Electioneering

As promised, we did go canvassing for Obama in New Hampshire yesterday, and as promised, I’m here to tell you about it. First, the facts. We went to the local democratic party office about 9 a.m., got driving directions for where to go in NH, and then picked up a couple of people who needed rides. It turned out the directions were really crappy, but we did make it to the destination at about 11. From there we were handed packets that contained a short script with talking points (more on them later) and a list of names and addresses to go to in a neighboring town. More crappy directions later, we ended up finding the target neighborhood at maybe 11:30. We split up into two groups and started looking for addresses.

Let me add a little more about the name and address list. Each entry was for a particular person at a particular address, with information like age and party affiliation listed. Then, to the right of that info was a space to circle how your encounter went: not home or refused to talk; supports Obama or McCain or is undecided, etc. It turned out that a lot of the information was incorrect; I remember one particular time we knocked on a door expecting a 65-year-old woman to answer, but the person that answered to her name was more like 30! Either that or she was in fantastic shape. She should give McCain some tips.

The goal of the whole deal was not to actually persuade anyone of anything, but just to gather information about how people were leaning in the election. So if you met a McCain supporter, you just thanked him for his time and moved on—no arguing or any of that. On the other hand, if you met someone who was truly undecided, you were supposed to engage him on the talking points and kind of talk up how Obama would address whatever issue he was worried about. For people already in Obama’s camp, you tried to get email addresses or drum up interest in volunteering. In this fashion we tramped to about 50 addresses and talked to maybe ten actual people.

Now, I should hijack my own recollections and get to the real point of my post: Canvassing was incredibly nerve-wracking and pretty much left me feeling as though I’d been beaten for several hours. I have just about zero talent for chatting with total strangers and am not too great at thinking on my feet when it comes to talking about politics. Hell, I kind of dislike people in general and would be thoroughly annoyed if someone knocked on my door and tried to chat me up about Obama. In other words, I think I’m just about the worst possible person to go canvassing. I was petrified we would actually encounter someone who was undecided, because I felt like I had no ability to make a good impression. In the end, we ended up encountering only committed voters, so that didn’t come up, but it always took a giant dose of courage to push each doorbell.

We got through our list of addresses at around 2, and headed back to the NH office where we’d started. I have to let out a little whine here and mention that I had just about no food or water for the whole time, which probably added to the difficulty of the whole thing. The rational part of me recognizes that it makes a difference just to take the time to walk through someone’s neighborhood and to be a friendly face for the campaign, but the less adult part of me had a supremely miserable time and wonders if I could actually gather the strength to do it again. I mean, now that I have some experience it would probably be a less fearful exercise, but did I mention how miserable it was? Agggh.

Anyway, I am glad I did it. Although it truly was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. For the first time, I’ve been contributing to the effort to get my candidate elected, and that is important. On the other hand, have I mentioned how easy it is to go on the website and donate some money?