Going into the weekend, the campaign had a nationwide conference call led by Jon Carson, the Obama-Biden Campaign Field Director. 20,000 volunteers called in. At my GOTV (Get Out The Vote) office, we put one volunteer's cell phone on speaker-mode and placed it on a conference table as 30 of us crowded around to hear. Throughout the call, Jon would stop to provide interesting facts and statistics on the campaign. It was gimmicky. Here are a few:
- There have been 1,142,000 GOTV shifts across the country
- This election has seen 1.9mm new registered voters (111,000 more Dems than GOPs)
- The Obama campaign has made 13.3 million contacts (not knocks, but actual CONVERSATIONS)
Random canvassing video of me
The Force is Strong with "That One"
The final few days of the campaign almost entirely focused on outreach, and Friday October 31st through Monday November 3rd was all about going door-to-door. As opposed to earlier GOTV stages which included a "persuasion" approach, the purpose of the last few days was to ensure voters supporting Obama or leaning Obama were reminded to vote and vote early. At this point, we have canvassed virtually every neighborhood in Franklin County, and have collected as much data as we could on voter preference. Now we just need to turn out that vote.
On the Friday before election day (Halloween), I was asked to take responsibility for a group of 12 British Labour party representatives who came over in a group of 80 Brits to assist on the campaign. After a quick crash course on canvassing (It's pronounced "O-bomb-ah", not "O-bam-ah" where the "bam" sounds like "damn" -- apparently people in Ohio respond poorly to foreign accents), I was given a Ford E-350 commercial van and drove to our assigned neighborhood. To call this downtrodden, impoverished area "the projects" would be too nice. This was ultra-lower class. Most people weren't working, sitting on their porches, some places didn't have doors or windows, and on some streets where they had small houses and not apartment projects, half of the houses were abandoned while the other half just looked that way. I drove around the area dropping off pairs of two canvassers before parking the van with my partner (a very sweet Brit who also happened to be black - the only one in our group) and hit the streets. Unfortunately, no one told me where I was going ahead of time. Imagine the looks I got from everyone in the neighborhood as I strolled through, clipboard in arm, wearing a Brooks Brothers long-sleeved wool polo sweater, jeans, and trendy sneakers, hair parted, clipboard in arm. They must have thought I was the tax man, or worse. I was getting a lot of stares, people were pointing, shaking their head, and some even followed me around as I knocked on the first few doors. Then they saw me with my partner, who was black, and began to back off. Temporarily. Eventually, I was surrounded in the courtyard by several members of the apartment complex, who got very close and began to ask aggressively who I was. They asked sarcastically if I was lost. They told me I shouldn't be here. Finally, I point to my "Obama Biden '08" button and explain I'm with the campaign, trying to get Barack Obama elected. They all look at me incredulously as they give me the up an down. "You wit' Obama??" I nod. "Aight, shit, you cool." From that moment, I was able to walk around all afternoon, freely, without looks! It was like I had a force field around me, and that allowed me to go anywhere. The day before, I was in the richest, most Republican neighborhood in the county and was treated wonderfully by supporters and opponents alike, and yet there I was walking in perhaps the most dangerous neighborhood I've ever been in outside of a car and I was fine. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I've gotten the same reaction from friends who went canvassing in other states, such as the poorest parts of North Carolina. It just speaks to Obama's ability to transcend some socioeconomic differences. McCain's people NEVER came to these poor, primarily black neighborhoods. I honestly believe those canvassers would have been at the risk of physical harm. And for the record, I knocked on 102 doors that day, spoke to 60-70 voters. Wanna guess how many McCain supporters there were? Here's a hint: Zero.
Brits + Ghetto = Trouble
And now the short tale of our lost Brits. As I mentioned, I took a dozen Brits canvassing in a fairly unsavory neighborhood. Our field office was centrally located to the Brits' scattered routes, so the plan was to drop each canvass pairing off at the farthest point from the office, so as they get through their route, they would simply end up walking back to the field office. For 10/12ths of the Brits, that plan worked swimmingly. One problem: during training, everyone was taught to complete their routes, and knock on all of the doors on their lists. Except no one received the one rule that supersedes all others: If you are in a bad neighborhood and it gets dark, come back IMMEDIATELY. So imagine our worry when the sun set and 2 Brits never came home. They didn't have cell phones that worked in the U.S., so we couldn't call. So, after waiting around for 30 minutes after the last group got back, I finally grabbed a flashlight, another Brit, a map of the missing Brits' route, and jumped into the van. I drove with the brights on as my British navigator hung out of the passenger window, shining the flashlight onto each house's doorstep, hoping to find our foreign friends. No luck. As we hit the last few houses on their route, my stomach began to sink. Oh god, this is really bad. Oh god oh god oh god.... It wasn't until I pulled into the field office's parking lot that my cell phone finally rang. They had just walked into the office, and their fine. And they finished their list!
[cue forehead slap, sigh of relief]
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