Elizabeth Esty CT-103rd State took on a 5 time republican incumbent and beat him. As I wrote last Wednesday, I decided that the best use of my time was to work for her in a close race while letting others ensure Obama's victory.
The result. A squeaker that wasn't decided until after 11:00 when the absentee ballots were finally counted. There's nothing like a nailbiter to make you feel like your work mattered.
Yes We Did! We unseated a repugnant Republican and replaced him with a wonderful woman who will serve our district well in Hartford. With a margin of victory less than 200, all of the people who worked on her campaign know that it couldn't have been done without them.
Away from the limelight. No TV cameras in the Cheshire Democratic Town Headquarters last night. A few young print reporters and a town blogger provided the publicity.
Yes we did and I feel great.
Please follow me below the break. Elizabeth Esty and other wonderful candidates that you have never heard of deserve it.
How did I come to work for Esty, and why do I think she's so special?
Elizabeth Esty is on the town council in Cheshire, and I live in the neighboring town of Wallingford. I had never heard of her until she knocked on my door. With 10 minutes of conversation, I knew that she was a lawyer with an Ivy League education who had thought deeply about the issues that are important in Connecticut, and who was looking to work for pragmatic solutions to the problems that we face, informed by a deeply liberal sense of the values of our country. I'm hoping that this reminds you of someone else who won an election last night.
Esty made it clear that she was willing to do what it takes in an upstart bid. She was going to out-work her opponent and build on her solid base in Cheshire by achieving strong name recognition in Wallingford and Hamden as well.
I know (as I have said to tens of people and hundreds of answering machines) that she will bring the hard work and energy that she showed on the campaign trail to Hartford when she represents us. She has a broad vision for change at the State level, focusing on energy policy (a field where her husband is an expert) and education. She is in favor of universal health care, and believes in sound fiscal policy.
While I was poll-standing yesterday, with her sign, a man came by and said we had his vote, because he had met her on a hot August day, and they had talked politics and watched baseball in his garage. Friends of our family have shared similar experiences, and voted for her as well.
In past elections, I have never met the democratic challenger for this seat, and I have usually gotten one or two mailings at most. I've been comfortable voting against the Republican Incumbent, but I have never voted for the Democrat. As I was making calls in the final days of the campaign, Esty had near 100% name recognition in the parts of her district where she started near 0. She gave plenty of people a reason to vote for her.
The incumbent mailed out an endorsement letter from our town's mayor and an additional glossy mailer highlighting the state money he has helped our town secure. The only way to beat that was to have enough people believe that Esty was smarter, harder working, and a better choice for the problems that Connecticut as a whole faces.
Four years ago, the Democrat lost my town by more than 359 votes, and a different Democrat ran a worse race 2 years ago and lost by 509. Esty's hard work and possibly some help from the top of the ticket allowed her to come within 6 votes of winning my town. The turnaround here more than represented her final margin of victory.
As the race closed in the final days, the incumbent turned to the tried and true family values tactic. He sent a targetted letter to Catholic voters describing his firm committment to blocking abortion rights, stopping stem-cell research, and overturning the supreme court ruling legalizing gay marriage. He ended the letter with the smarmy statement "I have always put family values above politics." The Esty campaign put out a great counter, pointing out that he was going negative while Connecticut had real problems to solve.
After watching the Elizabeth, her husband and 3 children pull together to do what it took to win the race, my reply to the family values issue is, as always, to look at someone's family. If Elizabeth Esty does not have tremendous family values, then she has trained her family to fake it pretty darn well. I came away hugely impressed with the love that they share for each other, and their willingness to each contribute to the campaign in their own way. I was especially impressed with Sarah, who as a college sophomore, took off 4 days of class before an important midterm to coordinate mailings and lit-drops over the final days. If Sarah decides to run for public office when she graduates, incumbents beware.
How does it feel to work on a small campaign?
In some ways, the Esty campaign felt a lot like working in a local office for Obama. There was the same makeshift office space, in our case lacking heat and internet connections. There was the same routine of getting the call lists, making and recording the results of the calls, preparing and getting out mailings and lit drops. A lot of grunt work, with occaisional connections with real live voters who you might actually be able to persuade.
The big difference for me was that the streets that I was walking were streets I had driven. I did skip my house when lit-dropping in my neighborhood, since we didn't need to be persuaded. When I was calling people, I could talk about meeting the candidate, and talk knowledgably about how the people in Wallingford and Hamden didn't know her because we don't get Cheshire town-council news.
There is an electric feeling to working on a campaign that has the manpower to knock on millions of doors in the final weekend, but it was even more thrilling to me to be working on a campaign where I could call a significant percent of the undecided voters on the final Monday of the campaign.
Election day was frantic. I drove high-school students to polling places to greet people with Esty signs. I stood and greeted people where we did not have enough volunteers. I am proud that I asked my 13 year old son to take a 2 hour shift, and prouder still that he enjoyed it. We coordinated rides to the polls for people who needed them. We did everything we could to encourage people to vote our way.
My last shift of poll standing came at the Wallingford polling place in the hours before the polls closed. Turnout, which had been heavy all day slowed to a trickle because very few people waited until the last minute. I was assigned to go inside as the watch the tabulation at the Wallingford polling place. My spirits soared when I realized that I could report a 79 vote lead where we expected at best to keep the deficit small. By the time I reached headquarters, we had information from two of the other polling places as well. We had won Hamden as expected, with a good margin of victory, but had lost a district in Cheshire that we had hoped to win. We still needed election day results from 2 other districts in Cheshire and absentee results from 3 town halls.
We had a TV on to catch the national and other statewide news. Pennsylvania had been called for Obama nationally, but we didn't much care. We were confident in the national ticket, and in all of the other races that were being run out of the Cheshire office. We needed our own numbers to make it a sweep. Very soon, the other two polling places called in. We were up 352 votes (out of 10,824) before absentee ballots.
Cheshire absentee ballots broke 182-130 against us, so the lead was 300, exactly. About 15 minutes later, Hamden reported that we gained back 30 votes.
Still no word from Wallingford. Did we actually have someone waiting there? Yes we did, but we sent a lawyer just in case something went wrong. The secretary of State offered to intervene if we needed her to. I don't think we ever did.
States would get called for Obama, to much cheering, with the loudest being for Ohio. We knew that we had won nationally, but what about our race. The phone would ring and the room would hush, but the important call was coming on a different phone. The land-line was usually just reporters looking for quotes to meet deadlines. At 9:00, we found out that Wallingford was checking provisional ballots at the presidential level before looking at absentee. At around 10:00, we found out that they were counting their absentee ballots, by voting district, in numerical order. We were district 6 of 9. At 11:00, anticlimactically, the networks called Obama President-Elect. My tears of joy were more muted than I would have expected, because I still did not know what had happened to Esty in Wallingford. Surely there couldn't be more than 500 absentees. There's no way Adinolfi could get 80%. We had won, we thought, but we were still very tense. No one was talking victory.
Finally the word came. The right phone rang, and our campaign coordinator hunched over the poster-sized paper where we were tabulating results. When he wrote 239 in Adinolfi's column, I knew that we had won. The 154 for Esty merely brought the total up to 245. We had won, and our candidate's husband broke out the champagne. (I'm still not sure how we got from the 245 to the 193 finally reported. There was something wrong with our internal tally somewhere).
Barack Obama and Elizabeth Esty will both take office next January. He will be the leader of the free world. She will be a part time legislator. There is a thrill in getting an E-mail from the Chicago campaign headquarters thanking you for your work for Obama, but for me it pales in comparison to the look in the eyes of the candidate, her family, and unpaid campaign coordinator when they thank you for the work that you have done because it is so unexpected for a stranger to adopt a campaign like this.
I know that I have Obama's grattitude for the work that I have done for his campaign, even though I am one of so many that he cannot possibly know my name. Last night, when the final results were in. I got a personal hug of grattitude from the candidate. That is a feeling that you cannot replicate on a national campaign.
Please, Kossacks, do not think that you have to wait 4 years to recapture the feeling that you had last night. Volunteer for local candidates and issues. If your town is like mine, local elections are in the Odd years. Who can you find that you want to work for? You will feel a personal sense of ownership in a local race that is as gratifying as anything that you felt while working for Obama.