In telling this story (and I really am just telling this as a personal story, since there's more than enough election coverage out there already), it makes sense to divide it into three parts: acclimation, campaigning as usual, and the final days/election day. So, without further adieu:
I. Acclimation
As I mentioned in a previous post, this job really jumped out at me. I got the call to come out on a Thursday, left for Ohio Friday, and reported for duty Sunday. Though I technically spent that weekend hanging out with friends at Denison during our homecoming weekend, I quickly found myself spending all of my time during the day running around campus trying to scan/fax/print out a mountain of paperwork I needed to get in by that Sunday to become officially employed by the campaign. (Let me tell you, I've never been happier to have a scanned copy of my birth certificate/State Department certificate on my computer. Made this whole process infinitely easier). But anyway, I get a call on Saturday from the Columbus headquarters telling me I'm going to be sent up to Canton. Naturally, I take a few minutes to get directions from Google Maps to that area, and look up a few facts about the area just so I'm not jumping in completely blind.
Sunday, however, things change. As I'm leaving Denison, I call Columbus to check in and make sure my paperwork went through alright. The paperwork's fine, but it turns out I'm now headed to Akron. The sudden change threw me off balance at first, but then I realized I really had no familiarity with either Canton or Akron, so it made no difference where they sent me. After getting new directions and saying my goodbyes, I headed northwest to the Akron headquarters on the corner of Merriman and Market.
Despite being fully aware of the fact that I had absolutely no idea what I was getting into, I still had a few preconceptions of what I would be doing and the type of environment I would be working in (mostly drawn from my stint as an intern on the O'Malley/Brown campaign in '06). The Akron office, though not exactly as I had pictured it, came pretty close. It was your stereotypical storefront campaign office; with long tables filled with phones and volunteers, laptops everywhere with campaign stickers on the backs, and quote-filled posters on every wall. Walking in, I was getting pretty excited for the type of work I would be doing in this city.
After sitting down with our Regional Director, Max, however, my hopes and expectations were quickly shattered and replaced with more mystery. Turns out the Akron office wasn't my staging location, just the regional office I would be reporting to. My actual sphere of operation was further to the north, in a town called Twinsburg. So, after getting the phone number for LM, my Field Organizer, and Sharon & Steve, my host family, I once again drove off into the great unknown.
The first thing that struck me about Twinsburg was how it didn't just stand in stark contrast to other towns around it, it stood in stark contrast with itself. In terms of organization, it reminded me a bit of Columbia; subdivided into little "villages," each with its own shopping center. These villages, though, were a strange mix of golf-course condos mostly owned by retirees, average suburban single-family houses, blue collar neighborhoods (with no sidewalks and streets in poor repair), and even a projects community. I could tell this was going to be a difficult area to target supporters in.
After meeting up with Steve and Sharon (and their amazing dog, Biscuit) around 9:00 PM, I headed out once again to meet up with LM at our local office. Not having a specific address, Steve gave me the best directions he could; telling me to just drive down Rt. 82 and look for the house with
the "Barack Obama for President" banner in the front porch. I headed out and down Rt. 82, and didn't really realize until I had crossed county lines into Cuyahoga County that I had possibly gone too far. Long story short, though: I found the place, met with LM, and went back to Steve and Sharon's around 10 (the earliest night I would ever have on this job). Got up the next morning, headed back to Akron for a weekly regional staff meeting, and was officially introduced to the whole staff. After that, I went back to Twinsburg, and got to work.II. Campaigning as Usual
First off, let me point out (if you didn't get it already) that the above title is a joke. There is absolutely nothing "usual" about campaigning. To chronicle everything I did leading up to the election would probably be ineffectual, unentertaining, and leave me with no motivation to finish this post, so I'll boil it down to the basics. During the days, I either ran odd jobs for LM, canvassed local neighborhoods, or worked on recruiting volunteers. At night, I ran the volunteer shifts out of our office. Before Get Out The Vote week (the final phase of the campaign, which I'll explain in greater detail soon), we only really had volunteers coming in from 5-9 and doing phonebanking. Basically, we had the volunteers calling undecided voters and "sporadic Democrats" (people who don't go to the polls that often, but vote Dem when they do) and just talking to them about Obama. After we stopped our calls at 9, my job was to tally all the numbers of the day - number of calls made, number of contacts made, and number of voters committed to early vote - and submit them to LM.
Ah crap, I missed a part of the story. Typical. Anyway, the reason LM couldn't just take these numbers himself was that he wasn't there anymore. Him and I were responsible for 3 towns, Twinsburg, Macedonia, and Northfield (another fact I forgot to mention. Sorry again), so he
started working out of Northfield and Macedonia as soon as I was hired, leaving me in charge of Twinsburg. Anyway, now you're caught up, so let's continue.Last thing I had to do each night was enter the data from all the calls so we could print fresh lists the next day for our phonebankers. Because our "grassroots" (see: strapped for resources) office didn't have internet, though, I found myself leeching wireless wherever I could to get all the data in before the midnight deadline. For the first few days, this meant sitting in my car outside a hotel and using their unencrypted wireless to do the numbers. After a while, though, a local teacher's union gave us keys to their office, so LM and I could have somewhere indoors to do internet-related stuff from.
Anyway, that was the skeleton structure for my average (if you could ever call it that) day. Random events would come up, such as Michelle Obama speaking at a highschool in Akron, that I'd take time off to go and help work. Until Wednesday, October 29th (the Wednesday before the election), though, I mostly stuck to that routine.
III. The Final Days/Election Day
As I mentioned before, our last coordinated campaign effort was called Get Out The Vote (GOTV, for short). At that point, we were working out of the office all day every day, sending canvassers out to talk face to face with undecided voters. This leg of the campaign really embodied the whole philosophy of the Obama campaign, which was to have local supporters talk to local voters to show that this election was about their own communities, and not just some singular blanket effort to win over voters with tactics such as robocalls or attack ads. Getting back to the point, though, the canvassing was the backbone of what we were doing. And, since our regular volunteers were mostly older women who didn't fancy lots of walking or interacting with total strangers, I had a lot of new volunteer recruiting to do. I succeeded modestly, but there were still days where we had almost no volunteers. During those days (such as Wednesday, when it started snowing for no goddamn reason), I had to go out and canvass on my own. I really met the full range of individuals while doing these routes; ranging from the old guys who threatened to rip my Obama/Biden button off and shove it down my throat to the WWII vet who, after having a half hour conversation with me about his genuinely undecided vote (as opposed to those who are too apathetic to vote but too lazy to come up with a decent reason why), told me it was young people like me who gave him hope for the future of this country. That one really stuck with me, and does still. Also, it seems that all the interesting stories come from old people. Younger-to-middle-aged voters really just tell you their opinion and close the door. Older people really let loose when you ask their opinion, and regardless of how they feel, it always makes for a better story.
Getting back to the point, though, the canvassing of undecided voters ran from Wednesday until Sunday. After that, the campaign figured it wasn't worth our resources to continue to contact these undecideds, and instead focused everything on mobilizing our base. Monday, we spent the entire day putting door hangers up on the doors of local Democrats, telling them where, when, and what to bring to vote. Though that was easier to recruit volunteers for (since there was no interaction with strangers), we were still short-handed. I wound up doing 2 precincts by myself until about 10 PM. After getting back to the office, I had to quickly run out and print the maps for election day canvassing (where we would be knocking on every supporter's door and making sure everyone voted), so I left Sharon to close up shop for the night.
Now, whenever I closed the office for the night, all I had to do was lock the front door, turn off the lights, and make sure the back door stayed unlocked. You see, we didn't have a key to the place, so locking the back door was a pretty bad idea for us. And Sharon did just that.
By the time I finished all my prep work for the following day, it was around 1 AM. Though some sleep may be better than none, I had no choice to be up and ready to at 4 AM on the big day. To make things more disorienting, the state office - who had the phone numbers of every staffer in the state - woke us all up at 4 with a robo-wakeup call from former president Bill Clinton. Waking up to a phone call from that guy has to be one of the strangest ways to start a sleep-deprived day ever.
Getting to the office and finding it was locked, I quickly narrowed my options down to one: break in. Now, our office was right off a pretty major road; a road that had become infested with cops in the days leading up to the election. Since the only open window was on a side of the house that faced the road, I first made sure to call LM and let him know what I was doing, and to call the Sheriff's station and post bail if he didn't hear back from me again in 10 minutes. Thankfully, though, I got in just fine.
Election day in itself was just too chaotic to describe, but I will say it was a mad rush right up until the second the polls closed. My day basically started with me chasing Republicans, who were giving voters wrong information about where to vote and who was eligible, out of the projects area, and ended with me being driven around by a madman after dark to knock on the doors of supporters who had already voted just to make sure. Hey, that late in the game, I didn't really have enough dignity left to care what people thought. But 7:30 came, polls closed, and I cracked open a beer with the other canvassers.
Sometime soon I'll getting around to writing an epilogue for this, both about what happened after the polls closed and the memories that stuck with me. That's for another time, though. Even just attempting to retell this mess has gotten my head in a spin, so I'll try to collect my thoughts so I can leave you with a much more concise and oriented conclusion. To leave you with something to summarize this mess, though, I'll just say this: I've answered more requests with "hold on, let me put my pants on" in those two weeks on the campaign than I probably have in the rest of my life.
