I don't usually write diaries (I usually post my stuff to
edgewise, a political blog I write along with cecil vortex - who does post diaries here more often - and a few other folks, but I thought a little update on my weekend GOTV efforts might be welcome.
All weekend I've been volunteering time for the local Oakland Call for Change phone banking effort sponsored and managed by MoveOn.org. What I've seen so far is a brilliant experiment in managed chaos, as the volunteers take shifts calling other callers to get them to commit and then confirm their commitment to call from home using the awesome web interface or go to house parties to make their calls in a more social setting.
Like clockwork, at a certain point the Oakland callers have been redirected toward calling voters directly. Call for Change is targeting infrequent voters: people who vote in presidential years but sometimes sit out the midterm elections, and focusing our efforts on swing districts.
On Saturday I made calls for two or three hours just confirming people who had signed up to make calls the following day. This may sound like a silly sort of pyramid scheme but it's more like a phone tree. I knew that every person I reached and reminded was going to call 60 or more voters, reach 20 or more of them, and perhaps convince five or six who were wavering to get out and vote.
I'm pulling those numbers out of, um, hat. But the point is that I'm multiplying my impact on this election. Instead of just going out and voting once, I'm helping ensure that five, ten, fifteen, twenty or more votes are counted for Democrats as we sweep into control of the U.S. House of Representatives.
After a certain point my ear was falling off and I switched over to the data side of things, first just running sheets of completed calls over to the data entry folks and later helping check people out and cleaning up and tallying their calls so that the whole apparatus could monitor its progress and turn on a dime.
On Saturday we were telling people that we as of the day before we had reached 63,000 of the 450,000 voters we were aiming for by election day. (Friday night along 9000 people made calls across the country.) Remember those numbers for a moment.
Today I went back and worked a six hour shift. First I called 48 voters in Ohio to encourage them to get out and vote for Sherrod Brown (and to remind them how to find their polling place and to bring their whole family to the polls). I got the script modified for my own way of speaking and after a while I was cooking.
After that shift I switched over to data again and spent next five hours just processing the information. It may not sound like much but I knew that without accurate counts we wouldn't have nearly the same impact.
Sometime in the mid afternoon one of the tireless young volunteer organizers got up on a table to tell us that so far a number of local CallforChange offices had already reached their target number of voters, two days ahead of schedule! (We'll be making these calls right up through election day to ensure people make it to the polls.)
At that time, Brooklyn, New York, was at 135% of their target. (Cheer!) Ithaca, New York was at 120% or something. (Cheer!) And Oakland was at 111%! (Huge roar!)
A half hour later, another organizer, Adam, got up on a table to tell us that nationwide MoveOn had already reached 453,000 voters, exceeding the number already we had targeted for election day! He said that we were now going to reach beyound swing districts into areas formerly considered safe for the Republicans.
I have to work tomorrow, but I'm taking election day off and I'll be back at that office at Oakland doing anything I can to help us win this thing.
There's plenty of work to be done. Find something that needs doing and do it. Believe me, there's nothing like feeling you're making a difference.