(cross-posted at Deny My Freedom and Daily Kos)
Last weekend, I volunteered with the Ned Lamont for U.S. Senate campaign for the first time. My summer job is prohibitive to making monetary donations to candidates, and being a mere 15 minutes from Connecticut, I decided to stop sitting on my ass and go do my own part. Canvassing and phonebanking certainly isn’t as noticeable as the efforts of deservedly-lauded bloggers such as Spazeboy and the bloggers who put together the “Kiss” buttons and the now-legendary “Kiss” float. Nevertheless, it’s still a critical part of getting out the vote ahead of the August 8 primary, which, as the entrance to the 4th District office in Norwalk shows, is a mere 10 days away.
I got to the office a little too late to go canvassing up with most of the field staff in Bridgeport, so instead of baking in the hot, humid weather today, I got to do roughly 4 hours of phonebanking and had a great time chatting with the remaining staff and the volunteers who came in for the day.
Even moreso than canvassing, it seemed like phonebanking was even less successful than the canvassing last Sunday afternoon. Perhaps people are much more wary of answering their phones and speaking to strangers. One of the women I spoke to got quite angry at me, yelling at me and demanding to know what I was trying to sell her (in the end, she was one of the undecided voters). The additional trouble of speaking over the phone is that it’s more difficult to convey a sense of genuine feeling. After all, with such a small time frame to make your case, there has to be a quick, concise sales pitch – and what I discovered was that most people didn’t really give a damn about what I thought to begin with. Another additional problem is that I don’t think everyone understands what a primary is. Many folks stated, “I’m going to vote for the Democrat”. While this may be a rich lead-in to discussing who is the bona fide Democratic candidate in the Democratic primary, elaborating further didn’t seem to clear up much of the misunderstanding. Of course, of those who picked up their phones, most didn’t want to be bothered. One person was in the middle of a card game, many just hung up on me, and overall, it ended up with me shaking my head and wondering if the blogosphere overplays the impact this race is having among your average citizen.
That being said, I probably ended up having more Lieberman supporters than Lamont backers by the time I finished calling roughly 200 households. One of the disadvantages of calling the bigger cities is that this is where Lieberman’s ‘support’ is the strongest, as he has the backing of the local political machines. That being said, none of the Lieberman supporters seemed overly enthusiastic about backing the incumbent. The Lamont supporters, on the other hand, had a little piece to say. One person said that they’d be voting for Lamont because they felt it was ‘time for a change’. The other person I spoke to who supported Lamont (as does his spouse) said that we needed to ‘kick the bums out’. His take was that everything was a mess, and everyone – Bush and the rest of Congress – deserved to be ‘thrown out’. There was never such an aggressive stance taken by Lieberman supporters; indeed, they sounded fairly curt when answering who they were supporting. One of my fellow volunteers said when they called a particular person, that person was extremely angry – until they heard that we were calling on behalf of Lamont. Then they said that they were supporting him and wished us the best. To me, this is the vital difference in what I’ve noticed to date – Lieberman supporters don’t seem overly enthusiastic about their candidate, but those who feel strongly about this race – those who have their piece to say about what’s going on – are voting for Lamont. There’s a passion on our side that simply doesn’t exist in the other campaign.
I should add that another fortuitous benefit added for the Lamont campaign is using volunteers who are fluent in Spanish to call various households. I’m not sure how many people they converted, but it definitely helped; their conversations seemed to go on longer than ours did. My last call for the afternoon was to someone who said they didn’t speak English. So I handed it over to the volunteer next to me, and she spoke to the person in Spanish, and she was able to turn someone who would have otherwise gone ignored into a voter leaning towards casting a vote for Lamont. It may just be luck, but to me, this is genius.
We called it a day around 5 PM, as there was much data entry to be done. Additionally, some people were contemplating heading up to New Haven for the Temptations concert tonight, where both Ned and Joe were in attendance (as far as I know). Tomorrow, I’ll be out hitting the pavement again, doing my little part to ‘kick the bums out’.
