It had been a long two days for the McGinn for Mayor campaign. On Monday, October 19, McGinn announced that, contrary to previous statements, he would abide by the will of the city council and not try to stop the deep-bore tunnel, instead turning his attention to making sure Seattle taxpayers wouldn't be saddled with paying cost overruns. Within 24 hours, opponent Joe Mallahan had released a campaign ad accusing McGinn of "lying" to voters—of being, essentially, a flip-flopper. After which KING 5 had released a poll showing Mallahan widening his gap over McGinn, 43 to 36 percent.

At McGinn HQ on Aurora Avenue North that evening, Ainsley Close was doing yoga. Close, 27, has been volunteering full-time for the campaign since before the primary. (One of the surprises along the way, McGinn said in a separate interview, was when "I discovered Ainsley was without my knowledge running my campaign. So I put her in charge. I called her up to ask her how she was doing on something and then asked her, 'By the way, how's Derek doing on the maps?' And she told me. 'How's Elliott doing?' And she said Elliott had been up all night working. And so I tested her and asked about other people [working on the campaign], and I realized she knew what everyone was doing. She was running the campaign. So I put her in charge.") McGinn and Close struck a deal that she would defer her fall quarter of graduate school, for a master's in environmental science and management, if McGinn made it through the primary. And he did. So she did.

She was on her back on the carpet, her legs stretching up over her, her feet touching the floor just past her head. Derek Farmer and Elliott Day, two other full-time staffers since before the primary, were sitting nearby. These three were among the core volunteer staffers labeled "jobless skoolkids" by a supporter of Jan Drago in an anonymous blog comment during the primary—a label they've worn proudly ever since.

"Crazy day," Close said, standing up again.

"It was a crazy day," Day echoed.

Close had been with McGinn all morning. "I was Mike's bike escort today," she said, cracking a grin. "Which is, like, come on buddy, go a little faster."

Day, who is 25, made a whirring electrical sound—"Eeeehhhnn!"—and they all cracked up. Farmer, 30, who deferred law school at UW for the campaign, flashed a look of worry and imagined the political repercussions: "The Stranger says, 'Even McGinn's Supporters Make Fun of His Electric Bike.'"

I asked about the new Mallahan ad. "We knew that was going to come," Close said, and then, referring to Mallahan: "He doesn't have anything else."

I asked about the KING 5 poll. "All I can say is, that same poll said we'd lose the primary, by not a small margin," Day said.

"As one of our campaign stalwarts said, it would be off-brand for us to be up in the polls," Farmer said.

We'd gathered to discuss how the campaign had made it this far—winning first in the primary after polling had them in fifth place four weeks prior, going head-to-head in the general with a candidate with four times the money, amassing a volunteer army that phone banks nightly in three locations around the city and that can be deployed quickly on special projects. "After Mike won the primary, we honestly were inundated with volunteers. We went from doing things to making sure things got done," Farmer said.

"Another way of putting it would be, we went from being the only people phone banking to..." Day said, his voice trailing off to the sound of a volunteer phone banking in the background. As of October 20, the campaign had dialed 43,060 voters (not including robocalls), left 18,087 voice-mail messages, and had 9,788 conversations with voters. Day joined the campaign in May. He has a degree in geography but hadn't been able to find work. "I had no idea what to expect and was totally comfortable with the notion that we were just a 'message' campaign rather than a real contender," he said. "My first week, I was given some phone numbers and told to call them and convince them to phone bank. And I was like, 'Okay, I guess I know what a phone bank is. And it was really, really hard to convince anyone. It was June and impossible to make anyone give a shit. Mike just kept saying, 'Keep calling.' Which really frustrated me, because I felt like he didn't understand."

Day paused. "You're given a certain amount of trust to make something happen," he said, "and then when it actually happens—it was an eye-opener."

The campaign credits phone banking above all else for their success so far—they're aiming for 12,000 conversations with voters before Election Day. According to Farmer's records, the campaign logged 8,040 volunteer hours during the primary, 330 hours of that phone banking and 420 hours on lit drops (taking campaign literature to voters' houses, precinct by precinct). Since the end of primary-election voting on August 18, the campaign had logged, as of October 20, something like 19,528 volunteer hours (phone banking, lit drops, the 18 town halls McGinn has held, the 14 policy meetings he's had with his staff, community events, fundraising, debate prep, etc.).

This is rough math, but if you figure the average person burns 65 calories an hour (about 75 watts of energy) talking on the phone or doing clerical work, and 315 calories an hour (about 366 watts of energy) walking door-to-door up and down the city's residential hills delivering campaign literature, as of last week McGinn volunteers had expended an impressive 1.6 megawatt hours of energy in the general election alone. For comparison's sake, 1.6 megawatt hours of energy is equivalent to 180 gallons of gas, or enough energy to power a four-bedroom house for a month. And that's not including the thousands of volunteer hours in the primary or the last two weeks of campaigning before November 3.

Mallahan likes to say that he's proud to run a "professional" campaign—a dig at McGinn's full-time volunteer staff, which also includes Nate Merrill (McGinn's scheduler), April Thomas (office manager), Jen Nance (who organized the town halls and donates photography to the campaign), Sol Villarreal (an Obama organizer who now runs the phone banks), and Aaron Pickus (communications). Other central volunteers: Becky Stanley (volunteer recruiter), Thao Tran ("We needed a Southeast Seattle office, and he scored one in, like, 24 hours," McGinn says), and Christi Stapleton (who oversaw the Democratic-district endorsement process and then took up running the Southeast Seattle office). Asked whether any other campaign for Seattle mayor has relied so entirely on a volunteer grassroots effort, McGinn said he didn't know, but added, "My understanding is that Norm Rice put on a really powerful grassroots campaign on short notice and surprised people."

"We use the word 'staff.' We definitely work here, but we don't get a paycheck," Close said. "I think there's a stigma that because we're volunteers we're somehow less qualified or less intelligent. We just care more."

"There are people working for campaigns who just think of it as a job," Farmer said. "We all believe."

Farmer and Day took me into a room with six maps on the wall. "So what you're looking at is the six legislative districts in Seattle," Farmer said. "We basically crunched the data from the primary results, precinct by precinct."

"Those are the colors you're seeing on the map," Day said. "The blue is where we won. Blue with striped lines are precincts where we won a lot. The green is where Mallahan won. So pretty much anywhere with a view, Mallahan won—and his numbers are up among Republicans. And the orangey pink areas are where Nickels won."

"Look at Ballard," Farmer said, pointing to the map of the 36th Legislative District. "On one side of Holman Road, you probably voted for Mike. On the other side of Holman Road, you probably voted for Joe." Likewise, McGinn did very well in Columbia City—"where the urban liberals live," Farmer said—but Mallahan took the wealthier nearby neighborhoods of Mount Baker and Seward Park. Given Day's degree in geography and the fact that Farmer is a former military intelligence officer, these maps send them into full-on geek mode. "In the military, we call this 'intel preparation of the battle space,'" Farmer said. "You figure out where your opponent is, you figure out where you are, you figure out the lay of the land, and you plan accordingly."

Most of the precincts had either red or black Sharpie hash marks on them. "The black hash marks are where we've phone banked, and the red hash marks are where we lit dropped," Day said. "You can see there on Capitol Hill, for example." He pointed to the 43rd District map, nearly black with hash marks. "We've basically called every landline on Capitol Hill."

Looking around the room, the floor crammed with donated tote bags stuffed with McGinn's latest large-format, multipage campaign pamphlet, Farmer said, "I like to think we have a pretty sophisticated operation here. I mean, not bad for a bunch of jobless skoolkids."

"There you go," Day said, "bringing it back."