Canvassing For Kerry

I've been out doing volunteer work for the Kerry campaign for the past few days. On Saturday I did literature drops at about 150 homes in downtown Nashua. I was paired up with a fellow who has been in the USA only since 1986, but this is already the fourth Presidential election that he has volunteerd to do campaign work in. He's also been active in Senator Kerry's campaigns in Massachusetts. I provided the "local knowledge" of the downtown Nashua neighborhood that we were assigned... and in-state license plates for the car parked on the street -- which is quite important for perception. We were instructed not to knock on doors, just drop the literature. These activities are all carefully planned, and the list of addresses we had was supposedly narrowed down to confirmed Democrats and undecideds. Our job wasn't to convince the undecideds. Statistically they go for the challenger by about a 3:1 or 4:1 margin. Our job was just to "energize" and get the base and the undecideds to vote. Two different Bush-Cheney crews were working the same neighborhood, and they were knocking on doors -- but it didn't appear that they were knocking on doors of many of the same houses as we were visiting. One of the Bush-Cheney teams was driving. We were walking. They were driving a Mercedes... through a working-class neighborhood. They had in-state plates, too, but I don't think they felt comfortable leaving their car unattended.

After we completed the lit drop, I joined a "visibility" team waving signs at one of Nashua's major intersections. I was there for a little over two hours, and we had a great response from many of the motorists. One of my fellow sign-wavers observed that Volkswagon drivers were clearly heavily favoring our side. I didn't notice that, but I did notice that we got more thumbs-ups from women than men, and more younger motorists than older, and that "the bird" was exclusively the province of 20-something males traveling together in too-fast too-loud cars.

Today I spent four hours in front of a local grocery store "leafleting". Nobody wanted the leaflets, though. At least 8 out of the first 10 said something like "I've already got way too many of those", so eventually I stopped trying to hand them out and just concentrated on the spiel. Again, my job was to turn out the vote, not to convince anyone to change sides. After about 20 minutes, I had perfected about a half-dozen different versions of essentially the same few sentences targeted at likely Democratic voters, and a couple of more generic sentences targeted at other voters, and I believe I developed a good eye for distinguishing between the two. The response was excellent, with almost everyone being absolutely courteous, thanking me for reminding them to vote, complimenting me for getting involved, and returning my wishes for a good day. Many people showed their support for Senator Kerry, and several of them engaged with me quite enthusiastically to share their specific concerns. Some overtly indicated that they intended to vote for Bush, but only a few were emphatic about it, and only two gave me specific reasons why they weren't voting for Kerry.. Only one of the two was downright hostile in his reaction. He made my friend Jerry look like a pinko liberal commie. This fellow attempted to engage me for a few minutes, spouting the type of stereotypical far-far-right conspiracy theories that even most of my Republican friends are downright embarassed about. This was stuff that makes most of the wilder trolls on Usenet look take, but I've seen a great deal of it before in letters to the editor of the local paper, although a lot less these days than ten or fifteen years ago. He finally got bored after I brushed him off for about the fifth time to talk to someone else. I don't think a single eyebrow of any passerby wasn't raised in bemusement by his rantings. My favorite moment was with an elderly woman said "I wasn't old enough to vote for Roosevelt, but I sure wanted to, and I've voted Democratic every election since then!" There was also one woman who made me feel that the entire morning was worthwhile because she told me that she had never voted before but she wanted to, and she asked if she would be able to register at the polls. I happened to have a copy of NH Voter Bill of Rights, which I had printed from the web last night, which has information about that very subject, so in the "turn out the vote" effort, I believe I can chalk at least one up for the good guys.