“This isn’t my first rodeo. No wait, it is.”

In July, I went to Cheyenne’s Frontier Days (CFD), a celebration of the Western lifestyle, the main attraction of which is its large, award-winning rodeo. Since rodeo is Wyoming’s official state sport, I had to get to Cheyenne to see it for myself.

Attendance at CFD (sometimes referred to as “the Daddy of ‘em All,” or, as the announcer called it on the day we were there, “The Mardi Gras of the Plains" - not so sure about that one) exceeded 200,000 visitors this year. Although the rodeo is a big draw, many people also come for the concerts, fairground rides, “Indian Village” (more on that later), free pancake breakfasts, vendors and parades. There are abundant opportunities to spend your money and – much more interestingly – to see the ways in which people perform various Western identities. I’ve never seen so many cowboy hats in my entire life.

So, to the rodeo. There were many different events on the schedule, including: 

• Bull riding: probably the most well-known of the events. The competitor sits on a bull, secures himself by holding onto a rope with one hand and must keep his other free. He needs to stay there for eight seconds and then is scored on control and balance. Part of the reason the bull moves around so much is that he has a “bucking strap,” causing a fair amount of discomfort. The strap is released when the ride is over.
• Steer wrestling (video below): a two-competitor event where a young bull is released into the arena and while one competitor rides alongside it to keep it in a straight line, the other competitor jumps off his horse and works to stop the bull and turn him over onto his shoulders. This one’s frantic and can be quite dangerous.
• Barrel racing: a timed event where competitors must travel around three barrels in the fastest time possible. The only event at CFD in which women competed.
• Steer roping: the roper and his horse are released into the arena slightly after the steer, and the roper must throw his rope around the steer’s horns, turn to trip it up and then tie together three of its legs, which must remain tied for six seconds.
• Bronc riding: like bull riding, except, you know, with horses. There's a guy in my geography class who used to bronc ride competitively.
• Wild horse racing: teams of three are each given an unbroken horse. They must saddle it and attempt to make one lap of the track. The team with the horse/rider to return first wins. Most of this event consisted of watching teams struggle to saddle up their horses, horses running in every direction and even of those who completed their lap, few did so with their riders still attached. 

 

Many rodeo events developed out of tasks performed by cowboys, but my impression is that today, many of the competitors (plenty of whom spend the season on the rodeo circuit) have never worked on ranches. To my surprise, competitors came from across the country – there were more than a few from the South, the Pacific Northwest and the Midwest. While competition is drawn from a wide geographical area, it is not necessarily otherwise particularly diverse. I only noted one Asian American and one African American competitor and was actually quite surprised not to see more Hispanic competitors. With the exception of barrel racing, the CFD rodeo (and most other rodeos at the same level, by my understanding) was male-dominated.

For obvious reasons, rodeo can be a dangerous sport. If I heard the announcer correctly, one competitor had broken his back shortly before we arrived. One of the ways in which competitors are protected from the bulls is through the use of “rodeo clowns.” If the rider gets bucked off, the rodeo clown’s job is to distract the bull while the rider gets away. It’s a dangerous job and the clowns must be quick and agile. They dress in bright clothing, which is apparently designed to come away easily, should they be attacked.

After watching the rodeo, we spent some time exploring the vendors’ stalls. The range of items available for purchase was certainly varied. In addition to the stuff you'd expect - the carved wooden furniture, spangly horse tackle, candy, cowboy hats and so on, we also saw a Brazilian cooling system, Crocs and fitness machines. Really, though - who buys a cooling system at a rodeo? Probably people who get the rest of their stuff from SkyMall. We also saw this massive dog (not for sale). Unfortunately, the picture doesn’t show quite how massive it was, or how truly heinous the owner’s wig was.
 

If you played one of the fairground games, there was a chance to win this star-spangled rifle.

One of CFD’s longest-running attractions(?) is the Indian Village (“sponsored by Taco Bell”). Native Americans have been invited to perform at Frontier Days since the end of the nineteenth century (one assumes Taco Bell sponsorship came more recently), because, as the CFD website explains, “American Indians have always been an important part of western history.” I don’t know much about what those earlier displays of Native American cultures looked like, but I was interested to see what the 2012 Indian Village looked like. The village features teepees and a range of booths selling trinkets. We arrived just in time to see the afternoon dancing performance. During the show, I was trying to figure out what was at work here and how the audience responded to it. The woman introducing each of the performers made a point of emphasizing their lives outside of their performing – their jobs, where they were attending university and so on. I spoke to one of the drum players afterwards, and asked what the motivation was behind the formation of the group and he said it was primarily to break down stereotypes, but that he often enjoys messing with people who ask him stupid questions. He said he's sometimes asked what his teepee is like, to which he normally responds by talking about its flatscreen TV and solar panels. I don’t really know what the take-away is for many of the visitors to the Indian Village, but it was interesting to see it nonetheless.

In visiting Cheyenne, I was surprised at how big it felt. I don’t mean the crowds at Frontier Park, of course there are thousands of people there. It felt very large as a city. The population is 60,000, a third of the size of anywhere I lived before coming to Wyoming. This state is doing something to me.

Video for the British Association for American Studies

Eric Sandeen, the head of the American Studies program at the University of Wyoming, suggested to BAAS (the organization that awarded me the graduate assistantship) that I make a video, giving a brief overview of my experience here.

It's now up on BAAS's award information page and will hopefully give those thinking of applying an idea of what coming to Wyoming for American Studies might be like. If you're reading this, you probably have a fairly good idea of what I've been up to, but I thought I might as well put it here anyway.

Four More Years.

Tuesday marked the end of two and a half months (in my case, much longer for others) of phone banks, canvassing shifts (in the snow and the sun), being told “shame on you” (more than once), plenty of trips down to Colorado, getting positive responses and thank-yous that make unpleasant ones more bearable, going to rallies, and making one 600-mile roundtrip to drop off a phone and a clipboard. It was wonderful.

In mid-August, I finally got round to doing something I had been meaning to do for a while: getting involved in the Obama campaign. OFAWY (Obama for America – Wyoming) was dedicated entirely to helping Obama win Colorado. We were obviously not going to win Wyoming (and its three electoral votes), so instead, we were an export state – focused on helping Obama win the state to the south (with its nine). Wyoming was a single-staff state, which means that there was only one paid staff member (Bob, the state director), who was supported by a corps of interns and volunteers. From the first day I helped out at the office, I learned that this was a data-driven campaign. It is essentially a numbers game. A great deal of political science research has shown that X number of calls/door knocks translates to Y number of votes. Our task was not to provide people with yard signs or bumper stickers. Such merchandise may be nice, but it does not provide a statistically significant electoral advantage. Yard signs don’t vote. This campaign was about spreadsheets and about making targeted calls. In this regard, it was very different to my experience of how campaigns work in the UK (for the time being, at least).

West Greeley office.

There’s an awful lot that I could write here, but instead of overloading you with information, I’ll try to give a rough idea of some of what I got up to. I'll apologize now for the abundant parentheses. And for failing to avoid overloading you with information.

Despite having planned to get involved all summer, it wasn’t until I received an email about going down to canvass in Fort Collins that I actually signed up for my first volunteer shift, and I’m so glad I did. With what was left of my summer break at that point, I started to go to the downtown Laramie office regularly to make phone calls, initially to recruit volunteers in Wyoming and Colorado. My first time involved asking people in the town of Etna (pop. 164) to attend a phone bank that week. The campaign here has been remarkably successful at establishing teams in similarly tiny towns (the explanation for which I’m sure would be fascinating to explore in itself), which has served as a good way for voters across Wyoming to get involved and make their voices heard in a state that doesn’t necessarily offer many such opportunities.

All the names we had in our system were of people who had identified themselves as supporters at one point or another, but that didn’t mean they were always glad to hear from us. Everyone who made calls enjoyed their share of angry voters – those who were bothered that you were interrupting their dinner, calling them at work/on their cell (numbers which they willingly gave us, along with an email address in some cases), and – in my case especially – asking where you’re calling from. One guy thought my calling him from what he presumed to be a UK-based call center was evidence of Obama’s desire to outsource jobs. I may or may not have called a particular supporter’s cell phone after he rudely dismissed me from his landline. I simply assumed that his providing us with three methods by which to contact him must have meant that he wanted to be very contactable. He was not terribly pleased with my decision.

Making calls using the predictive dialer.
Photo credit: Chase Harmelink.

Up until October 9^th, canvassing was focused both on persuading people who we knew might vote for Obama and on voter registration. Scott Gessler, the Republican Secretary of State of Colorado (and various Secretaries of State elsewhere), had made the decision to “cut costs” by striking from the voter rolls those individuals who did not vote in 2010. As such, there were many Colorado voters who were expecting to receive their mail-in ballots for this election and who – if we had not been able to reach them – would have been disappointed. Therefore, part of our job when knocking the doors of those listed as IFTV (inactive, failed to vote), was to re-register them. Good old Gessler.

Now, as was often the way both with canvassing and making calls, most people were not in (or decided not to answer the door/phone – something which became much more common as the campaign progressed and the Colorado voters were fed up of being harassed by the campaigns). This sometimes made for frustrating walks (by which I mean canvassing trips, not like annoying strolls), where you didn’t always feel like you’d done much good, but it was important to remember that just being out there helped, and was a crucial part of the process. Even if it didn’t always feel like it, days with a poor contact rate – perhaps eight conversations out of 56 doors knocked – were still important, as was remembering that some days are better than others. I’m not sure this makes perfect sense when written down, but I think it's an important way to see things when involved in a campaign.

Even though the walk packets contain maps of the turf you’re canvassing, navigating unfamiliar territory can nevertheless introduce you to some confusing/frightening/interesting experiences. If, for example, you’re canvassing in poorly-planned Greeley, CO, you must try not to get confused about whether you’re on 30^th Avenue, 30^th Avenue Court, or 30^th Avenue Place, or why house number 412 does not seem to exist (it’s in a cul-de-sac a quarter mile south of 410, naturally). Be aware of large dogs in front yards. Your knocking the front door may wake them from their sleep and lead to a frantic ten-second panic which involves you failing to latch the gate as you run yelling and screaming out of the front yard, dropping your voting location stickers and trying to use your walk list clipboard as a shield… or so I’ve heard. Canvassing may take you onto front porches with creepy cuddly-toy tea parties (and not in a way that made it seem like they were just toys that had been left out by a child who lived therein). It may enable you to talk to people in trailer parks, where the homes seem to have inadequate guttering to deal with snowmelt (an important matter in the Mountain West), presumably leading to some unpleasant living conditions for the residents, and it’s possible (although unlikely) that you’ll be confronted with some vehement racism towards the president. Canvassing was a good way to see more of this fascinating, varied and often perplexing place.

President Obama came to speak on the Colorado State University campus in late August, and since tickets were distributed on campus the Saturday before by his “advance team”, it was a good opportunity to register many of those waiting in line for tickets. Since a large proportion were students, many had either just moved away from their parents’ homes, or had recently moved between student accommodation, and needed to re-register. This, plus the fact that they were something of a captive audience while waiting for distribution to begin, made for a very successful day of registration. I really enjoyed registering voters – it is a tremendously satisfying activity in itself. I know it sounds incredibly corny, but it just feels good to be facilitating democracy, helping people exercise their democratic right.

Not long after voter registration ended, the campaign shifted its focus toward ‘Get Out the Vote’ (GOTV), which involved a combination of checking to see if those who had applied for mail-in ballots had received them and sent them off yet, and encouraging everyone else to vote early. Later, we made lots of ballot-chasing calls, making sure voters with mail-in ballots sent them in before the deadline (“No, ma’am. I’m afraid you can’t send it in at the end of the week, the election is on Tuesday.”) Particularly exciting for me was the fact that some of the people we called/canvassed were more comfortable speaking in Spanish. There is a box on the sheet you can check to indicate this and the campaign will have someone get in touch later, but I was really glad of the opportunity to be able to talk to them then. I think it’s really important that participation in the electoral process is encouraged by facilitating greater involvement across the changing American electorate (the subject of my undergrad thesis, if anyone’s interested). The matter of how Latinos vote – particularly how such voting behavior may be affected by the complex process of racial/ethnic identity formation, shaped in part by religious, regional, class and national identities – will, I think, be of increasing interest in elections to come (the developing topic of my grad thesis, if anyone’s interested).

'El Norte': the staging location in North Greeley, which has a high concentration of Latino voters.

When Election Day arrived, I simply could not concentrate on my work. At 12:30pm, I decided to head down to the office, since I figured I’d be of more use there than staying at home trying to plan a paper, where brief periods of productivity had been punctuated by periods of pacing around the house and moments of anxiety/excitement/swearing. There were lots of final GOTV calls to be made, and from lunchtime until the polls closed at 7pm, the group of us in the office made 2000 calls. We made calls right up until the moment they closed, on principle, and then it was done. There was nothing more we could do. Many months of work had been leading up to this one day and now it was over. Since OFAWY had started up, a total of 68,000 contact attempts had been made (calls or door knocks). Various other volunteers and interns arrived to watch the results come in, which was great – it was really nice to be in the company of everyone else who had contributed to the campaign. I've met some tremendously smart, hard-working and talented people and it was an honor to be part of their team.
 

Election Night: computers, call sheets, phones, food.

Every time the networks announced that Obama had won a state, people cheered. Then when Ohio was called, the place went nuts. Screaming, hugging, high-fiving. We had done it. Everyone was very happy, but still eager to know how Colorado had gone. Of course the outcome would have been great regardless, but we wanted to know if the state we had been relentlessly calling and visiting for months had gone in our favor. When we found out that it had, we were overjoyed. We built that.

It was one of the best things I’ve ever been involved in.
 

Yep.

Bob had all of us sign the banner during the results.

Rewind: 2008 Presidential Election

Since tomorrow is Election Day 2012, I thought I'd re-post something I wrote four years ago, the day before the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, for the UEA American Studies blog, Containing Multitudes.

Yard signs dot neighborhoods, campaign ads fill commercial breaks, news schedules are filled with stories of candidates’ state-hopping and polling data. The election is well and truly upon us. Tuesday will see voters electing candidates to a number of positions, with a ballot paper that can take up to ten minutes to complete. The electorate will also decide on Amendment 2 to the state’s constitution, similar to California’s Proposition 8, which would define marriage only as between one man and one woman. If the amendment achieves the support of sixty percent of voters, it will become part of the Constitution of Florida.

Despite the plethora of positions to be filled - members of Congress, local Sheriffs and Supervisors of Elections - it is unsurprising that the Presidential race is the most discussed and debated. Here in Florida, one of the 'battleground states', the outcome is of particular interest. Florida is one of a handful of states for which the result is not already a largely foregone conclusion (although polling in even some of the traditionally strongly red states, like Indiana, is indicating the possibility of major gains for the Democrats). Candidates are keen to keep campaigning here until the last moment: both Obama and McCain and each of their running mates having visited the state in the past week. As home to a high proportion of Latinos, who have tended to vote Democrat (with the exception of Cuban-Americans, who tend to vote Republican), Floridian campaigning materials and ads in Spanish are widespread, such as Obama’s ‘¡Basta Ya! Unidos Por El Cambio’ (‘Enough Already! United for Change’). The state’s large retiree population has also been targeted, through initiatives like ‘The Great Schlep’, a movement organized in part by the Jewish Council for Education and Research, in which young Jewish Americans have visited their grandparents in Florida to encourage them to vote for Obama. The state has gone Republican in all but one of the last four Presidential elections, with 2000 being one of the most memorable and fiercely contested battles in the state’s history, eventually coming down to a ruling by the United States Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore. Polling data currently indicates a lead for Obama of a few percentage points, although McCain-Palin yard signs in more rural areas and a notable presence on car bumpers show that they are not without support here. Only Tuesday night will show us which way the state has swung.

I took the opportunity to visit the Democrats of Osceola County Obama Office in Kissimmee three days before the election to witness some of the campaigning first-hand. Nilsa, a mother of ten (four her own, three adopted and three more raised by her!), originally from Puerto Rico but resident in the US for 50 years, has been volunteering at the office since the beginning of August. I asked her, a first-time campaigner, how and why she got involved this time. She first explained that her children have now grown-up and she has recovered sufficiently from recent heart surgery. When she was invited to volunteer, she initially spent just a few hours working in the office, gradually getting more and more involved, to the point where she now feels out of place at home. As we spoke, the campaign office bustled around us, with phones ringing, yard signs being carted through the building and a whiteboard saying that home-cooked food for those working on the main volunteer floor upstairs would be greatly appreciated. The diversity of Democratic support was demonstrated by the variety of materials around the office and the parking lot outside, with posters and bumper stickers bearing slogans like ‘Women for Obama’ and ‘Arab-American Democrat.’ One of the volunteers sported a ‘Teamsters for Obama-Biden’ t-shirt.

Nilsa, in discussion with another volunteer, said that on election day they would be providing water to all the voters in line at the Polling Places – Republicans, Democrats, whoever – “we don’t discriminate”. Long lines have been a great issue even in the days up to the election, with many voters taking the opportunity to vote early but still having to wait up to ten hours in line. Nilsa spoke of her desire for a new kind of President: “we need an intellectual, a smart man. I’m going to send him a lot of Puerto Rican food – rice and beans!” Asked about how confident she feels, she said “I’m not singing yet. I’m behind the curtains, gargling warm water with salt… We don’t look at the TVs or the polls – we can’t.” And if Tuesday goes well? “We’ll be cleaning up, celebrating and continuing our progress.”

“Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could stand. Martin Luther King stood so Barack Obama could run. Barack Obama ran so our children could fly” – from a leaflet in the campaign office.

It’s 00:15 Eastern Time, November 4th 2008 – the first results in the US Presidential Election 2008 have just come in from Dixville Notch, New Hampshire - a small village of just 21 registered voters, which has not gone Democratic since Humphrey in 1968. 

McCain: 6, Obama: 15. So the election begins…

And now, back to 2012. It's 12:08 MST on November 6th. How did Dixville Notch go this time? Romney: 5, Obama: 5.