Just came back from New Hampshire. We joined up last tuesday right after the long weekend, in a local MoveOn meeting in Cambridge Mass. I would say we had 150+ people showed up that night (in a church, nonetheless). We then splited up into four groups. Two to NH and Two to Maine.
After a month of working on the phone bank with MoveOn calling people in OH, it was truly refreshing to see other volunteers face-to-face, who have been dedicated most of their free time and free cell phone minutes to help out. The response was so amazing. My team agreed to go this Sunday so we are five people, two cars, heading to Enfield, NH early this morning.
It's about 2.5hr drive from MA to Enfield NH. We got there about 11:00am. Our precinct leader gave us a warm welcome, brief us the procedure and technique to approach people. The basic rule is to make it quick and precise, since we are targeting mostly occasional, lazy voters who are mostly leaning Kerry but need a little push. The area that we target is quite deep in the rural area. Stables, horses, trackers were commonly found in the area, not to mention there were quite a few "beware of dogs" signs. It was a little scary when you could hear gun shots every 5 mins in the backdrop. But all that, didn't diminish our enthusiasm. We got our route and addresses and we were on our way.
It started pretty slow on the first couple houses, maybe I needed that to work up my courage and practice my skill to talk to people. But after that it was very easy. People were friendly (one nice couple even offer us chocolate), and they were willing to put down their home improvement tool and gardening shovel and talked to us. I would say about 60% of the targeted voters were not home, 30% of them all strong Kerry supporters and about 10% were either still undecided, lean Bush or strong Bush. Keep in mind that it is a NH small town, I was expecting more Bush supporters then Kerry supporters so I was just glad that we found at least a good number of voters who pledged to vote on Nov 2nd.
Overall, I would say MoveOn is extremely organized except the routes were not numerically sorted and therefore it was hard to run a smooth routine. And even if we brought our bikes with us to hit the dirt road it was difficult to maneuver them to get into the wood.
And gotta tell you guys, oen of the teammates, who did the driving, back and forth, was someone who just had a leg surgery 1.5 month ago, still walking on crutches. But that didn't hold back her determination to canvass. Picture a young woman hopping with crutches on NH dirt roads door to door, if it isn't impiring for us all to work our ass off these coming two weeks, I don't know what else will be more motivating.
So GOTV! Make calls for DNC, ACT or MoveOn... whatever you can do. I would say the last week will be the most critical, especially in Florida. My confidence towards NH, OH and NV has grown tremendously, except Florida. I know the DNC is running the phone book to call Florida so please sign on and work the work!
