Today I made calls for Mark Udall through MoveOn and Daily Kos. I live in the greater Los Angeles area and although there are some races closer to home that could use help I am really worried about what will happen to the country if the Republicans take the Senate. Since I only had about an hour to give today I was hoping to make the most of it. I have to admit I was a little bit hesitant to get started, anticipating getting the inevitable angry hang-ups and possible Gardner supporters. It was pretty easy just following the link sent to my email and then calling in from the Voters Rising Training Hub. The group training session took about 12 minutes and I think the trainer said about 45 of us were participating in the session.
After the orientation we were instructed to follow another link and register our phone number so we could be called back by the HubDialer once we were ready. The system was designed to connect you with people who had a progressive voting record but were not politically active and might be at risk of not voting. The system would automatically screen out no answers and voicemail messages. We were told once we heard a beep the name of the person we were contacting would appear at the top of the on-line script. We were then to simply follow the script on-line and record the results of our call by clicking on the appropriate answer before activating the "next call" button.
The script basically had three objectives: 1) determine who they supported and if they said Udall 2) find out if they intended to vote early by mail or at the polling station on election day and 3) get them to commit to voting. If they were to say they supported Gardner then basically the call was over. There was an option to follow up if the voter said they were undecided so I had done some research and taken some notes just in case.
The first 6 or 8 calls were all duds, either voicemails or no answers. Then I got some live answers interspersed among the duds. Sometimes the person on the prompt was not home and the person who answered would ask to take a message. In those cases, perhaps 10, I told them I was from MoveOn and we were just calling to encourage Coloradans to vote on November 4th. A few times the person no longer lived at that residence or it was just simply a wrong number. I think some told me they weren't home just to get out of talking to me. Four others were upset and told me to take them off our list and not call again.
I probably spent around 40 minutes making calls and out of the 30 or so live bodies I spoke to, about 6 or 7 said they were supporting Udall, and committed to vote. All but one said they were or had already voted early by mail; the other would vote at the precinct on election day. One guy said he supported Gardner so I thanked him and moved on.
So I spent an approximate total of 52 minutes and nailed down perhaps 7 votes for Udall. I know it doesn't seem like many but if the other 44 of us did as well, although I imagine many did better than I, that is 315 votes. I'm pretty sure the number will actually be higher because the calling session was two-and-a-half hours and more people were joining the session during training.
The calling hub is pretty sophisticated and except for a few glitches works pretty well, probably averaging for me three dial-ups per minute or 120 Colorado homes in 40 minutes. It sure beats walking precincts for Eugene McCarthy with my mother when I was 10, plus it allows someone like me who lives in a safely blue state to help out with a close race in a swing state. I will definitely make more calls next weekend.