Phone Calls for Obama
Oct 7th, 2008 by nick
Since my last post about Joining the Obama Campaign I’ve gone into the local Obama campaign office about once a week to volunteer. Although I tried at first to convince the volunteer coordinators that I should do data entry, they’ve mostly had me making phone calls. The way it works is that I get a list of voters who by some algorithm have been designated as possibly undecided. Mostly, they’re registered as “Unaffiliated.” I was skeptical of the efficacy of making cold calls like this until I realized that the real point isn’t to convince people to vote for Obama (though that’s a bonus no one will turn down), but simply to identify Obama supporters. The campaign will then follow up with all the people who voiced their support for Obama to make sure they actually vote.
As one might imagine, I’ve had some interesting conversations. And I’ve mostly discovered that I’m not all that good at it. I don’t like to just read the script because I come across as, well, scripted. But when I try to speak off the cuff, I typically find myself coming up with good arguments about five minutes after someone’s hung up on me. Yesterday, for example, a woman said that she is part of a military family, and so she’s obviously voting for McCain. I made some weak and ineffective attempts to mention Obama’s votes in support of veterans’ care, the GI bill, and so on. But what I really should have done was start out by saying that I know many military families who are supporting Obama, and then ask her why specifically she thinks McCain will be better for military families. If she had said that it was because he’d actually been in the military, I should have said, “Great! Then I assume you’ll be supporting (Democrat) Lt. Col. Hal Bidlack for congress.” But sadly I missed that opportunity.
In another conversation yesterday, a young man started out by asking me if Obama was really going to take his guns away. I responded that the McCain campaign and special interests like the NRA have been spreading lies about Obama’s positions on gun control, and that he has no intention of attempting to overturn the second amendment. But the guy insisted that the attack ads must be based on something substantial, and probed me for details on specific bills that Obama has supported that might be construed as voting against gun rights. I of course didn’t have those details, but I did note his interest, and the office will send him some info on Obama’s positions on that issue. He seemed like a truly undecided voter, so maybe my ten-minute conversation and the campaign materials will sway him.
Luckily I didn’t get the woman who told the person making calls next to me that she couldn’t vote for Obama because he “likes to kill little babies.” There are plenty of reasonable arguments to be made that Obama’s policies on sex education and access to contraception will actually reduce the number of abortions more than will the failed Republican policies of abstinence-only sex ed. But I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to come up with cogent arguments on the spot any better than the shocked caller next to me. And really, I don’t think anything we could have said would have made any difference in that woman’s vote.
As yesterday was the deadline for voter registration in Colorado, the office was frantically trying to reach people who had filled out voter registration forms incorrectly. Many of the mistakes seemed to be from college students who don’t have a Colorado drivers’ license, so used their social security number as an ID. Unfortunately, the confusing Colorado registration form requires a box to be explicitly checked in that case saying that the voter does not actually have a Colorado ID. And given our Clerk and Recorder’s history, you can assume that he’ll toss out any ballot with even such a minor mistake. So I spent some time yesterday trying to reach the folks with mistakes in their registrations. I’m happy to report that I did save several registrations. Since these registrations are all from likely Democratic voters, I feel that I directly earned Obama several votes in Colorado Springs yesterday.