This Presidential Election really has me riled up, so yesterday morning I got up early to volunteer for Barack Obama at the Medford, Oregon office.
Ashland, where I live, is very liberal (think Berkeley in the mountains) and the office there gets loads of volunteers. Medford OTOH is only 15 miles away, but much more conservative. Figured they needed us more there.
We walked in a few minutes late--the training for our shift had already started. It was busy and the office was packed with half-opened boxes of campaign mterial. 25-30 volunteers were listening intently to a college-aged man gesturing energetically while he gave what I at least thought were amusing canvassing instructions, like:
* Don't get chased by a dog. If the house doesn't look safe or a man comes after you with an axe, don't go up to the door.
* Don't get in a fist fight. At this point, we're not trying to change minds.
On a serious note, he said this is a numbers game. 1 in 12 people you talk with will vote. And remember, you're representing Barack Obama and we have spent a lot of time building a positive reputation in Southern Oregon.
As he reviewed the packet with us, a woman in her 60s who for whatever reason felt the need to antagonize on an early Sat morning, interrupted dourly, "Excuse me, but I really feel like you're being condescending. Like we're kids or something. I don't know if this is generational, but the way you are talking is offensive. I came in here inspired, but now I feel like walking out." Mind you, the guy talking to us looked like he hadn't slept or eaten in a week. And sure, he was a bit of a smart-ass, but I kind of like that in a person. The room fell uncomfortably silent. The young man calmly said, "I've been up since 6am and I've already had a full pot of coffee. I'll see what I can do."
Kind of an odd way to start things off, but I was proud of the guy that he kept his cool. He probably gets people like that all the time. She didn't have much of a sense of humor. Maybe she was an ex-Hillary supporter (ha ha). Anyway, after the drama, we all got in our cars to drive to our canvassing areas.
We ended up with Turf 3 in Central Point which is a town past Medford. We got the area by the highway--a mostly all-white, lower-income neighborhood. It was starting to rain. We went from house to house, knocking on doors, and asking them if they'd voted or not and if possible, marking whether they had voted for Obama (checkbox 1), McCain (checkbox 5) or were still undecided (checkbox 3).
Most everyone was nice, polite, and enthusiastic, except for a meth-head girl sitting on her apartment stoop who said she wouldn't be voting and a woman whose yard was filled with so much random junk I could barely find a way to the front door. She eyed me suspiciously and although at first I could tell she considered giving in, she ultimately said, "It's none of your business whether I vote or not" and slammed the door in my face.
At this stage in the game, it is all about getting people to vote. And in Oregon, it was important to make sure that voters who hadn't yet turned in their ballots knew it was too late to mail them in and they had to drop them off at an official ballot box. During training, we were told we could bring back ballots to the office, although most people wouldn't feel comfortable doing that.
One of the first people I talked to was an old man who hadn't mailed his ballot in yet. I offered to take it for him and drop it off at the Obama office where they would take care of putting it in the ballot box. He said that would be great and handed his signed ballot to us. I have to say I was surprised. I told him I'd give him the office number so he could doublecheck it had been turned in, but he said he trusted me. I was very proud.
I met a young Hispanic couple having breakfast who pumped their fists in the air about Obama and a frazzled woman with several young kids who had just moved in and didn't know where her ballot was or who to vote for in the local elections. I gave her the address of her drop-off location and made sure someone from the office called her back so she could get help before Tues. I was going to give her a few URLs to look up, but she didn't have a computer.
We kept running into a young man with a grocery bag who was presumably on his way home from the store. Every time he walked by my Jeep, he stared way too long at it. As luck would have it, we were knocking on doors near his place and saw him go into his apartment. He watched us while we did our work and we eventually ended up knocking on a door two down from him. "What are you doing anyway," he finally asked us. We said we were just encouraging people to vote. We asked him if he had voted and as he looked at us glassily, he said he wasn't allowed to. Well...you know what that means.
We knocked on a door for a young man, but got his mother instead. He was in Iraq. He was in the Army seeing combat, calling in tanks. She missed him and he'd be home in February. We talked for a few minutes, but it was raining and we needed to keep going. As we walked away, she called out--the election was important, but it would turn out the way God intended. It was God's will, she told us.
All in all, I felt great after 3 hours of canvassing in the rain. We turned up almost 75 contacts, 11 of whom had voted (most for Obama). Of the remaining, they all said they would turn in their ballots Monday. Here's to hoping.
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