HILLSBORO — If the fortunes of this year’s hardest-fought campaigns hinge on the final push to get out the vote, then what’s going on inside a tidy bungalow along the railroad tracks of this Portland bedroom community matters a great deal.

Here, in between making dinner, baking cookies and celebrating the 16th birthday of one of her eight children, tea party activist Rosie Gagnon is working the phones, squeezing in 10 or 20 minutes or even an hour when she can, placing dozens of calls each day urging voters to support her favored candidates.

“Hello, my name is Rosie, and I’m a volunteer with FreedomWorks PAC, a grass-roots organization advocating for limited government,” began Gagnon, reading from a script. “I’m calling to ask for your vote for Senate candidate Sharron Angle in the general election on Tuesday, November 2nd.”

It’s no mistake that Gagnon is calling people in Nevada rather than Oregon, where the Republican Senate nominee isn’t given much of a chance. Encouraged by national tea party groups, she and other activists are dialing long-distance to try to influence the nation’s most competitive congressional contests.

With mailing lists numbering in the hundreds of thousands and Internet-based call programs that do everything but read the script, national tea party organizations are trying to take advantage of the movement’s vast but decentralized grass-roots muscle.

FreedomWorks, which claims 2,100 registered callers nationwide, is just one group with a phone-from-home program. The Sacramento-based Tea Party Express helped sway primary elections in Alaska, Delaware and Nevada by placing tens of thousands of calls to those states, and organizers for Americans for Prosperity, headquartered in Arlington, Va., say 10,000 volunteers are making calls through the program — 400 of whom are in Oregon.

Counter to liberal organizations

The efforts are designed to be a conservative counterweight to MoveOn.org and other liberal organizations that used these sorts of tactics to great effect in 2006 and 2008. Those groups are at it again this year, with Organizing for America launching a revamped online calling tool last week to coincide with President Obama’s rallies nationwide.

The Internet-based software the tea party groups provide makes calling easy: Register as a volunteer, log in and the program calls your phone number to connect you. Click again, and your phone calls a voter’s home. Read the script on the screen, click again and the call is disconnected. Click again, and the next call is underway.

All the while, the system is logging valuable information for the national groups: who’s still undecided, which numbers are good, who’s home and who’s not.

Calling all around the country on behalf of politicians she has never met is not exactly something Gagnon expected to do. But she’s a mother, and she’s worried that no matter how well she raises her kids, it won’t make much difference if things don’t improve.

“I’ve been concerned about the direction our country’s going starting back when President Bush was in office,” said Gagnon, who is active with the Oregon Tea Party and the Oregon 912 Project, and whose husband, Jason, lost his job in February as an information-technology project manager.

Gagnon spoke cheerfully into the telephone, reading from the computer screen at a small table in her dining room while two of her children, Peter, 4, and Adam, 6, waged a Lego “Star Wars” battle in the kitchen. On this day, Gagnon was calling voters in Nevada, a critical state where conservatives are chasing what would be their biggest prize: the defeat of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat.

After asking people to vote for Angle, Gagnon recited the talking points on her screen: “Sharron Angle is a fiscal conservative and will oppose wasteful government spending bailouts and the growing national debt. Harry Reid has been the cause of government overreach, costly bailouts and the out-of-control spending for too long. Please vote Sharron Angle for Senate on November 2nd.”

Gagnon is among three or four dozen volunteers in Oregon who call around the country for FreedomWorks. The Washington-based libertarian organization has spent millions of dollars this year to help local tea party groups form and to coordinate their political activity.

National organizers say these calls are especially critical in the more than half a dozen Senate races that hang in the balance. Polls show all of these contests to be neck and neck, meaning the final push for votes could sway the results and determine which party controls the chamber.

Many don’t like taking orders

But one of the quirks of the tea party is that many supporters don’t like being told what to do, and some have balked at abandoning local races just because a national organizer tells them that a candidate in another state has a better chance of winning.

In Oregon, part of the argument for making calls on behalf of Dino Rossi in Washington state or John Raese in West Virginia is that Oregon Republican Jim Huffman, who is trying to unseat Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, is widely predicted to come well short on Nov. 2.

But after come-from-nowhere victories in Massachusetts, Delaware and elsewhere this year, it can be hard to convince tea partiers that any race is out of reach.

Russ Walker, the national political director for FreedomWorks, was all too aware of that sentiment as he gently nudged the local coordinators during a conference call last week.

He didn’t ask them to stop working for Huffman — or for Chris Dudley, the Republican candidate for Oregon governor who is running neck and neck with Democrat John Kitzhaber.

Instead, Walker began the call by asking everyone how FreedomWorks can help them. Sounding a little like an auctioneer, he promised 1,500 Huffman yard signs here and 2,000 door hangers there.

More volunteers

Only then did Walker move on to what he was really after: asking coordinators to sign up as many volunteers as possible to make calls to other states.

One of those volunteers, Kristina Ribali, 37, of McMinnville, was hard at work this week trying to sway voters.

“Hello, may I speak to Patricia?” asked Ribali, who with her husband founded the Yamhill County 912 Project. Her house echoed with the repetition of the scripts from which she read:

“Hi, is this Dixie?”

“Hi, this is a message for Richard.”

“Hi, is this Sandra?”

“Hi, is this Anne?

Ribali worked away in her upstairs study, stopping occasionally to check on her two children, Reagan, 7, and Nick, 12, who played in the living room below.

“Hey, whose socks are on the table?” she asked no one in particular — and then she marched back upstairs to her computer.

“I have only so many hours in the day,” Ribali said. “But look, we’ve got 14 days left. I’m going to do what I can do to push these last races over the finish line.”

So she picked up her telephone and dialed another number.