I am an attorney from a safe Democratic state who went on a campaign trip to Ohio this election day. I wrote the following email for a list to which I contribute about my experiences there.
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A factor that has not been widely discussed as an issue in the Bush victory is the totally disorganized state of the Democrats as campaigners. Will Rogers said, "I don't belong to any organized political party -- I'm a Democrat." But they were winning back then when he said that. Now it's not funny any more. As they used to say in Chicago, "Votes Count But Organization Decides." I saw little organization in Ohio.
We saw the disorganization from a distance with the Kerry campaign's inability to figure out how to present the candidate and what stand he was going to take on the issues, but I want to give a short personal account based on my anecdotal experience.
In the past I had been a long-time advocate of a "We Don't Do Democrats" position. In the 2000 election, I supported Ralph Nader. However, I put my independent politics on hold for this election, and actually not only voted for Kerry and gave him a lot of money, but also volunteered for him, going down to Columbus, Ohio, for Election Day and the previous Monday, to do whatever the Dems had for me to do. I also brought a friend on this expedition. I stayed with other volunteers at a hotel that, being an overpaid lawyer, I paid for. And there were hundreds of volunteers from as far away as NY and Calif.
As far as I could tell from the worm's eye view, the Dems had no idea what they were doing in Columbus. I'm a lawyer, so they put me in touch with something called the Voter Protection Program (VPP), to fight expected GOP challenges to minority voters. (Although intensely litigated and finally permitted by the federal appeals court, these did not emerge in a large scale in Columbus, anyway, so far as I heard.)
The VPP people planned and then canceled "mandatory" teleconferencing training, sent me emails saying I had not sent them my information (I had). In the end participation in the program didn't require a law degree anyway because out-of-state voters couldn't campaign closer than 100 feet from the polling place, and out-of-state lawyers can't practice law in Ohio.
The VPP scheduled a meeting for Sun., which I missed because when I got into town I decided to visit friends, but it emerged at the training meeting held the next night that on Sunday before the
VPP kept scores of mostly out-of-state mostly lawyers there from 7 to 10 without accomplishing anything concrete (or so many of them felt), and told them to come back the next day. People who had traveled a distance were sort of mad about that.
Monday it was not easy to find something to do. I went down to DP HQ, which was in a hard-to-find union hall on the south industrial part of town, and was a total zoo. It took me almost an hour to get assignments for myself and my friend. Other people in my hotel room reported similar frustration. My friend's assignment turned out not to exist, and then when we got another one, the directions to the place where they wanted to send her were wrong and incomprehensible. So she contacted Rock the Vote, which she located on her computer, stayed in her hotel room and called people in Pennsylvania using her cell phone. She said Rock the Vote was pretty good, by the way, actually organized. (Another friend reported that MoveOn was good in Ohio.)
My Monday assignment was to canvas known Democratic voters who had already been visited, supposedly, anyway. I did one minority-working class housing complex where it was hard to get into the buildings (locked outside doors), and not surprisingly few people were home during the day. I did, however, get into the buildings. Many of the addresses were bad, despite there having been recent(?) visits. Then I canvased a middle-class suburban neighborhood, again visiting known Kerry supporters to remind them (again) to vote and to reconfirm addresses.
The woman directing the operation at the branch office I went to said she knew the guy who was coordinating the Ohio campaign and that he had coordinated state campaigns for Gore in 2000 and Clinton in 1996, and so was supposed to know what he was doing. She said that the job I had was necessary because they'd check at the polls on Election Day to see whether these people had voted and call them to make sure that they got to the polls if they hadn't yet. However, in the suburban areas 9at least) it was a pretty good bet that people with Kerry yard signs were going to vote. The working class people, if they had the right address, were probably not at home during Tuesday (most of them were not at home on Monday). I do hope some of them were encouraged to go to the polls by last minute phone calls.
Monday night I went to the VPP meeting. It may have been the worst organized meeting I have ever been to in my life, in a long life of attending badly run left and liberal meetings. It was chaired by a New York lawyer who had lots of experience and was the national VPP coordinator for the Dems, I think. There was an Ohio lawyer co-chair who could not answer a straight question or talk for less than 15 minutes at a time. There was no agenda that I or other could discern.
There was also no parking, I will add --this was at the Seafarer's Union -- are there seafarers in Columbus, Ohio? -- and it had a parking lot that would just about fit the seafarers in Columbus. I illegally parked at a pizza place across the street and had to keep running out to check to make sure they had not towed my car. Which they did not, fortunately.
After a while they had all 100+ people in room introduce themselves, state where they were from, what experience they had, etc. Why was unclear. This would be OK in a 20 person meeting. We wanted to know what we were supposed to do and where were supposed to go. After the introductions and various digressions the NY lawyer gave us an inspirational speech and the Ohio lawyer explained in general and lengthy terms what we were supposed to do (which turned out in my case not to match what I did very closely at all). This repeated the stuff that they had already sent us in out emailed packets about the VPP. Then they mysteriously read off some names of people to be sent down stairs for some purpose. After a bit one of this came up to rant about how disorganized everything was, he resented having flown 1000 miles and being subjected to pointless chaos. (Thereby irritating everyone else in the room who felt the same way.)
Then they read off the names of everyone remaining one by one, and many who were not there because they had not come back after the previous night, sending us downstairs to get our assignments. There we waited in a single file line in a basement hallway for at least an hour while people got their locations and assignments. I was literally last in line, having lost my place when I went to the bathroom.
When I got to the assignment room, they asked me if I was a group captain. I said, "No one told me if I was, what's involved?" "You get the registered voter lists so you can see if people are listed, and you act as a sort of counsel to the community organizer at the polling place," said they. "OK," said I. I got back to the hotel at 10.30, needing to wake up at 5.15 am. The process could have taken an hour if they had been organized. Everyone was teed off, as you can imagine.
The assignments were for 13 1/2 hour days, 6 am to 7.30 pm -- although many of the volunteers were older and retired lawyers. Standing at the polls. Outside in the chilly rain. Despite there being more people than they could easily use, we were told. This was not thoughtful. We were told that sandwiches would driven around on election day -- none were, I went across the street to eat at Subway. Fortunately there was a restaurant near my polling place. Lots of polling places didn't have one.
On Election Day I stood alone -- no community activist, no other volunteers, no one but me -- all day from 6 am to 7.30 pm, with my pad (they didn't have clipboards either), my literature and my voting list, saying, "Hi, I'm an attorney from the Ohio Democratic Party Voter Protection Plan, and I'm here to help if you have any problems inside." (I had to make up my own script, none was provided.) I did manage to save about four or five provisional ballots (which were not counted because Kerry conceded before they became an issue). When I called in at 7.30 p.m. there was still a 2-3 hour wait and they wanted me to stay anyway even though no one could come ion any more and I could not enter myself. Supposedly also there was an Ohio lawyer inside. I said to hell with it it and went back to the hotel to take a hot shower and sleep.
My friend reported that she had been assigned to drive people to the polls, she had been sent to about five houses, but had not in fact been needed at any of them. After a bit she went back to calling people through Rock the Vote. Others in my room said the deal was the same, pointless assignments that were hard to get, no support, confusion, lack of consideration.
That was how I spent Election Day and the day before in the battleground state of Ohio. People in my room bitterly reflected that if we had wanted work that mattered and reasonable organization we bet that we could have gotten it at Republican Party HQ. So, anyway, maybe my experience was atypical. But I doubt it. I think this lack of professionalism and seriousness was a factor in Kerry's defeat. I agree with my fellow volunteers who came to Ohio from NY and California and Kansas and Illinois and Oklahoma -- this was my room -- that the Republicans could not have been worse and were probably a lot better.
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