Today, with three different partners, I hit 10 “turfs” (bundles of voter addresses) in North Philadelphia. At about 100 addresses per turf, I estimate I hit about 500 voters with Obama door-hangers reminding them that tomorrow is election day and where their local polling location is.
GOTV — Get Out the Vote — is as brass-tacks as politics gets. The key to winning this battle is a combination of massive manpower and operational efficiency: preferably, you not only throw more people at the problem of reminding (cajoling, pleading with) voters to vote, but also get more work out of them in the precious few hours of voting in a day. (Pennsylvanians get a few more hours than the average American: 13, between 7am and 8pm).
Door-hangers are how you get to voters when you know they’re not home, as you’d expect on a Monday. Though many of the households we lit-dropped today had someone home, usually because they work night shifts or, as they day turned to dusk, people came home.
The section of North Philly we covered had an interesting mix of old-school public housing and new mixed-income developments. One project we covered was a throwback to the bad old days of public housing, an 11-story concrete monster where the stairwells stuck to your shoes for reasons you’d rather not guess. There were low-rises too, many with open front doors where we could blow through and hit every apartment with efficient alacrity.
There were also some nice redeveloped homes, including some that took the place of the infamous projects where Bill Cosby grew up. The residents there were as likely to be Latino (generally, Puerto Rican) as Black, and most were friendly. True to demographics, though, many were also Hillary supporters. (The less-friendly Hillary supporters, whom we encountered later in the day, lived in the rougher parts of the neighborhood).
Perhaps with these newer residents, the face of North Philadelphia will change once again, as it has before. One of the old Baptist churches in the neighborhood still bears the name of the Jewish congregation that erected the building in 1911. Perhaps in the coming decades it will morph once again into Catholic or Pentacostal.
Youth remain the most enthusiastic supporters of Obama — I persuaded (I think) many older teens who lamented being too young to vote to show up tomorrow and put in some hours volunteering. Younger kids just like saying the name “Obama.” (I’ve often joked that the power of Obama’s name is in melding the three most primal sounds humans can make – “O Ba (father) Ma (mother)”.)
I certainly hope they will show up, as so many of the voters on our lists were newly-enrolled, often the most difficult to turn out, even a campaign as large and well-organized as Obama for Pennsylvania can run low on volunteers. At the end of this evening, we still had a good pile of turfs yet unturned — first priority for us tomorrow morning at 7am. A great war journalist might pull a great story out of the front-line experience of American democracy. But a media obsessed with glitter, scandal, and pablum never notice the grassroots, and perhaps that is a blessing.
