We were racing against the clock.
With an hour and fifteen minutes before the close of
elections in Merrimack County, New Hampshire, we took to the cars and the
streets. We abandoned our staging
location, grabbed walk packets and lists of sporadic voters and charged out
into the dark for our final Get Out the Vote effort!
We tore down dark rural roads scanning mailbox numbers. When
we reached a house on our list, the older woman accompanying me would zoom in
to the driveway and I would hurdle out of the car and up to the door. “We are just making sure everyone has
voted. And offering rides for those who
haven’t. Have you voted sir?”
For the last two and a half months, I suspended my life as a
teacher, trading it for life on the campaign trail. I moved up to New Hampshire and set up as a
full-time, unpaid fellow with Organizing for America – President Obama’s
grassroots campaign.
Four years ago I volunteered on Barak Obama’s campaign, but
in a more limited capacity. I was still
in college. I canvassed and phone banked on holidays and during the final weeks
of the election – on evenings in between paper writing.
But this election, with no hard commitments, I wanted to do
more. Why? Simply put: I believe in the
president. But I also have a deep
conviction that, as an American -- as a
citizen of a country where I have the power to be involved in the political
process and the possibility to effect change -- I have an obligation to participate.
And so, I traded lesson plans for walk packets. For two months my life took on a new routine:
hours of driving around rural New Hampshire, walking up drive ways and into
trailer parks to talk to voters, then back to our office for yet more hours sitting
on the floor making phone calls to more potential voters.
I canvassed the house of a 75-year-old Irish priest who
invited me into discuss politics in the rectory, and I knocked on the door of a
19-year-old girl who had never considered voting before we talked. I traipsed up a long driveway to a
dilapidated mobile home and spoke with a grizzled, beer-bellied man with no
shirt who politely refused to share his political leanings.
It wasn’t easy. There were days when I canvassed for six hours
alone, in the rain – going from silent home to silent home, leaving behind a
wake of literature. There were nights when
I made 250 phone calls. I would be
cursed at, lied to, hung up on – not just by Republicans, but also by Democrats
fed-up with the political season. We
would spend hours prepping canvassing packets and then be told that our targets
had switched and we had to scrap our work and start afresh.
But there were also the volunteers who worked with us week
after week -- as the leaves changed
colors and then fell, as the air went from crisp to biting. There was the sixteen-year-old high school
girl who was a powerhouse on the phones, who admitted that her grades were
slipping as a result of being at our office for so many hours a week, and who in
the same sentence brushed that concern aside with a simple “This is more
important.” There was the 84-year-old
British woman who had been a nurse in Boston and spoke bluntly about watching
women die on the operating table from back-alley abortions in a time before Roe
v. Wade. She and an older gentleman
would sit near the windows and, between phone calls to voters, reminisce about
life under FDR.
For two months I listened to stories – from men, women, old
and young. I listened to worries,
concerns, hopes, fears and dreams.
In the end, all of our hours of canvassing and phone calls
came down to one day – November 6th 2012.
It came down to how many people we could encourage to
vote. It was a numbers game. But it was also, on the ground, an individual
game. We arranged rides to the polls
for elderly people. We followed up with
others to ensure that they registered at the right polling location. These were men and women that I had grown to
know over two months, whose doors I had knocked on, whose stories I had
listened to.
Each vote was a story.
A week before the election one of my volunteers canvassed
the house of a man with a minor criminal record. A town clerk told him that he could not vote
because of this record. Checking, we found that New Hampshire law
disenfranchises only those still serving time or those convicted of voting
fraud. We returned to his house to tell
him so. At 6:30 am on Election Day he
called my boss to thank her and say that he was off to the polls to vote for
the President.
During that last hour of the election, as we sped along the
back-roads of rural New Hampshire looking for final potential voters who had
yet to make it to the polls, we swapped stories in the car. The older woman with whom I was driving told
me that she became politically active at a young age. When she was fifteen, she proceeded to tell
me, Dr. Martin Luther King came to Boston. Skipping school, she wore her Catholic school
uniform and joined in the parade. As they marched down the streets of Boston,
older men began ushering her to the front, until she was, in the end, walking
hand in hand with Dr. King.
Hours later we, all the staff in the Concord office, crowded
into an unheated room in our office to watch as the polls come in,. We fretted as we refreshed our internet
browsers incessantly. Around 10 pm, they
called NH for the President.
The election was still to be called. But we in New
Hampshire, with our four precious electoral votes, we had done what we set out
to do. There was champagne, hugs, tears
and a little dancing.
And then, finally, we went home to sleep.
President Obama has another four years to help move America forward.
The campaign is over and I am heading back to the
classroom. I miss students, I miss
teaching. But for all the worry, stress,
frustrations and pure exhaustion of the last two months I would not have had it
any other way. It has been my privilege
and my honor as a young woman, and a young American, to work for my President.
There is still work to do.
But I can now return to the classroom knowing that I have a
President who has my back and has the back of my students.
