This weekend marked the beginning of Philadelphia for Obama’s Get Out the Vote project for this year’s State and Local election on November 6th. Even though Barack Obama is not on that ballot, and won’t be until April 22nd we believe that we need to be spending our time and energy helping get Democrats to the polls for this Fall’s elections. To that end, the grassroots team for Barack Obama here in Pennsylvania has decided to push getting our volunteers to participate in Get Out the Vote activities statewide and help out with local candidates they like in the run up to this coming general election.
Here in Philly, we started out by preparing a Get Out the Vote flyer for distribution during a national canvassing day for Barack Obama. Asking the people we canvassed to remember to vote on November 6th certainly made the canvassing very enjoyable for me. Most people really appreciate it when you ask them to vote, even if they have already told you that they won’t support your preferred candidate for president. We are planning to call all of our supporters in the greater Philadelphia area in part to ask them to volunteer in the run up to election day.
Obama supporters statewide are doing a variety of efforts to help out the candidates on ballot this November. We are asking our volunteers and supporters to help out in the local races now, either by volunteering for those campaigns or by asking voters to “Barack the Vote” between now and election. We are heading out to County Fairs and to Democratic County Dinners around the state to contribute what we can and give our support. We are working the the campaigns for 2007 to see how we can improve their turnout and find out where we can best help out.
I know that it isn’t usually the done thing to ask volunteers for one candidate to head out and help in an election where your candidate isn’t running, but we think it is the right thing to do. There is a lot to do between now and the end of primary season, but now a year ahead of the Presidential general election, we are doing what we can to help Democrats get elected in our city, county and state.
