- many expect that the Republican Congress will attempt to shut down the 527 soft-money exception, a move that could devastate a group like ACT.

Even without the question of funding, there are difficulties. During the campaign, ACT, MoveOn and other influential progressive groups -- labor unions, liberal interest groups -- worked roughly in parallel, sharing ideas and resources and a common mobilized base, all in an effort to vanquish a common foe. But with the campaign over, the groups have fewer incentives to work together, and differences over how to proceed -- and who gets to control what was created during the past year -- are bound to emerge.

We may already be seeing the early fissures. On Thursday, MoveOn took an aggressive posture in the battle to control the future of the Democratic Party, demanding in an e-mail memo to members that the party rid itself of "elite Washington insiders." Democrats "can't afford four more years of leadership by a consulting class of professional election losers," wrote Eli Pariser, the executive director of the MoveOn PAC. "In the last year, grassroots contributors like us gave more than $300 million to the Kerry campaign and the DNC, and proved that the Party doesn't need corporate cash to be competitive. Now it's our Party: we bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back."

MoveOn could not be reached for comment for this article. But it's hard not to wonder if Pariser's line about Washington elites was a subtle dig at ACT -- a group that is, after all, headed by some of the party's most insiderish insiders, Steve Rosenthal, Harold Ickes and Ellen Malcolm. Asked whether ACT had any sympathy for MoveOn's call to banish insiders from the party, Gensemer balked. "We don't have grandiose goals of taking over the party," he said. "The vast team of political professionals we've put together understand what our role is now. We're following to see what happens with the DNC. We have our thoughts, we've learned a lot, but we're not a reactionary force."

Even if ACT, MoveOn and other progressive groups manage to continue working well together, and the vast infrastructure they amassed this year remains relatively intact, there is still the matter of the activists -- those people on the ground who decided during the course of the year to join the political scene. Can those people be reactivated to fight future battles? Did the activists who swarmed to swing states this year do it only out of a quick, one-shot hatred of George W. Bush, or were they expressing deeper convictions, passions that will motivate them for the long haul?

For the third-party groups, this is the most difficult question to answer. It's hard to tell what peculiar cocktail of hatred for Bush, love for Kerry, and genuine fear for the national condition sparked the grand activist effort we saw this year; consequently, it's hard to tell whether many of the activists will remain active, or whether many will take Kerry's defeat as too much to bear and lose their willingness to fight.

"There's an absolute 100 percent risk of that," says Allan Oliver, who headed the League of Conservation Voters efforts in Florida. "That's a risk that we're trying to fight, and the way we're trying to fight is by saying: Let's sit down and do some smart analysis and figure out what went right, what went wrong. Let's figure out a future plan. What do we do from here?" In time, those answers will come. "And perhaps all those volunteers who traveled across the country for us -- they've taken some days off, they've sat down, we've all kind of moped around at one point or another. But soon they'll come back saying, We need to get into the fight."

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