Virginia is for…
Suffolk, Virginia. Yesterday I saw the Obama ground game at full throttle for the first time. Lots of volunteers knocking on thousands of doors here in Suffolk. Get out the vote (GOTV) is the name of the game. We are contacting mainly known Obama voters to make sure they get to the polls. Talking to people is the best way of doing this. We try to elicit what their plan is for election day: when will they go vote, with whom, where? When people aren’t home, second best is that big door hanger we are now using.
My role was mainly instructing the canvasers and helping them turn in their data, which are reported several times a day to Chicago. Some people went out two and three times. Others just did one round. A big contingent came down from Prince George’s county in Maryland. A few came in from DC and other parts of Maryland. One woman from New Orleans is staying with her niece nearby.
What are they hearing? A lot of strong support for the President, which is what you would expect in this GOTV phase of the campaign. But they are also hearing about dirty tricks. The main one at the moment seems to be phone calls to the elderly telling them they can vote by phone, which of course is not the case. There were enough cases of this today to suggest it is an organized effort.
I don’t really know what to say about this except the obvious: whoever does it belongs in prison. We are making extraordinary efforts to ensure that our door-hangers, which list the local precinct for a particular area, do not get distributed to others who live outside that precinct. That someone else is trying hard to mislead voters is criminal, even if it is not likely to succeed with enough voters to make a difference.
What we are not hearing is also important. There is no sign of effort by the local authorities, or the local population, to suppress the vote by intimidation. It is hard to tell anything about race relations without really living in a community, but they don’t seem particularly troubled here. Certainly daily interactions appear normal and even cordial. The clientele and staff of the three restaurants I’ve tried so far are mixed. I noted yesterday the all too apparent anger of white males, who clearly feel their position in society is under assault. But I haven’t seen any sign of that out in public.
Virginia claims to be for lovers. I can’t testify to that. But it certainly appears friendly, even if the politics of this presidential election have divided it deeply and evenly.
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