Greetings, kossacks. I just returned from a day canvassing a middle-middle class white suburb in Erie County PA for Obama. The Obama HQ in the city of Erie, which was hopping on Sundays in the primary season, was quieter, although there appeared to be 3-4 regular staffers and 4-5 volunteers working the phone most of the time and people in and out for canvassing. The permanent Obama staff seemed VERY concerned about the possibility of a McCain upset in Pennsylvania and are looking hard for volunteers. I traveled from upstate NY to work. I urge New Yorkers upstate to consider a trip to Erie, where Obama has to rack up a sizeable win, to contribute. Again, the staffers there seemed genuinely anxious, and the number of volunteers appeared to me, on this one Sunday morning, to be down considerably from the primary campaign. This thing is NOT over, so don't "flake out". If you were considering volunteering do.
Notes on the canvass on the flip.
My partner and I, plus my young son, walked a middle-class white neighborhood - nurses, teachers, middle managers, firemen, county employees -- bordering on the city of Erie itself. We had a list of mostly Democratic voters, some ID'd supporters, and many we had to "ID and persuade." According to the folks at the headquarters, these were people who someone (the computers?) had flagged as infrequent voters. The neighborhood is full of Obama-Biden signs, with nary a "McCain-Palin" in sight. We had 90 voters, more or less, on our lists (probably 40+ households) and we spoke to nearly 40 personally. Of those we "ID'd" there were 19 Obama's and 6 McCains, plus three undecided. One outright racist, who didn't yell, but said the blacks were voting for the black and he as a white was going to vote for the whites.
My sense was that this was a pretty good result. The median household income in the township is high for Erie - $45,000 - and there is no racial diversity. Erie County as a whole is almost 2-1 Democratic/Republican registration, but went for Kerry only by 54-46%. This suggests to me that outside the city, Bush must have won narrowly. Yet the impression we had was that the Democratic defection rate was low, that the Obama supporters were very enthusiastic and motived to vote, and that certainly the Clinton supporters from the primary were going to vote Obama. We even had a couple of householders tell us that they were lifelong Republicans who had switched parties during the summer.
The permanent staffer I spoke to seemed a bit glum about our results. I'm not sure how to interpret that. On the one hand, what I saw looked pretty good, and the public polls for PA as a whole look good. But the staffers seemed just a trifle desperate. What do they know that I don't? Or are they just stressed out? Or are they trying to motivate a high volunteer turnout?
Anyone else have any feedback on this area?
Also, some minor fun on misallocation of resources by McCain/Palin. My own neighborhood in upstate NY, in a state Obama will win, has a fair number of McCain Palin signs. Nothing visible in the white PA suburb we canvassed, an area where McCain/Palin will have to do well to get an upset in the state.