Friday night was Halloween. Friday night was weird and random, but some fun. In my super political trend my costume was election themed:
(For anyone who doesn't get it, check out
this wikipedia page and
this picture of her.) My friend Danielle did my make-up and I think she did a fantastic job. Being in DC some people even understood it!
Anyway, Halloween night we made a last minute decision to not go out to a club and rather go to a party being thrown by a friend of a friend of a friend. The party was fun but nothing special, with the real entertainment coming from annoying drunk-out-of-their-minds girls who followed us to the party somehow and were being ridiculous. Oh well.
You may remember from a couple posts ago that I was heading to southwestern Virginia to hel GOTV for Obama. This is that story.
Day 1 - Saturday:We were carpooling down on Saturday. After finishing packing and getting to sleep around 4 I got up around 6 and hopped in the car. Liz was driving with Bryan riding shotgun, both of them adults with real jobs and a fervor for Obama. After a couple of pit stops we got to the Christiansburg, VA office around noon. After grabbing a quick bite to eat we got a few canvass packets to walk and were into it pretty quickly.
We worked the canvass packets until dinner and darkness and then were back in the office getting organized. We switched over to the working-printer-equipped office in Radford and spent a long time creating, printing, and organizing walk packets to be used for the next couple of days. The extra hour of sleep owed to us by the daylight savings switch was used for an extra hour of work, and we didn't leave the office for a long while. 22 hours after waking up I got to go to sleep in a very nice supporter's extra basement room.
Day 2 - Sunday:Oh, how I love Church. No, not going to it silly. Getting to sleep in because everyone else is there and it's useless to try to talk to voters during it! Not having to wake up until nine is a beautiful thing. The day went pretty smoothly, although I think it rained late in the day. That might have been Monday though, I can't really remember. A few more walk packets and a lot more organization until the early morning hours of the upcoming switch to a different round of GOTV. Until mid-Monday, we were knocking on doors and doing voter ID and GOTV at once. During Monday we switched into pure GOTV mode, so there was a lot of setting up to do, especially for the onslaught of volunteers. Going to sleep before 4 is also beautiful.
I think (but am not sure) that Sunday also contained me and Liz's most ridiculous canvassing excursion. We had a couple of doors to knock down
Lizard Creek Road, and even though it was narrow, unpaved, and shady, we decided to head down it. First, we passed a trailer with a modest size confederate flag. A little something, but we were in the South! Then we come to what seems to be a dead end fork in the road, beside a place that will live in my nightmares forever. Attached to one side of the trailer is a huge confederate flag. On the other, a deer's head is nailed (not mounted, nailed) to it, with flashlights dangling from the antlers. As we sit in the car figuring out how to turn around, a large black dog comes screaming off the porch, obviously set to attack us. It is continually trying to get over a fence in its way (about a foot from the side of the car). At this point, I look at it a little closer and notice what I won't forget. It's right eye wasn't there. Just a socket. Creepiest. Thing. Ever. Ever.
We also tried to go up a steep narrow dirt road/driveway and got stuck and had to reverse down. Not nearly as scary, but it was right after I got hit on by an 87 year old woman looking for company. Yeah, always interesting out in Shawsville.
Day 3 - Monday:We woke up around 7 knowing it was going to be a long day, having mapped out our game plan the day before. We were coordinating a full 5 shifts of volunteers and making sure everyone was doing what was needed most. We also hit up a couple more walk packets worth of doors in the morning talking to voters. At midday we switched into pure GOTV and stopped talking to voters, instead simply hanging precinct-specific directions on their doors and running on to the next house. Switching from 'VOTE TUESDAY' to 'VOTE TODAY' hangers starting at 10 pm, we were out running up to doors until 2. We got to our home away from home before 3 and I received the first sign from my body that I need more sleep than this. While I was waiting for the bathroom to open so I could brush my teeth, fully clothed in a well lit room, sitting upright on the end of the bed, I fell asleep. Woke up two hours later with my closed book in my hand and my toothbrush on the floor, still sitting up. Creepy as hell. Also took me a bit to figure out where I was. Eeeeek.
Day 4 - E-Day:Another nice early morning to start getting out the vote in full force. Liz and I did a full nine walk packets together throughout the day, knocking on doors and seeing whether or not people had voted and if they needed a ride to the polls. We were only knocking on the doors of voters identified as sporadic (voted in 2 or fewer of the past 4 elections) democratic-leaning/strong-democratic voters, but even with that select sample the results were very good. Out of the 5 packets where I was the door knocker instead of driver, I didn't have a single voter tell me they weren't going to vote. By the afternoon shifts, every opened door had already voted. This was also true of our last-hour (6 to 7 pm) phonebanking, hitting every number that we still weren't sure if they had voted. I probably got through to 30 voters in this time, all who had voted (with most adding that the rest of their family had voted too!). The phonebanking frenzy came to a close around 6:50, as time ran out to get people to the polls, and the wait was on.
I'm going to take this moment to extol the Obama GOTV system. On Election Day, every sporadic DL/SD voter in the Christianburg voter universe was contacted multiple times, in multiple ways. Every door was knocked at least 3 times unless there was confirmation of a vote before that. Every phone number was dialed another couple of times on top of that. And that is only from the local office, online supporters made over 1,000,000 calls on election day backing up the GOTV effort. One woman I talked to halfway through election day had received 13 calls and been talked to in person 3 times in the past 48 hours. Utterly ridiculous.
We had a few minutes of downtime to talk to each other in the Blacksburg office before we were dispatched to the polling location being used by hordes of VA Tech students who were still standing in an hours-long line. We were tasked with driving finished voters back to campus, and got to meet some interesting students. I'm pretty sure that a good half of the parking lot was full of waiting Obama-campaign shuttles, just for the students.
We returned to the office in time to make another half hour of frenzied phone calls into Colorado, making sure everyone there had voted. The lists were a bit outdated so a lot of the voters were being re-confirmed, but it was still a very high level of positive turnout.
After that we went upstairs from the campaign office into Awful Arthur's Bar & Restaurant to watch the results roll in on their wall of TVs. Pretty much all of the local campaign staff and dedicated volunteers were there together, and it was a very cathartic moment for all. Bryan had his mobile broadband hooked into his laptop and was sharing it for us political junkies to check in on races around the country. This really came in handy after 9:34 PM when CNN called Ohio for Obama and the Presidential election was secure. I can't convey the level of nerdy politicalness we were exhibiting, as we fluently discussed house and senate races across the nation. It was exhilarating.
The 11:00 PM moment when all the networks called the election for Obama, a mere couple minutes after calling Virginia for Obama (which sent the bar into a huge frenzy), the bar basically exploded. Everyone was jumping and screaming and hugging whoever was nearby. Countless volunteers, especially older African-Americans, were stopping by the area where out-of-state volunteers and full time staff were hanging out and thanking us profusely. Watching the scene brought me the closest to tears I have been in a very long time.
McCain's concession speech twenty minutes later was well received, with only a little bit of singing "Hey hey, goodbye!". Tears were streaming down many faces in the bar when McCain voiced what everyone was thinking and put the historic nature of the election on a pedestal for the nation to see.
Everyone stuck around for Obama's victory speech at midnight and loved every moment of it. Hearing the many African-Americans in the crowd Amening his words struck home with me. It was an amazing moment to see the people I had been working with for a few days coalesce and feel a part of something bigger.
We stayed at the bar until around 1:30 when things came to an end and it was made clear we should move down to the campaign office. We did so and immediately hopped on their multitude of computers to continue tracking the close races around the nation. We were home and asleep before 3, savoring the sound of the words "President-Elect Obama."
Day 5 - Wednesday:We didn't dawdle too much, rising around 8 and heading out the door before 9. Our host and us exchanged a multitude of thanks, with everyone being happy about pretty much anything. We honored the election of our first black President with breakfast at the ever-racist Waffle House (they have good waffles, give us a break!), and even got to see another lady with a very fashionable confederate flag purse. We were ready to go back to DC. Got dorm-room-home around 2 and did my math hw and went to class an hour later. Woot for good timing. Somehow wrote a paper that night before falling into a level of sleep beyond that which mere mortals can normally achieve.
Overall Thoughts:Wow. There is an old political adage that a good ground game can get a candidate around 3-4 points in the election. This was a revolutionary ground game, but even if it only got an extra 3 points for Obama, that's enough to have switched IN, OH, VA, FL, and NC. That's 86 electoral votes, which is just enough to swing the election (leaving Obama short of 270 at 263). Everyone I met at every campaign office I went to was welcoming, tired, and hard at work, all at once. Such a well oiled machine is a sight to see, and I hope that some others get the chance to see something like it sometime. These five days were amazing both for what I got to contribute to and the people I got to contribute to it with. This, unlike anything else, has solidified my desire to be heavily involved in campaigns for as long as I can be. When 2012 rolls around and you are just finishing up college and ready to work, take a "break" and work for a candidate somewhere near you. I promise you that it will teach you something, either about something tangible or about yourself.
I am a little sad that I missed out on being in DC on election night. Campus, and really the whole city, exploded. GW students were the first to congregate in front of the White House, and soon there were thousands in the area and the networks were covering it. Cars were stopped and honking in celebration everywhere, and the emotional release of it all sounds pretty amazing. Sappy as it is, I am quite content to have been with the people I worked so hard with during the final push to election day. To see the joy on their faces when they knew for sure that what they had been working so hard for was accomplished was enough joy to last me a long time. The field director I was working under dropped out of college almost two years ago to work for Obama. He did amazing things in his counties and is better for it. I applaud him for being willing to take such a risk, he is one impressive guy.
