[...a diary about canvassing Portland OR for US Senate candidate Steve Novick, crossposted at LoadedOrygun.]
I suspect some may not laugh at the morbid connotations of 'stumping' for a man with a hook for an arm, but I bet Steve would, and 'canvassing' always makes me think of wrapping people in tent material, like at Boy Scouts summer camp, when you spent the week inside those heavy canvas platform tents.
Meta having been addressed and dispatched, I did indeed compel myself and two children out of bed at 8AM Saturday in order to go walk the streets edumacating Portlanders on Steve Novick, candidate for Senate.
{on the ground diary, below}
I had originally intended to go by myself, but when Mrs. Joe set up a conflict by walking Lake Oh-sweet-dough* for Obama, suddenly Lil Joe and Joesephine became involved. Aged 11 and 8 and already too sassy for their own good, this kind of event sounded like the King Hell lame-o suggestion of the year. It was like being forced to admit you'd have preferred to go to school on Saturday, than do this.
There was no choice to be had, however, and sometimes that's the best way to go, with no option but to forge ahead and do it.
Still groggy once arriving at Novick HQ off Hawthorne in near SE at 9 AM, we signed in and chose precinct chunks to walk. I consciously admit to seeking out a more well to do neighborhood like Grant Park/Irvington or Laurelhurst, just because I had younger kids with me. Besides, one thing that I thought would make the walk more interesting would be if there were more interesting homes on the trip. LJ loves the HGTV channel, like his mama.
Having snagged what I thought was a cool area--17th-20th around Klickitat Street--we walked across the way to where the campaign had set out food and drink for volunteers. There were Voodoo Doughnuts, bagels, fruit, several kinds of drinks...in other words, free food for the kids, who immediately brightened after scarfing down some of what was put out.
The chief organizer for the day began speaking (near the food, smart move), and marshalled the decently sized crowd into action with three points: Be Human, Get the Lit Out, and Point Them To the Resources.
And then, like Leopold as played by Bugs Bunny entering the opera house, Novick himself made his way quietly through the massed crowd and finally to the head of it, at which point he began to speak.
It was a spirited oration, brief but pointed--we're going strong, we can win this, we're Seabiscuit!--and designed to send the troops off with a bang. (Novick himself was headed for a trip down to Coos Bay, part of an exhausting weekend schedule that had him right back up for lunch in Troutdale the following day.)
We collected our bags of lit, and fanned out across the city. It was a relatively short drive up to 17th, through the Lloyd District and across Broadway further north.
[section about City Council races, interesting to a tiny few on Kos, deleted...]
As we walked, LJ would hand me a fresh set of literature: a four color door hanger with the "Politics as (un)usual" tag and expression of Steve as a paradigm shifter in the Senate; and a white xerox showing several of the best taglines from the set of endorsements Novick has gotten--from The O to the Medford Tribune to the East O, et al. I began using it to back up the news that Steve had been endorsed by all of the general papers in Portland, seemingly to good effect. If all four of them could agree on Steve, shouldn't this guy have at least SOMETHING on the ball worth checking out?
Several folks were either not at home, not awake or not interested in answering the door, but at around 1030 AM on a Saturday, many others were awake and answering their doors. I was a little surprised at the ease with which people took the lit; I had expected some would actively refuse my attempt to hand them more of what Bojack calls "election porn" for Oregonians, phraseology for once I have to admit I like. Could it be true that they secretly LIKE and READ the stuff candidates send them--at least to read through or glance at before they throw it away, and before they get sick of it all and stop reading any of it?
I was also surprised at the general willingness people had to be canvassed upon, accepting and even grateful for the involvement. Certainly having two cute kids in tow made me seem less threatening, but I was beginning to wonder--where are the cranks? Where are the people who want to bend my ear about what REALLY happened on 9/11, who want to complain about why I should be out finding someone to fix the potholes and keep the illegals out? Then I remembered--the campaign had filtered the list out to include just Democrats. :)
We didn't get enough of the little white sheets with the newspaper endorsements on them, and I was physiologically reaping what I'd sown with the morning triple caramel latte' from Tiny's...more alertness, and a great desire to pee like Novick's equine metaphor. So back to HQ we went.
By this time LJ, who'd taken well to the job of lit man, had suddenly turned ill. I'm not sure still what overtook him, but he went a little dizzy and fell asleep on the way back and forth from the campaign. I thought our goose was cooked; surely Joesephine couldn't pull up the slack and do the job for 12 - 20 more blocks?
But she turned out to like the lit job (which she sweetly kept referring to as "lint," as in "need more lint, Daddy?") even more than LJ did. With rain continuing to threaten and the temperature not building with the hours as advertised, I started to worry: would we get drenched and I'd be once again faced with a miserable child?
We lucked out on the drenching; intermittent sprinkles were the order of the day, and as Joesephine said, "We're Oregonians, Daddy--we can do sprinkles." And so we did, finishing the second set of blocks on our turf, my daughter painstakingly writing down house numbers and recording her own committment level estimation--"Was that a 1 or a 2, Daddy? Was he a three?" in a little notebook of her own. Maybe I'm pushing this whole youth movement thing, but I'm now accepting offers on her behalf for any field organizing positions out there.
So what was the mood of the electorate? Generally aware and ready to vote...for President. The rest of the races? Still a little fuzzy. But that's what we were there for, right? To spread the gospel of Steve.
The easiest houses were the ones with Novick signs out in front--we figured those were pretty solid votes for Steve. :) I wrote them down at the time, but turned in the sheet at the end of the day and didn't count them up before giving it back, so I don't recall the exact number of signs for Steve in the 16 blocks we covered, but my best estimation is 6-10 (not including the house that had two!) And though overall I think Sho seemed to have the most signs around the parts of the city I drove through, just inside our turf nobody had more signs than Steve.
I made a reference to the coding system stumpers use--1 for a solid Hooker, 2 for a Leaning Hooker, 3 for the nominally undecided, and 4 for....someone else. Beyond the folks with lawn signs, I'd say another 6-10 houses were fairly solid for Novick.
Another three or four said they were in some stage of leaning towards Steve, a couple said they were undecided but seemed amenable to the wiles of Novick, and the rest who were home claimed to be undecided. (One house had already voted, and when I asked if they would say if maybe they "leaned towards Steve" when they voted, they said, yeah, they "might have leaned that way.")
Not a single person that we talked to indicated they were ready to vote for someone else. That raises the question of whether people were truly undecided or whether they just didn't want to say to the guy holding Novick lit that they were voting for Merkley. Now me, if someone comes to my door who I know I'm not going to vote for, I save their time and their lit and let them know they're wasting the candidate's time. But I can see how one might simply say "I haven't decided yet."
One thing that seems fairly clear is that the Presidential race is sucking a lot of the oxygen out of the other state races. When I would ask about whether they'd been following the Senate primary, several folks hedged a little or said "Yeah, kind of." One couple that came to the door looked a little blank until the man said to his female companion, "You know, the little guy!" Exactly, the little guy. Never underestimate the political utility of a distinctive appearance...
After the second set of blocks we checked back in with LJ, who had been resting in the van. He seemed a little better, but was not really up for a third go-round and some cross-street stragglers, so we packed it in and headed back to HQ.
Other folks were beginning to trickle back in from around the city, and near as I could tell, they were finding roughly the same conditions as we did--a little light on the number of people really tuned into the race, but good support for Steve among those who'd been paying attention.
And now my kids are hooked, so to speak. They were so disappointed that I didn't get them a chance to meet Steve (who Joesephine told me is "more famous than Miley Cyrus!"), that they made sure I took them out to Troutdale yesterday for a BBQ at the city park, where the campaign offered "a medium-rare opportunity to meet Steve." They wore their Novick T-shirts, LJ even brought along a school friend, and they got their chance to meet him. If only they could vote!
The bottom line from on the ground in Portland--at least one little chunk of it--is that Steve is pretty well positioned to win this race. No doubt the Merkley campaign had folks out at the same time (the first weekend after ballots go out is always one of the most popular times to do a canvass), and perhaps they have similar stories of whole blocks teeming with voters for Jeff.
But compared to what many Novick supporters expected to be fighting--an uphill battle against a far more organized and well-funded establishment opponent--Steve's campaign appears to be in great shape. With an aggressive GOTV effort, bouyed by the ability to tell people that the Portland papers are all for Steve, I think the chances are fairly good he will win Multnomah County by a couple of points. Scientific? No--but it's looking good!
*Lake Oswego, wealthiest city in the state