After weeks of volunteering in the Manhattan Beach, California office for the Obama Campaign, my husband and I drove up to Vegas today to participate in tomorrow's GOTV efforts. We did the same thing for Kerry, so we were kind of expecting a large crew, somewhere around a hundred and fifty, when we showed up at the training at 5 p.m. We got the surprise of our lives.
We walked into the Building trades Union Hall in Henderson Nevada a couple of minutes late for the training because there had been an accident on the road. After winding through the maze of hallways, we were suddenly confronted with the main hall and THIS:
We estimate that there were over 600 people patiently waiting for the training to start. We walked in, found someone who looked like they were in charge, and told her that I had a laptop and a Nevada password to Votebuilder, the Obama campaign site that tracks the results of phonebanking and canvassing. She grabbed me, cleared some space at the table, and within seconds after I got my laptop booted up I was entering the days canvassing results while waiting for the training to start. There were two other people also doing this, and we entered hundreds of sheets from the days work. Just a guess by how I was entering data -- the 1's (definite Obama) were outnumbering the 5's (Definite McCain) by 4 or 5 to 1.
The main training person was also late because of the accident, so they didn't get things started until about 5:45. While I was entering data, the person in charge got up and asked people to tell their stories of how they got inspired by Obama and why they were here. One guy gave a very lengthy and somewhat rambling speech about how he liked Obama, went to a rally, managed to get seated close to the rope line, and actually got to say "Thanks" to Obama and got a "No, Thank YOU!" back. Even though this guy's story was kind of long and dragged out, you could have heard a pin drop in the room as everyone listened attentively. When he got to the part where Obama actually touched him on the shoulder and said Thanks, the whole crowed actually Oohed. This crowd was so hungry for Obama that even this relatively tame story got everyone even more fired up.
Finally the main trainer, Lauren something, got up. She went into great detail about our roles as poll watchers and how to use some new reporting procedures via cell phone to report our precinct numbers. They really emphasized the importance of being polite, etc. They also said that there would also be an attorney present to watch out for voter fraud, and that our job was simply to collect the data at regular intervals and report it in so that the new canvass sheets could be sent out.
Finally, they gave out precinct packets -- there were so many people, they didn't have enough precincts!! So they told those who didn't get packets to go back and keep canvassing their areas (many people had been here Sat and Sunday too, but we couldn't come that early so we helped from Manhattan Beach those days.
About 7. they let us go -- just in time for the next wave of people to come in for the 8 o clock training!
If enthusiasm and commitment is any sign of who is going to win Nevada, then the Silver State is definitely going to be a lovely shade of Smurf blue tomorrow.
Off to bed soon as we have to be at our locations at 6 a.m. tomorrow, but thought I should share the great news.