The basement meeting room of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 98 can only be described as organized chaos. The union hall is the main staging area for Ed Rendell's campaign, sort of the unofficial street headquarters. From here, hundreds of volunteers will fan out across the city and suburbs knocking on thousands of doors and asking people to vote for Rendell, spreading the "get out the vote" message to students and businesses, and just plain standing at major intersections and holding up Rendell campaign signs, like the folks at Broad and Spring Garden. Three campaign workers stand at the curb on what turns out to be quite a chilly morning for late May, cheering and encouraging motorists to honk for Rendell. Many do, giving thumbs-up signs to the eager volunteers.

Taped to the wall in the union hall basement are maps and lists of wards and divisions to hit, and the man marking those lists with a felt pen is Joe Grace, a Rendell deputy campaign manager. Grace, a former journalist, served as District Attorney Lynne Abraham's campaign manager last year in her successful bid for re-election. Today, Grace is looking more than a bit harried, with lists to cover, volunteers to coordinate and at least 20 people asking him questions or complaining about petty problems at any given time.

He is calm and patient, but definitely in a hurry. He charges up the basement stairs, through the lobby and into the street to help unload printing supplies, then runs back down to check on his people, because Grace can't afford to be away for more than a few minutes. Then back up the stairs, then back down. Asked when he last slept, Grace laughs.

"I'm too tired to remember the last time I slept," he says, taking the stairs two at a time. "That's not just a convenient sound bite. I really can't remember."

Grace is part field marshal, part cheerleader, part scoutmaster. He gives out kind words and hugs freely, gets a little short when things go awry, and rallies the troops.

"We'll get 1,000 volunteers through here easily today, and there are two smaller staging areas in other parts of the city, one in the Northeast and one in Germantown," he says.

Cars and vans rumble out of the parking lot and down Spring Garden, each festooned with Rendell stickers, banners and posters, and filled with eager volunteers. Each volunteer is given an instruction sheet with a script along the lines of "Hi, I'm working for Ed Rendell. I hope you'll come out and vote for Ed" and a simple plan: Place hangers on every door, knock on every door, and knock on every door again.

10 a.m., 30th and Walnut

Outside AFSCME's District Council 33 headquarters, Rick Farfaglia is overseeing the phone-banking operation in the "Barney truck," a giant purple Service Employees International Union trailer outfitted with the latest telecommunications technology. Inside the truck, union volunteers wearing headsets sit in front of laptop computers. The central computer automatically dials 1,500 phone numbers an hour from a database of 110,000 labor union Democrats in Pennsylvania. When a call goes through, it's routed to a volunteer as a script appears on the laptop screen. For the past eight weeks, it's been "Will you vote for Bob Casey?" The scripts are automatically tailored to the person's line of work. Teachers heard about Casey's education platform. Nurses heard about health care. Today, the computer will call members who have committed to Casey and ask, "Have you voted today?"

The truck's been here since March, but Farfaglia, a 20-something who works for SEIU in D.C., is only stationed in Philly for a week. Next, the truck and Farfaglia are going to Atlanta, where, Farfaglia confesses, he's not sure who's running for Georgia governor.

10:48 a.m., G and Ontario

Carlos Matos, leader of a slate of largely Latino committee-member candidates in the 33rd Ward, huddles with his volunteers outside the Sheridan School, a local polling place in Kensington. Switching seamlessly from Spanish to English, Matos gives his crew a bilingual pep talk before sending them off on door-knocking runs. "Pull 'em out, pull 'em out!" he barks. The huddle breaks with chants of "Casey! Casey!"

Then Matos enters the school to brief two election monitors from the Committee of 70, a nonpartisan election watchdog group, about a dispute he's having with the poll workers who object to his practice of sending in voters with a campaign volunteer to assist. The two young men in oxford shirts and khakis look out of place among the working-class voters, but they know the rules. Any voter can ask anyone to help them vote for any reason. Matos is running a write-in candidate named Luis Cruz against incumbent state Rep. Angel Cruz. The write-in feature on the new voting machines is confusing enough, let alone when the two candidates have the same last name.

With Matos seemingly victorious in the dispute, the poll workers continue to protest about broader issues, like the fact that Matos' mother-in-law is the city commissioner who oversees elections. At a loss, the Committee of 70 rep throws up his hands, smiles and says, "That's just Philadelphia politics."

11 a.m., 12th and Bigler

Chris Di Paolo and Jeannette Costa are running jointly for committee members of the 39th Ward, 41st Division. Di Paolo, a business owner and ex-Marine, is handing out fliers attaching their names to Rendell. There seems to be a lot of name-gaming. Rendell-Lawless, Rendell-Kukovich, Rendell-Josephs --the list goes on. Di Paolo says he and his partner are hitching their wagon to a winner, and that with Rendell in the governor's mansion, Philadelphia can look forward to a bright future.

"I hope Ed wins, because that's a plus for the city and a plus for the state. Of course, I hope we win too," he adds with a smile.

12:35 p.m., 30th and Walnut

On the fifth floor of District Council 33 headquarters, Bob Wolper, a Bucks County-based communications and political consultant hired by Philly unions to run their Casey operation, explains "Labor 2002."

"We're not doing random GOTV [get out the vote]. That's what Rendell's doing," Wolper says. In the Philadelphia area, the unions have to turn out committed Casey voters only and hope everyone else stays home.

Phone banking and door-knocking over the past two months has given the unions a database of every union Democrat in Pennsylvania who's committed to voting for Casey. Now, on primary day, the job is simply to make sure these people get the phone calls and house calls they need to get them to the polls.

2:47 p.m., Oak Lane

Harry Mobley, a Philly native who works for the AFSCME's Harrisburg office, is cruising down Cheltenham Avenue in his old Cadillac. "GOTV -- it's not rocket science," he muses. It's just a matter of knocking on doors. Except, in the early afternoon, most union workers are at work. Each empty house gets a flier titled "The workers who know Ed Rendell best are voting for Bob Casey," with a personalized handwritten note from Mobley. He says, "We'll be back, 100 percent face to face" after working hours but before the polls close at 8 p.m.

4:20 p.m.

After almost two hours of door-knocking on mostly empty houses, Mobley's getting frustrated. "I'm just spinning my wheels," he says.

4:42 p.m., North Philadelphia

Mobley's Cadillac heads downtown to drop two volunteers back at the union hall. KYW NewsRadio's traffic report makes clear that every highway in the city is at a crawl, so Mobley heads straight down Broad. Fielding a call on his cell from AFSCME's mid-state office, Mobley gets a briefing on turnout in the Harrisburg area. So far, he can't make heads or tails of the bits and pieces of turnout information he's picking up. At the end of North Broad looms City Hall. In front of the scaffolding-covered building 10 volunteers hold up massive signs. Each sign bears one letter. Together they spell "VOTE RENDELL."

7:02 p.m., 30th and Walnut

Wolper, the union consultant, dances into the GOTV office at DC 33. Responding to a few puzzled looks from the workers, he says, "I love this stuff. I do this for a living." In less than an hour, the polls will close and the results will start trickling in. Wolper's giddy. He can't wait.

He offers his theory on why organized labor's been flexing its political muscle over the past few election cycles. You see, a lot of Philadelphia union leaders got promoted and are now running major unions like AFSCME and SEIU. "It's a philosophy they brought with them" to Washington, Wolper explains, "coming out of this atmosphere [in Philadelphia] where labor and politics are intertwined."

8:20 p.m., Third and Spring Garden

Amato Berardi, an Italian-born management consultant, looks pensively at the big-screen TV on the second floor of Finnigan's Wake, the Spring Garden Street bar hosting Casey's Philadelphia party. He says he's heard from sources inside both campaigns that turnout in the Philadelphia region is at 35 percent -- Rendell's stated base line. Hardly any of the votes have been counted, but Berardi's already worried.

8:30 p.m., 17th and Locust

At the Radisson Plaza-Warwick Hotel, Rendell campaign spokesman Dan Fee distributes to reporters a cease-and-desist order to the Casey camp -- issued at Rendell's request -- signed by Judge Willis Berry Jr., the judge presiding over primary-day disputes. It's an election staple in these parts, ordering one campaign to stop already with the underhanded tactics at the polls, in this case distribution of partisan literature within the polling place and entering the booths with voters to "assist" them in making the proper selection.

9:14 p.m., Third and Spring Garden

Mike Driscoll is greeting fellow Casey supporters at Finnigan's Wake, which he co-owns. He's hosting the party out of personal loyalty to the late Bob Casey Sr. Before Driscoll got into the bar business, he was a committeeman in Northeast Philly and volunteered for Casey Sr. during his 1986 gubernatorial primary against Ed Rendell. When Casey Sr. became governor, he appointed Driscoll to a midlevel position in his administration. "I stood out because there was not much to choose from." Then as now, most Philadelphians lined up behind Rendell.

9:30 p.m., 17th and Walnut

Here in the Warwick Hotel's grand ballroom, the overflow crowd eagerly awaits the arrival of the candidate. They are jammed in. One of the hotel workers estimates the crowd at 700. There's a Dixieland trio playing a seemingly endless version of "Happy Days Are Here Again" while news cameras set up for the live shot. There are television sets in each corner of the room tuned to WHYY and Fox TV's joint coverage, and each time numbers are flashed for the governor's race, the raucous crowd lets out a whoop. Their candidate is ahead, and he doesn't look likely to relinquish that lead. Democratic politicians abound in this place, and reporters descend on each one like vultures, hoping for a quick sound bite. The crush of people combined with the sparse air conditioning makes breathing difficult and movement nearly impossible. It takes almost 30 minutes to negotiate through the crowd to the front door, about 50 feet. Despite this, the crowd is upbeat and sings along with the band for the umpteenth chorus.

10:37 p.m., Third and Spring Garden

With 74 percent of the precincts reporting, Rendell leads by a hefty 10 percentage points. The big screen at Finnigan's cuts to the Warwick, where Rendell's backers are pumping their fists in the air. The TV reporter on the scene pulls aside Rendell campaign manager David Sweet. In Finnigan's, with the throbbing mix of the '70s, '80s and '90s entertaining the college-aged crowd downstairs, it's hard to hear what he's saying, but he's definitely playing it calm, making it seem like the corks are still firmly secured in the champagne bottles at Rendell HQ.

Port Richmond ward leader and former state Rep. Gerry Kosinski looks at Sweet and asks rhetorically, "Does he look like a winner?" Then he confidently rattles off a mathematical scenario in which Casey will still win by 2 percent. Seeing that his fellow viewers aren't much interested in his math, Kosinski heads back to the veggies and dip.

11:20 p.m., Third and Spring Garden

Casey's yet to concede, but some die-hards have already left the building, figuring they don't have much to celebrate. The Wednesday morning quarterbacks are already out in force. Rock Broughton of Olney offers his two cents.

Casey would have done better if he had "brought religion into it." As Broughton sees it, there are a lot more Catholics in Pennsylvania than Jews, so why didn't Casey play up that he's Catholic and Rendell is Jewish? Asked whether he thinks this strategy could have appeared anti-Semitic and backfired, Broughton sticks to his guns.

11:30 p.m.

Casey concedes live from Scranton on the big screen. Very few supporters are even there to watch it at Finnigan's Wake. Finnigan's staff has already cleared the buffet trays and the bar is closing down. Bar owner Mike Driscoll is nowhere to be found, nor are the scores of big-shot Philly politicos whom he expected to make an appearance at his soiree.

11:30 p.m., 17th and Walnut

It's over. With at least 89 percent of the precincts counted, Rendell is Pennsylvania's Democratic candidate for governor, beating Bob Casey 56 percent to 44 percent. Casey, much more of a gentleman than this nasty campaign would indicate, called Rendell at 11 to concede defeat and congratulate the victor.

Midnight

Rendell makes his way to the podium and has his hand raised in victory by friend and former partner Mayor Street. Flanked by politicians, Rendell's speech is long, but he remembers to thank everyone, and says, "This is a victory for change. The experts said no Philadelphian would ever be elected governor of Pennsylvania. Well, the experts underestimated the people of Pennsylvania." Rendell promises to call a special legislative session to bring the state's contribution to our schools up over 50 percent from its present 35 percent, and to cut property taxes at the same time by 30 percent. It's a tall order and an ambitious plan, but he swears he's up to the task.