Once again, I got back last night to my state from next door Ohio, canvassing to nudge Obama voters to the polls. This time we were dispatched to deep red and sometimes rabidly Tea Party neighborhoods in Hamilton County. And boy was it quite the experience. As we drove into the Delhi subdivision where our staging site was located, my canvass partner (a 72-yer old bundle of energy who carpooled with me on the drive to Ohio) and I quickly realized that this was gonna be challenging on several counts. The visual overload of seeing an endless sea of not just Romney/Ryan signs but angry bold Tea party diatribes – i.e. Brown kills Jobs, Obama threatens religious FREEDOM, Defend Bill of Rights, Save the Constitution—required all the intestinal fortitude we could muster.
In the midst of all this, we made the turn to the final street and voila, our eyes were richly rewarded with the calming Obama-blue signage & buntings that festooned the OFA volunteer’s house-turned-staging site for this final GOTV push. T’was a sight to behold and even more soothing as we and other Kentucky volunteers crowded into this warm cottage-style house to receive our instructions and canvass packets while the aroma of chocolate chip and macadamia nut cookies wafted through our nostrils. Took a few bites of course.
As OFA’s memo released on Nov 3rd stated, we were part of the volunteer army being deployed to do the final stage GOTV. There are:
5,117 get-out-the-vote (GOTV) staging locations in the battleground states that will decide this election, they began to execute the final phase of a ground game unlike any American politics has ever seen. These staging locations are even more localized versions of our field offices – set up in supporters’ homes, businesses or any area that can serve as a central hub for a team’s GOTV activities in the final days….From these hyper-local Obama hubs, volunteers have signed up for 698,799 shifts to get out the vote over the final four days of this campaign , a number that grows by the minute as organizers continue assigning supporters who have expressed an interest in volunteering.More over the squiggleys…