In 1990 College Professor Paul Wellstone decided to run for the US Senate. Wellstone believed that community organizing and electoral politics went hand in hand. He hit the streets and inspired thousands to volunteer for his campaign. Wellstone won with 50.4% of the vote against a 2 term GOP incumbent, Wellstone was out spent 7 to 1.
Bernie Sander’s volunteer army has grown to over 3 million people. In my county alone, Westchester NY, the first county north of New York City, over 30,000 have signed up at berniesanders.com
In August I saw Bernie put 28,000 people into an arena in Portland, I decided to get on board. In 2004 I took leave for my crappy taxi drivers job and flew from NJ to Broward county Florida for a staff position in the Kerry Edwards campaign. Now with an additional 13 campaigns under my belt, I knew what to do when no one was organizing in my area. First I requested a Voter Registration database for my county from the board of elections. I know that walk lists are an actionable item, and sure enough we were canvassing for Bernie in September. One of my volunteers wrote a software program to scrape phone numbers off the whitepages.com. Now I had a poor mans VAN, we were in the business of phone banking by the end of September. We collected donations and bought 10,000 pieces of Bernie lit for $480 with an online crowdfund. Some of you donated to this project. Thanks.
At this point in the timeline Bernie was ascending in the polls, tightening up the race with Hillary, until Hillary started making big media buys. By the second debate in October the polls were static. In Mid November the Sanders campaign unveiled its OpenVPB online phone bank tool, so we started training volunteers how to use the tool. That first generation taught a 2nd generation, who taught a 3rd generation and soon we started to see some small positive movement in the polls for Bernie.
Then in early December the word went out on the Slacks that beta testers were needed for a predictive dialer, and other volunteers were needed for support. What we didn’t know at the time was that, that support, would be manually entering cell phone numbers into the system, because Federal law prohibits autodialers from dialing cell phone numbers.
The polls responded. In the first week of January we made 400,000 calls into Iowa, the polls continued to respond. On December 7th Bernie was down 36 points in South Carolina, now its an 8 point race with 5 weeks to go.
Hillarys campaign simply doesn’t have the time, the money, the volunteers or the tools to pull this one out. With dozens of House candidates running against GOP incumbents, endorsing Bernie and his platform, the stage is set for a similar type of political revolution that FDR called for, when in 1932 Democrats took 99 House seats, along with 4 more from the Agriculture Labor Party and won 11 Senate seats.
So my Brothers and Sisters, the time is now. Step out of your comfort zone and step up for Bernie.
Go to berniesanders.com/events and create a phone bank party at your home. Open your home to total strangers as tens of thousands of others have done in the Bernieverse and enjoy feeling the Bern. Calling into the early states is how we elect Bernie Sanders. Check out the links, there’s a webinar to get you started and all the tools, plus a help line is available.
Sign up to use the online phone bank tool here.
Sign up to host a phone bank party here.
Thursday January 21st Westchester4Bernie goes back to Hillarys’ backyard, Chappaqua Metro North train station to hand out flyers. A reporter will be meeting us for interviews. This is what democracy looks like, Millennials, Gen Xers & Boomers standing together to take back Chappqua & Westchester county & New York State.
Westchester4Bernie.org We Deliver.
Now is the time we run up the score and start building coat tails so President Sanders will have a majority in the House and Senate. Put the Daily Kos down and join Duane from Ossining, Michelle from Scarsdale, Eve from Larchmont, Barry from Chappaqua, Jennifer from Binghamton, Rachel from Albany, Lauren from Syracuse and all the other awesome people I’ve met on this incredible journey that started in August and empower yourself by making some calls for Bernie. Because this is how we elect Bernie.
This message is volunteer powered and is in no way paid for by the billionaire class.