Ray Sullivan, Obama’s state director, in the headquarters the day after the election.

The Providence Journal / Kathy Borchers

I’ve been hearing about Barack Obama’s campaign machine ever since he beat Hillary Clinton in Iowa. As much as his charisma and policies, they say he won on his ground game.

The day after the election, I drove to his state headquarters on Providence’s South Main Street to see how it worked.

Since Rhode Island was guaranteed to go blue, I was expecting a small storefront. Instead, I found a sprawling set of offices with a big central war room. I got lost in it as I looked for Ray Sullivan, 31, Obama’s state director, his top paid staffer here. He apologized for his rumpled suit, explaining he’d been working nonstop for 36 hours.

The headquarters looked like a movie set of the morning after, with pizza boxes on the floor and wires hanging from the ceiling. On a desk, I saw a crate full of cell phones.

The first thing Sullivan told me said a lot about Obama’s now-legendary machine.

I asked if there had been a spontaneous celebration the previous night when the networks called the election at 9 p.m.

Far from it. At that exact hour, they were waiting for call-lists out of Chicago with voter names from Alaska — where polls wouldn’t close until 1 a.m. Eastern time. Scores of volunteers, he said, were seated along hallways, cell phones primed to persuade final prospects 4,500 miles away.

I asked why they would bother. There was zero hope Alaska would vote blue.

“We left no stone unturned,” said Sullivan. “You reach as many people as you can.”

Of course, said Sullivan, his operation was focused on getting out the vote here, but even more so, the office on South Main in Providence was a staging ground to reach people in battlegrounds like Virginia, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire.He pointed to Devin Driscoll, one of his salaried field organizers, as an example of his people’s dedication. Driscoll graduated Providence College in May and had a full-ride scholarship for graduate school at the University of Minnesota. Then he got a call from Sullivan, who knew Driscoll had chaired College Democrats of Rhode Island. Would he come to work instead for Obama? Driscoll agreed to give up the scholarship. He hopes to get it back next year, but there are no guarantees.

I asked his hours.

Since summer, he and other workers have routinely started at 9 and left at midnight.

“The guy at Ronzio’s knows us pretty well,” said Sullivan.

He estimated they had 1,600 regular volunteers — he called them repeat offenders — and hundreds more who were one-timers. On Election Day, 600 came in and out of the office. There were so many, Sullivan got permission from a law firm upstairs to use its offices.

As for the crate of cell phones I saw, those were sent by Obama headquarters, each with its own plan.

“I’d hate to see the bill,” said Sullivan.

The campaign even had a computer program allowing people to download call lists at home, and input responses back to national headquarters, where they kept track of how millions were voting.

Sullivan is a Rhode Island state rep from Coventry, where he lives with his folks. He just won reelection to his third term. He said he didn’t find out about his own victory until after the election was called for Obama, since he had no time to check.

He isn’t sure what he’ll do next professionally. He said that’s typical of people in the campaign. “I don’t think anybody,” he said, “had time to think, ‘What am I going to do on Wednesday?’ ”

We sat in his office. I noticed a can of chicken noodle soup, some containers of duck sauce and a jar of Advil. He tried to ignore his multiple cell phones as they kept chiming.

Then he told of a moment he’ll long remember from election night, after everyone left to walk by foot to the Biltmore, where a party was planned. Sullivan stayed behind, alone in the vast headquarters, to finish some final e-mails.

“It went from really loud to really quiet,” he said. Then he thought back to 6:30 a.m. that morning when the headquarters phone rang. Sullivan was there to pick it up, having slept on the carpet.

It was a woman voter, asking what time polling locations opened. He told her.

The woman then said she had been at Martin Luther King’s famous speech in Washington decades before. She got choked up for a moment, and added, “I’ve been waiting for this for so long.”

After months of counting voter calls and door knocks, it reminded Sullivan why he’d done this.

Now, at 10:30 p.m., his thoughts lingered on that one woman voter.

He finished his work and walked alone into the night to join the celebration.

mpatinkin@projo.com