canvassing is fun!
Today for the first time in weeks I felt like I had time, so I volunteered for canvassing. Though when I signed up on the Obama website there appeared to be only 3 other people on this shift, when I showed up at the house it was swarming with people--there might have been 50 people there, entering data and making calls and training volunteers, teams of canvassers going out. I partnered with a woman who turned out to be really interesting, a documentary photographer/runner/bike co-op volunteer, and we drove to southeast Durham and went down our list of 77 registered Democrats who've voted irregularly. It was a great list, by far the most accurate voter list I've ever worked from. We showed lots of people sample ballots, gave out poll opening and closing times, told them where their polling sites were, recommended judges, told 18-year-olds they had to vote for president separately (which everyone else seemed to know, thank goodness), wrote down who needed rides on Tuesday. Lots of people had already voted--even if the person on our list hadn't, others in the house had. Almost everyone was excited about voting and eager to talk about the election--not just the registered voters on our lists, but neighbors we passed sitting on porches or walking down the street. Someone waved out a car window and thanked us for our work. One woman told us she's making a scrapbook about the election for her son, now 2 years old. One person suspected us of being McCain supporters in disguise, but our spiel convinced her. I think every single person we canvassed all afternoon was African-American, and none of the streets we walked on was one I'd walked on before. I feel like just our being there, these two white women, being in agreement with the people we were talking to, was worth something.
And then we were ravenous, so we went out for pizza before taking back our canvass results. But when we got back to the house, a large and beautiful house probably dating from the 20s, which someone in my neighborhood lives in but has apparently loaned out to organizers, the door was still open and half a dozen people were still clustered around computers in the dining room, filing all the day's data.