Tag: moveon.org

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Sausage Factory Confidential

Well, maybe all those MoveOn phone calls added up to something after all. I wrote before about Saturday’s telephone session, calling voters in Ohio and New Jersey (both the candidates we were calling to support, Sherrod Brown and Robert Menendez, won; in Brown’s case, he beat a Republican incumbent). Then:

–We had a couple people over on Sunday and made another 280 calls or so all together for Senate candidates in Pennsylvania and Missouri. Both of them–Bob Casey and Claire McCaskill–won. In Casey’s case, I printed out some background material on him, including a Wikipedia article that (accurately) describes his conservative views on abortion (he’d like to see Roe v. Wade overturned) and gun control (he doesn’t like it). But MoveOn, which I think it’s safe to say has an image of being on the left edge of the Democratic Party’s left wing, was calling on his behalf 1) to help knock off Casey’s opponent, radical right-winger Rick Santorum, and 2) to further the Democrats’ strategy to win back Congress (another conservative Democrat it worked for: Heath Shuler, elected to the House from North Carolina).

In any case, one of our guests started reading about Casey and exclaimed, “I don’t like this guy at all. Why am I making calls for him?” I didn’t really disagree with her thoughts about Casey; after all, how many more Liebermans do the Democrats need? But my stronger feeling was that we’d been given a job and I wanted to complete it. Luckily, I kept the new anti-Caseyite on board by giving her some Missouri voters to call; Claire McCaskill is a much more palatable candidate from a Berkeley liberals point of view.

–On Monday, I went into the MoveOn office in the early afternoon and stayed late enough that my car got locked into the city of Oakland parking garage I was using, a couple blocks away (not that it was that late: Oakland’s swinging downtown turns the lights out as soon as the local officeworkers head home, and the garage closes at 7). I spent part of the day calling MoveOn volunteers to see if we could get them to commit to more last-minute calling; most of the calls were to people in the East Bay, including half a dozen or so to people with Berkeley phone numbers. I was a little chagrined that among the Berkeley folks I contacted, no one had done the calling they had committed to, and no one wanted to do any. The charitable course would be to withhold judgment and recognize my own lack of past involvement; later, I’ll take the charitable course. For now, I think a lot of people in Berkeley feel like they’re taking a stand by living here and tolerating or partaking in the wild and crazy atmosphere, which is so enlightened compared to anywhere else you can think of.

I think I remember calling into two states on Monday: Maryland, for Senate candidate Ben Cardin (he won). Then, at the tail end of my shift, into Arizona’s 1st Congressional District, which is an amazing chunk of territory: 58,000 square miles or so, more than half the entire state (and bigger, by itself, than the entire state of Illinois). We called on behalf of the Democrat running there, a lawyer named Ellen Simon. At one point, I reached a guy who said he had four mail-in ballots, cast for Simon and other Democrats by himself and family members, but he didn’t know what to do with them now that it was too late to mail them in time to get them counted. I thought it would be easy to find out the details of Arizona’s law on this, but nowhere I looked–state and county and Democratic Party websites, gave a definitive answer. As a last resort, I had the brainstorm of looking up the candidate’s home phone number, since I knew her hometown. Surprisingly, there was a listing online. I called, and got a guy who said that Ellen Simon was out on the campaign trail. I explained what I needed to know, and this guy–her husband, I presume–told me that all the voter needed to do was bring the signed ballots into a polling place and they would be accepted. As it turned out, though, Simon needed those four votes and then some: She lost by 13,000 votes.

–On Tuesday, MoveOn opened the Oakland office at 5 a.m. I got there about 5:20, and there were already about 10 people making calls or getting ready for the day. Since I brought my laptop, I made calls through the group’s online call site: first to the 20th District in New York; then to the 2nd District in Connecticut; then to the 1st District in Iowa; then to MoveOn volunteers to try to rally people one last time to make more calls.

The whole feeling of the day was different: First, people saw light at the end of the tunnel. For both the people making the calls and the people getting them, they knew the blitz was almost over. But something else was different from even the previous day.

The entire calling process is a vast numbers game, nearly impossible to get a grasp of when you’re calling number after number in far-off states for candidates you may well have never heard of before you started dialing the phone for the day. At the beginning of the calliing campaign, the phone lists are pretty rough. I’m not sure of the criteria that landed people on our rosters, but at a minimum, I’d guess two factors were present: They had been registered Democrats, and they hadn’t voted in one or more elections over the last few years. When you start calling through the raw lists, you get lots of what seem like fruitless calls: hang-ups, disconnected numbers, people who tell you in no uncertain terms they love President Bush and wouldn’t think of voting for a Democrat now. Many, many calls are unresolved: A machine picks up, and you leave a message; the people on the other end won’t tell you how they’re voting, even if they say they’re Democrats; some say they’ve already voted. Occasionally–very occasionally, someone will tell you they plan to vote for the Democrat in the race and might even tell you what time they plan to go to the polls. So what you and the tens of thousands of other people calling from around the country are doing, one number at a time, is winnowing down the lists, culling out the bad numbers and the hostile voters one by one until, on the morning of the election, your left mostly with those who have indicated they’re going to support your candidate.

So while it was still dark in Oakland Tuesday morning, I was calling people in New York to make sure they were doing what they had said they were going to do: Get out to the polls and vote. The aim isn’t to get every single promised voter out the door, but rather to nudge enough of them that they might make a difference in a close race. And the assumption was they all the races we were making calls on were very close.

So: the New York 20th. Kirsten Gillibrand–the online calling interface advised it was pronounced JILL-uh-brand–was running against a pretty well entrenched Republican (though one, I heard later, had a possible history of domestic violence to explain during the campaign). She won.

After making 20 or so calls there and getting mostly cheerful- or relieved-sounding people, the calling system started spitting out numbers for the Connecticut 2nd District, for a guy named Joe Courtney. With all 242,000 votes in the district counted, he’s ahead by 170.

Then on to the 1st District in Iowa, where a college professor named Dave Loebsack was running against another well-established Republican. My 24 calls into his district all went to a little town called West Liberty, just east of Iowa City. I got lots of machines and precisely one voter who said they planned to go out and vote for Professor Loebsack (pronounced LOBE-sack). He won.

–After about five hours of that fun, I went home, took a nap, took the dog for a walk, and voted. I came home and, urged on by a MoveOn email, logged on to the calling site and made some last-minute calls to New York, to Colorado, to Idaho. When Kate got home, we went back to the polling place to drop off her absentee ballot, picked up a couple hamburgers, and came home to watch the returns. I was surprised that the broadcast networks all stuck with their prime-time programming. So, we had a diet of CNN, MSNBC and even a dash of Fox News until 10 p.m., when we switched over to the still Leslie Griffithless KTVU news. Sometime after 11, our neighbors Jill and Piero came over and we opened a bottle of champagne to toast the results. The last time we did that was 1992, the night Bill Clinton won, in the street in front of our house. You know, that was really a long time ago.

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Moving On Again

Day Two at the MoveOn.org Political Action beehive in downtown Oakland:

I spent about three hours calling today. The drill was the same as the other day: We were trying to get people who have volunteered to call voters in competitive congressional districts to commit to specific times to do their work. I dialed 59 numbers, using my own cellphone; part of the way the organization saves money, or optimizes its effort, or however you want to put it, is to limit the number of land lines on the premises and get people to use their own cellphone minutes. Since it was early afternoon, maybe two out of three of those calls went to answering machines. Just like the other night, I got maybe 15 people who couldn’t or wouldn’t commit to making voter phone calls. I got five people who said they’d make calls over the last five days of the campaign, tomorrow (Friday) through Tuesday.

That was an improvement over Tuesday night, though a couple of not necessarily positive issues came into focus for me:

First: Despite all the griping people are given to, there are not a whole lot of people willing to give up a few hours of their time on the off chance it might improve the situation they’re griping about. That ought to be no surprise given the reality that “high turnout” general elections aren’t wildly popular affairs. The U.S. Census Bureau says that about 215 million Americans were eligible to vote in 2004; just two-thirds of that number were registered. The turnout of eligible voters–with the nation at war, the minority party with a grudge to settle, and one of the most divisive chief executives in our history standing for re-election–was 125 million, or 58.3 percent of the eligible population. To paraphrase Captain Louis Renault, I’m shocked, shocked to find there’s no voting going on here.

Second: You’ve got to wonder whether the telephone, abused as it is by people no one wants to hear from, is really the best instrument for persuading people to get out and vote. Of the 15 or 20 people I managed to get on the phone, only two were really willing to listen to the full pitch, and they seemed predisposed to go along with the program. Of the rest, almost everyone sounded hurried and impatient. Not that I blame them. In the back of my mind, I can hear Eudora Welty’s explanation of why she didn’t stay in advertising: “It was too much like sticking pins into people to make them buy things they didn’t need or really want.” For many of us, the phone has become impersonal, and sales calls, even the high-minded political kind that you may have invited, are grating. You just wonder whether there’s a better, more personal way of getting people to sign up for the fight. (I don’t suppose we’ll be going back to the old face-to-face political machine model any time soon; though it wasn’t all bad: I’ve been told that Richard J. Daley showed up at my great-grandmother O’Malley’s wake; this was 1952, three years before he ran for mayor, and apparently it was just part of his way of getting to know the voters (the living ones, I mean).

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Moving On

Somewhere in the dim past, I gave money to MoveOn.org, or signed one of its petitions, or maybe did some phone-banking in 2004. However it happened, they called me a week or so ago to get me to volunteer to make phone calls this week. I agreed, but something came up the first night I was supposed to go, so I didn’t show. They called again. Last night, I went in for the first of several evenings of calling–contacting people like me who have somewhere along the line said yes to something MoveOn asked them to do and who are now being asked to call voters in key congressional races.

After an orientation about the calling process and the script we were to use, I started dialing. My targets were folks in the 831 area code–Santa Cruz and Monterey counties, mostly. The goal was to get people to commit to six hours of phone work in the last five days of the campaign, Friday through election day. Since we were calling MoveOn people, the task seemed a little easier at the outset than cold-calling people on voter registration rolls who may or (more likely) may not want any part of your get-out-and-vote rap. I could hear fellow volunteers happily announcing (by ringing desk bells) that they were getting commitment after commitment. A lot of people want to have a sense they’re doing something to effect some change, any change.

In two hours or so, I made 34 calls. About half went to answering machines. About half a dozen were wrong numbers or fax lines or otherwise “bad.” The rest–let’s say a dozen–picked up. Three said don’t call here again. About four said call back because there are trick-or-treaters at the door. Another four said, gee, we’d like to help, but we can’t for one reason or another. That leaves one person.

She began by telling me she’d fallen asleep at the computer while trying to figure out the MoveOn calling system and thought she’d better not try any more calling. Really? I asked. Why? “Because I’m old and tired,” she said. “Hey, join the crowd,” I told her. “The only thing that’s keeping me going is being in a room full of people doing the same thing.” She listened, and after a little cajoling committed to attending “phone parties” on Saturday and Sunday.

That’s my success story. It’s enough to keep me going back for more.

Some snippets from other people I talked to:

“I can’t make long-distance calls because I’m on a plan that only allows me two hours of long-distance calls a month.”

“I don’t have any time man–I’m looking for work.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t–I have a mother who’s in the middle of dying.”

“I’m just on my way out the door to see David Sedaris. Call back tomorrow.”

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