I arrived twelve days before Election Day, after a six-hour
delay in Charlotte and was picked up by
Mike “Coop” Cooper, retired IRS lawyer and phonebanker extraordinaire. I was assigned
to the South Aurora office, along with eight other out-of-state volunteers (most of whom work on the Hill), five field organizers and an army of
other volunteers. The South Aurora
office was one of twenty-five across the state, the field organizers, five of
one hundred. We got paper cuts on our hands and blisters on our feet. We were cussed
out by voters, shooed away by security and questioned by the police. Some walls
may have been hopped over (sometimes you’ve got a 90-door packet and limited
time to talk to everyone, so…) and there was at least one dog bite. Most of the
OOSVs (out-of-state volunteers) and some of the field organizers stayed in
supporter housing – hosted by local volunteers who took us into their homes,
lent us their cars, fed us, in addition to calling or knocking doors
themselves. The kindness shown by these people is just one example of the great
display of hospitality I’ve been shown and benefited from the last few years.
As out-of-state volunteers, our role was to complete two or
three canvassing shifts each day, help out with volunteer recruitment phonecalls
as our field organizers needed them, debrief returned
canvassers, sign them up for more shifts, restock materials and so on. I was especially
excited to be canvassing again. I love canvassing. Who wouldn’t love knocking
strangers’ doors (often in the dark) or stopping them on the street and asking
them for money or to tell you who they’re voting for? It’s hard and it’s fun,
sometimes depressing, but frequently encouraging and exciting and heartwarming.
I think it’s also totally badass. Is it bad form to describe something you do as
badass? Maybe. Or maybe just in Britain? I don’t know anymore.
 | ||||||||
| President Bill Clinton |
 |
| The whole Democratic gang |
This volunteer experience offered many parallels with Obama
in 2012, and a couple of notable differences. It turns out that Aurora follows
the same strange system of recycling street names as Greeley. So not
only do you get E Bates Ave, you also get E Bates Cir, E Bates Ct, and E Bates
Dr. What fun! As in 2012, I had the chance to talk to many Latino voters.
I spoke with a family one evening in Spanish, and the mother asked me why she
and her family members should vote for Udall and Romanoff. I asked which issues
matter to them – “la inmigración,”
she replied, but said that all politicians talk about what they’re going to do
for Latinos during elections, then forget about them the rest of the time. Trying
to explain to someone why their concerns went apparently unaddressed in the
last two/four/six years is hard enough in English, so I’m not sure how
successful I was in convincing her to vote for the candidates, but it was so
interesting, just like the chat I had with another Latino voter on a doorstep
in Greeley two years ago, to reflect upon what this conversation revealed about
this political moment.
Certainly, we have seen some attempt to pass comprehensive immigration
reform (indeed, Colorado’s other Senator, Michael Bennet, was heavily involved
in 2013) and Obama has issued executive orders, such as DACA (Deferred Action
for Childhood Arrivals), for undocumented people brought to the U.S. as
children – so it is not as though all politicians talk about their immigration
plans simply as a way to pander to this population. Turnout remains lower among
voters identifying as Latino than among African American and Anglo populations,
so while there is much talk of the current demographic shift that will mean
that parties need to learn how to properly target Latino voters, if that’s a
term that will continue to mean anything (if it means all that much now), we do
not seem to be there yet. It will be interesting to see the impact that a
growing Latino electorate will have on policy in the years to come.
As residents of a purple state, Coloradans are targeted
relentlessly during election season. TV ads, print ads, phone calls, door
knocks. They’re oversaturated. And just as in the last election, you could feel
them becoming increasingly annoyed at the incessant contact. But once Get Out
the Vote (GOTV) begins, they can ensure most phone calls and door knocks stop
by getting their ballots in. The campaigns update their lists based on official
records, so whenever a voter at the door would protest yet another knock at the
door, we could assure them we wouldn’t come back once they voted, that they had
the ability to make it stop – sort of like protection racketeers, for democracy.
 |
Then there were some ways in which volunteering on this
campaign was quite different. The 2012 elections saw the people of Colorado vote
in favor of Amendment 64, legalizing possession and use of marijuana. I’ll
admit that I’ve not been particularly tuned-in to the economic or political
impact this has had in the intervening years, but I do know that when
canvassing in this election, I interacted with many more bleary-eyed,
reaction-slowed, chill voters than in 2012. If I were a copy editor, I might be
tempted to say that they put the “high” in “Mile-High City.” But I’m not, so I
won’t. Since this was a midterm year, turnout was, predictably, lower. We saw
both voters who had decided not to vote at all (many of whom were members of
the Democratic Party’s key constituencies) and voters who had been convinced by
the opposition to think of the elections as a referendum on Obama. Not everyone
is going to be convinced that they should vote in the midterms, no matter how
many times you knock their door, but some might.
I knocked Mongo’s door on Saturday. He told me that he had
voted for Obama in 2012, but was not planning to vote in this election – that it
didn’t seem important. I spent a few minutes with him, while he smoked on the
cigar he keeps in a mug inside the grill on his porch, talked about how close
the races were, about how Udall’s re-election could prove key in allowing the
Democrats to maintain control of the Senate. I joked that because I’d
spent five minutes talking to him, rather than knocking other people’s doors, it
would only be right for him to vote for Udall and Romanoff. I left his porch
unsure of whether it had meant anything to him, of whether it had made a
difference. I happened to be given the same turf a couple of days later, on
Election Day. It was about 9:15am when I knocked his door, but there was no
response. A couple of hours later, when waiting for my ride back to the office,
I knocked it once more. He came to the door:
“It’s you again!” he said. “I just got back from voting.”
“For Udall and Romanoff?” I asked.
“Yeah!” he said, and pulled his “I Voted” sticker from his
pocket to show me. “I wasn’t going to vote, but I did because of you. You
inspired me.”
 |
| Mongo |
Why am I telling this story? It’s not, I promise, to show
off to you, people of the internet (many from the Netherlands, for reasons I
can’t figure out), how talented a canvasser I am, how much I inspire the voters
of Colorado. But rather, that voter contact, and canvassing in particular, are
really important, powerful ways of getting people to engage in their democracy.
Connections between people matter. Many other volunteers I spoke to have similar
experiences, stories of conversations they’ve had with voters where they have
had really meaningful, impactful interactions. A canvassing friend of mine has
a poster on her wall with a quote from U.S. Representative Jan Schakowsky, of
Illinois’s 9th congressional district, who used to canvass:
“It’s the most important job and it’s an amazing job… It’s
amazing to take a message to the door, to a perfect stranger with nothing more
than a badge as a credential and raise money and pass on the hope that we can
make a difference […] it’s the most important and direct and I think most
meaningful kind of interaction.”
Amen.
So, we lost. That hurts and it’s hard to make sense of, but
I am so proud of what we all did. It was good and it was important. The title
of this post is from part of Udall’s concession speech, where he quoted his
wife, environmental lawyer Maggie Fox. We did democracy. I left Colorado inspired by the work of those who have been doing this, seven days a week, for months.
After my flight from Denver, I was waiting for the bus at
LaGuardia, and heard the woman next to me talking on the phone (I won’t apologize
for being a serial eavesdropper). I don’t know what she was talking about, but
she said, “you can’t do nothing if you’re not doing something.” At one level, this
sentence is obvious, right? Tautological, even. Of course you can’t do anything
if you’re not doing something. But she’s right. We can’t achieve anything if we
don’t keep trying, in spite of the knockbacks, of the bitter defeats. It is
those bitter defeats, as my Mum said in an email the morning of the election,
that make eventual victory all the sweeter.
See you in 2016, folks.
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