I promise myself (and some friends) that I'll write a blog post every day while I am in New Mexico working on the election.
I do. But the days are long and I don't find much time to sit in front of a computer, so I have to do it the old fashioned way -- with a ballpoint pen and a spiral notebook. And now it's Saturday. Better late than never, right? Below is my report.
[I did manage to get my first two reports posted in a more timely manner: The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle Meets Canvassing in Albuquerque and 'He Won't Pledge Allegiance to the Flag.']
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[MONDAY]
Is New Mexico Losing its Swing?
Because it's a small swing state, New Mexican voters have more clout in national elections than, say Californians. But if current projections hold, New Mexico's reign as a swing state may be over. State residents may wake up Wednesday morning with a 100 percent Democratic delegation. And all five electoral votes for Barack Obama.
Today, the breakdown is three Republicans -- Senator Pete Domenici and Representatives Steve Pearce and Heather Wilson -- and two Democrats, Senator Jeff Bingaman and Representative Tom Udall. But when Domenici announced his retirement earlier this year, all three of the state's congressmembers ran for the Senate. Pearce beat Wilson in the Republican primary. In the Democratic primary, Albuquerque Mayor Martin Chavez threw his hat in the ring first, but dropped out shortly after Udall launched his run. Udall is ahead by double digits. There's not a whole lot of suspense about who the state's next junior senator will be.
Meanwhile, all three Congressional seats are open, and Democrats Ben Ray Luhan, Martin Heinrich, and Harry Teague look like they're headed to Washington, D.C.
Monday is an easy day. No knocking on doors, just delivering doorhangers plugging our three candidates, and identifying the polling place for that precinct. I don't have a car, so I find a packet that's walking distance from Heinrich's office -- the north-south streets just south of Central in the Nob Hill neighborhood, and it's definitely Obama country. Obama yard signs outnumber McCain's by at least 20 to 1.
It's a quiet morning. Perhaps a bit boring, but easy. I have only a few conversations -- one is with a woman exiting her car, who says she's already voted, and then seeing the doorhanger I'm extending to her, adds, for all three of them.
Good, I say. Obama and Udall have comfortable leads, but Heinrich is just a teeny bit ahead. If all goes well, we could wake up Wednesday morning with all Democratic Congressional delegation.
It's about time, she says.
Our vote may not be as important, I say, acting now as honorary New Mexican resident. We may lose our swing state status.
It's worth it, she says. And who are these people voting for John McCain anyway. What are they thinking?
I try to keep an open mind, I say, though I wonder the same thing.
When I get back to Heinrich's office, a block south of Central (Route 66), around noon, it's a beehive of activity. The office is a non-descript one-story brick building behind a slab orf cracked asphalt with about a dozen parking spots. In the center of the lot are two folding tables stacked with walk packets. The front doors open into a big open windowless room decorated with a hodgepodge of campaign signs, posters, t-shirts, and precinct maps tacked to the wall. A dozen or so people are making phone calls in this room, and another five or six in a smaller adjacent room. The rest of the building is a rabbit warren of hallways and small offices, most likely meant for one person, but today there are two, three, four people crammed into them. (This photo below is actually not Heinrich's office, but the South Valley Obama office, but it will give you a sense of the luxurious working conditions. Note also the "New Energy for America" sign in the upper left corner. The Sierra Club gets involved in these races not just to help candidates win, but to urge them to support our message, in this case, for a clean and green energy policy. And Obama has made that one of his top priorities.)
I only meet a few of the dozens of volunteers. There's Laura, a New Mexico native who teaches in an Albuquerque charter school and recently joined the Sierra Club and is knocking on doors for the first time. There's Kurt, who came to Albuquerque from New England to visit his family, got cancer and made the University of New Mexico Hospital his home-away-from-home, and now has recovered enough that's he's volunteering every day. There's David, a schoolteacher from Dublin, Ireland, who's been in New Mexico for a month, helping with the campaign.
The staff in Heinrich's office all seem to be in their 20s -- and are mostly from elsewhere. That's the norm, they say. The Sierra Club's lead staffer in the Heinrich office is Camilla Feibelman, who grew up in Albuquerque, but works as an organizer in the Puerto Rico. She's the one who gives me my assignment every day.
I'm not privy to how they decide how to mobilize the volunteers. There are probably plenty of roles I'm not even aware of, but the main two activities are making phone calls or walking precincts and either knocking on doors or leaving literature. By this point in the campaign, we're targeting people who've already been identified as supporters -- the walk lists give the voters' name, address, age, gender, and party. So under the name it might say "DS M 47" -- that's a 47-year-old male who's decline to state his party.
For many voters, there's also an additional identifier -- "likely BO supporter," "sporadic base" (that means they usually vote Democratic, but don't always show up at the polls), and so on.
I prefer walking ten days out of nine compared to phonebanking, but I do get in a couple of hours of phoning. Mostly I'm talking to voters, and gauging their support, or, if they're already identified as supporters, thanking them and reminding them about where their polling place is. I also call volunteers who have already helped and ask them if they're willing to put in one more shift.
Some people cook for the volunteers. One night, there's a delicious chicken curry that I get to before it disappears. There's also lots of junk food around, or maybe it's just leftovers from Halloween. Working on a campaign is not the healthiest lifestyle. Meals on the run. Not enough sleep. Stress.
But I have it pretty easy, especially Monday. In the afternoon, I take the bus to a not-quite-so-close neighborhood, and as I sit down, the woman next to me points to the stack of doorhangers rubber-banded together and tells me she was up late last night counting them and putting them into packets. Every day, it seems, I run into someone else volunteering in one way or another. I only see one McCain volunteer -- as I leave my hosts house and walk down the hill to the bus stop. He's wearing a Veterans for McCain cap, and delivering literature to every door. I plan on saying hello to him as I pass, but he turns into a long walkway as I approach and we pass without acknowledgment. I'm wearing an Obama sticker, but I'm not yet working, so he has no way of knowing that I'm doing lit drops as well.
I hear they have some good food here in Albuquerque, but with the exception of the first day, before we show up at the office, I haven't exactly done the gourmet tour. But I ate out enough to see how ubiquitous the green chiles and red chiles are. One outsider told me that the McDonald's in Albuquerque give you an option of green chilis on your hamburgers. I didn't fact-check that, but I did grab a sandwich at Subway, which is my default quick-lunch spot in downtown San Francisco, and the store on Central, across the street from the University of New Mexico, served green chilis, which they don't have in San Francisco.
I try to drink in what makes Albuquerque different -- and knowing I'm going to be writing about it when I sit down for lunch or an ice cream break -- does make me pay a little more attention. I wrote on Friday about the xeriscaping, and I continue to notice all the variations on that, and I take photos of some of the more robust cactus gardens. The colors of Albuquerque are brown and red, the color of sand. Along the river, the cottonwood trees in the Bosque (bos kay), are exploding in yellows and golds. Mayor Martin Chavez is one of the many mayors promoting a green city, and it's got your bike lanes and decent transit system and all this landscaping that doesn't guzzle water. The city may be acting green, but there's not a whole lot of the color green. Some people have lawns, but on this third day of November, they're more often yellow and brown than green.
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[TUESDAY]
Election Day
I am up at 5 on Election Day, on the bus by 6, and in the office a little before 7. My first task of the day is to "visibility" -- another volunteer and I go to the west side and stand at the intersection of Coors and Montano with big posterboards with "Martin Heinrich for Congress" in blue and green letters. Some people honk their horn. One driver gives me a thumbs down sign. Another his middle finger. Most drivers ignore us.
Then I knock on doors, trying to find those few people who both are home and haven't voted. We're scraping the bottom of the barrel, and I don't have a very productive day.
My feet really hurt. They probably smell too, but I don't dare take off my shoes. I have blisters, I think. I never get them, or rather, I can't remember the last time I've had them.
I walk a lot, and almost as much in cities as out in the woods and wildlands. This past summer, I actually walked more than 15 miles through the streets of Los Angeles, on purpose. (The city was bigger than I imagined.) And a year and a half ago, my second time in Albuquerque, I had almost a full day to explore and I did almost all of it on foot. Come to think of it, that was probably the last time I had blisters. But I came home after that. I didn't go back out for another three hours knocking on doors.
Just before dark, I see a man in his driveway, and I ask him if he's voted.
I'm not registered, he says.
What about Doris Ortiz? She's on my list. Has she voted?
She's resting, he says.
Well, the polls are open for another hour and a half, up at the Bel Air School on Candelaria.
I'll let her know, he says.
Shortly after the polls close, I get a ride to the Albuquerque Convention Center for the election night party. We already know Obama has won Pennsylvania. In the front of the room are two big screen TVs on, one tuned to MSNBC, the other to a local station. The sound is off, so mostly we're looking at the graphics that fly onto the screen, flipping and fading like Olympic gymnasts. Illinois for Obama. Mississippi for McCain.
Shortly after I arrive, while I'm in the bathroom, I hear a roar from the crowd. MSNBC has called New Mexico for Obama.
The good news keeps on coming. The TV calls the Senate race for Udall. Heinrich is ahead by at least 10 percent, then 12 percent.
There's free food -- taquitos with chile sauce, roasted veggies, cheese, bread -- and a cash bar. An excellent decision, if you ask me. I get into the long line about 20 minutes before the polls are going to close on the West Coast, wanting to have that glass of wine in my hand to celebrate when they call California, Oregon, and Washington, and put Obama over 270. I watch the countdown on the TV screen while the line moves hardly at all. The roar goes up when I'm right behind the person being served.
It's an amazing night. I've made a few new friends, but I'm mostly among strangers here, but that doesn't dampen the celebration. The mood in the room could not possibly be any better.
The room quiets and the volume gets turned up for McCain's speech, but it's still hard to hear. He's gracious. I like him more now that I did a few days ago. There may be a decent man underneath all that bluster, but he certainly seems to have done his best to keep that guy in hiding.
After McCain's speech, the spotlight shifts to the wide stage to the right of the TVs, where soon-to-be-senior Senator Jeff Bingaman, and then Senator-Elect Tom Udall speak, and then Martin Heinrich's wife introduces the next Congressman from New Mexico's first district. He steps forward and leans into the microphone just as the TVs show President-Elect Obama striding up to the podium in Chicago's Grant Park. A few people standing in front of Martin wave their hands, then an aide waves to whisper in his ear. Heinrich returns to the microphone, and says, let's all watch and listen to the president-elect of the United States, Barack Obama.
I cry. It feels good. When I was a kid, my parents took me to an open housing march led by Martin Luther King, Jr., in Berwyn, a neighborhood of Chicago. I don't remember, but my mom tells me that the people in Berwyn glared at us with hate. We sang "We Shall Overcome." Now we have.
President-Elect Barack Obama looks so somber standing there in front of hundreds of thousands of happy people. He looks like he's got the weight of the world on his shoulders.
It's a wonderful night. I feel very proud to be an American. And to have been able to play a part, however small, to help reach this moment.
Martin Heinrich gave a good speech, but Barack is a hard act to follow.
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[WEDNESDAY]
Savoring the Moment
As I walk down the hill to the bus stop Wednesday morning, it's cold and drizzling. Then I feel some flakes of snow. Only a few.
I gather with about a dozen other Sierra Club folks and friends for breakfast at the Flying Star cafe on Central.
After breakfast I rent a car and drive up the Turquoise Trail, the old mining road between Albuquerque and Santa Fe. We arrive in the small ghost town/artist colony of Madrid ("mad" as in angry + rid), just in time for their Obama celebration parade, with a pickup truck, some bikes and people with flags. We've taken our county back, says one of the participants.