I haven’t written on here for years, but --well. I’m happy to see so many familiar faces still here. Like family, I suspect a lot of us will be heading back to the Kos community in these terrible days.
I live in a blue, blue state that gets little attention from national campaigns. Every presidential cycle since Bush v. Gore I have signed up to do election protection work in whatever state needed. I have a little group recruited that always comes with me, and we usually add a few younger lawyers as well. It’s a long day, often boring, but it’s necessary, fulfilling and it’s kind of exciting not knowing where you’re going to be needed until about a week before. The DNC is the umbrella coordinator determining what areas need the staffing and the campaign gives us some simple training and obtains credentials for us.
So I did my usual sign-up this summer, advising them how far I was able to travel, what languages I can sort of speak, and emailed my pals to remember to do the same. By mid- October none of us had heard anything beyond the initial acknowledgment. Around Halloween I called my contact and was told it was still being finalized. The first week of November came and we still hadn’t heard, hadn’t done video-training, hadn’t applied for credentials. I called again—still being finalized. On NOVEMBER 7th I was told “hey, if you’ve got any races in your state that need help, just do that. We haven’t been able to pull this together”.
As a result of my experience, as compared to the Election Protection effort in the Obama and even Kerry races, I’m skeptical about the much vaunted ground game. I’m only seeing a little tiny slice because of where I live, but in two of the prior races I was sent to Wisconsin, and I was amazed by the tight coordination, which perhaps could have helped this year.
I am wondering if my experience was unusual or if assets and talents were not tapped by the DNC that could have been. If I had known a few days earlier the DNC wasn’t going to assign us, I could have moved us into a program that was active in a close Senate race, or to an independent poll-watching organization. Sadly, I couldn’t do it on a days notice. Did anyone have a similar experience? Certainly, it wasn’t any kind of tipping point, but if this kind of detail was repeatedly overlooked in GOTV efforts, it might have been worth a point. I’d like to know because it would be something to fix for next time.
