Yesterday was a full day. I met up with Meesha and Maria, my canvassing cohorts at Sylvia’s house at 10am and left the Obama office at 8pm. With it being homecoming weekend, not many people were answering their doors, but the few that did kept us smiling.
The streets were flooded with thousands of Gator fans wearing blue and orange.
Gainesville is University of Florida. There are 50,000 students and thousands upon thousands of boosters, parents, siblings, alums, and just plain Gator (their sports team) fanatics. It took me about 40 minutes to get to our staging location in the morning because of the traffic. EVERYBODY in the streets was wearing blue and orange Florida Gator apparel. It was out of control. It was even more overwhelming than the cheese-head factor I experienced in my visit up to Green Bay (Packer country) a few years ago.
Many of the Gator fans wore McCain/Palin stickers and one even had a “Gators for McCain/Palin” t-shirt on. I didn’t see many Obama supporters in the streets. The neighborhoods were a different story though.
We went to three different locations yesterday – a mostly-college student apartment complex, a low-income mainly African American apartment complex, and a predominantly black, low-income set of houses off of a main road. I’d guess I knocked on about 70 doors, recruited about 4 or 5 volunteers, got 10-12 people to pledge to vote early, and talked to just one person who isn’t going to vote. Most people either weren’t home or weren’t answering their door. No matter what you’re canvassing for, there are going to be a set of people who just aren’t too happy to talk to you or will not answer the door when they see somebody with a pen and clip board. I guess that’s the breaks when you have people who are used to vacuum salesmen, surveyists, missionaries, and fundraisers. My main purpose for paying them a visit was to tell them the location of their polling place down the street.
In this get out the vote operation, we’re paying a visit to “inactive” voters, “sporatic voters”, and “super sporatic voters” who are for the most part clear Obama supporters. In the last election only 64% of eligible voters actually made it out to vote. The rest were either too busy, ill or disabled, or not inspired. Our job is to bug them, help them, and inspire them enough to close the deal.
After we knocked on our last door as the sun went down, we came back to the office to turn in our paper work. There are a ton of interesting props, posters, and people in that place. Jason got a kick out of this hard-core smiling zombie for Obama.
Zombies for Obama
