With less than three months to go before the crucial mid-term congressional elections — essentially a half-term report card on the performance of Barack Obama — Democratic activists in South Los Angeles are looking to mobilize the kind of grassroots army that helped elect the nation’s first Black president.

Organizing for America (OFA), the network that succeeded Obama for America, has been engaged in a full-on effort to prove many of the political pundits wrong, who have been predicting a Nov. 2 bloodbath for the president’s party when voters decide races for all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and more than a third of the 100-member Senate.

Meanwhile, organizers are hoping that Sandi Cook — a 49-year-old health insurance sales representative born and bred in the Crenshaw District — is the kind of centrifugal force that is being overlooked by purveyors of the conventional wisdom.

An OFA community organizer for Congressional District 33, Cook commits more than 25 volunteer hours a week to the cause.

She leads five active field teams, each consisting of a neighborhood team leader, a data coordinator, a volunteer coordinator and an event coordinator.

On Saturday, Cook set up her table for a voter registration drive at the Cherrywood/Leimert Block Club barbecue, which had a couple of well-known political visitors pass by, including 10th District City Councilman Herb Wesson and L.A. County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas.

She was joined later in the afternoon by her de facto boss, Philip H. Gaskin, the regional field director for South Los Angeles, himself a former community organizer.

“OFA is now president Obama’s national volunteer grassroots field team,” he said. “It’s the first-ever grassroots field team for a president. That’s historic and I’m sure it’s a model other presidents will try to duplicate. We’re in all 50 states and have teams in all 435 congressional districts.”

Cook spelled out their task. “The mission of OFA is to support the president and his agenda,” said Cook. “So that’s what we are doing, we know how important it is for people to vote [in this election]. At the beginning of the year, we have been … organizing nationwide, especially in California.

“There’s still a lot of support, but we need to build our capacity and reach out to people. This kind of work is grassroots; it’s neighborhood by neighborhood, door to door.”

Cook, a graduate of Crenshaw High School and West L.A. College, revealed that although she comes from a family that always stressed the importance of voting, her true political awakening came with Obama’s bid for the world’s most powerful office.

“I’d volunteered in church and youth clubs, that sort of thing, but never felt as passionate until Obama invited us to participate with his awesome speech in 2004,” she recalled.

“It literally stopped me in my tracks and many of the people I knew had the same reaction. I didn’t immediately go and look him up because he wasn’t running for anything. But he was the topic of conversation at the water cooler. People were like, did you see that guy, even though many couldn’t even remember his name.”

She added: “Then, when I found out in the community that some organizations were forming to back him and I went to Rancho Cienega Park to see him, I signed up when the Crenshaw and Slauson field office opened.

“I would work on the phone bank three to four days a week and some weekends. … The night of the election was magical.”

And 18 months into the administration, despite what some critics in and outside the Democratic Party are saying, Cook is unwavering.

“I like to remind people of the condition we were in — literally on the brink of a depression,” she said.

“That has subsided due to things his administration has put in place. Then we’ve had disaster after disaster, we’re in two wars and there’s the oil leak. I think he’s earned an A, but people don’t really understand that because they’re hurting. We may have a long way to go, but we’ve come a long way.”