I know this will be a fairly short diary, but thought I would write a little about my experiences today in the "wilds" of western Virginia.
I went to the office in Christiansburg, Va, (pop. 10,000 or so), about 5 miles from Blacksburg, of Virginia Tech fame, about 1:00 and found the parking lot filled with cars. Now this is a tiny office, really just an offshoot of the Blacksburg office, but there were way more cars than on the last two weekends when I went over there. Good stock of information and goodies, although the stock they had before clearly had rotated out. The phones were busy and during my five minutes there (both going out and coming back), there were additional folks either returning their files or getting new ones.
I asked Adam, the lead guy there, how many people were coming in to help today, and he said 30, maybe 40. Frankly, I was shocked, I figured 10-15 at most, especially in this small conservative town, but this is a great turnout. (Doing a quick bit of math, if there are 50 offices in Virginia, with 30 canvassers each, that means at least 1500 going out in the field just in VA. My guess is that the numbers are much higher in bigger locales though. Multiple that by 50, and that's the equivalent of 65,000, or three of four Army DIVISIONS of troops hitting the field nationwide. That's a pretty powerful army, not even counting the phonebankers. My guess is that is a low estimate.
The canvassing went OK, although they are certainly scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of undecideds and rare, sporadic voters. I don't mean that in derogatory terms of the people chosen, but instead that everyone has been hit multiple times, or are refusing to vote or whatever. I must admit, without trying to sound too elitist, but these were pretty low information voters. I think at least one of the people I visited was a parolee, based on is response to whether he was voting.
Managed to turn at least one (maybe two?) undecided voter over, who was leaning GOP, but didn't like McCain, for all the normal reasons. I did find a few definite Obama voters that had been hiding out, but largely it will be hard to get these folks to vote. Maybe they shouldn't all be voting.
There are still a few who simply wouldn't say who they are voting for, and I think alot of these folks are getting called "undecided" voters by pollsters. Kelly, the other worker in the field offices was saying her grandmother just can't stand Palin, that she physically feels ill when she hears her talk (I understand that feeling, I too am a graduate of University of Idaho, a few years before Pain was there, and I'm almost embarrassed to tell anyone that right now - really we're not all like that, most of my friends were smart and liberal). Anyway, she said her grandmother is one of those who won't discuss her vote, although she clearly is for Obama.
One of the things that was notable was the ratio of signs and bumper stickers. Now this is classically deep red territory, but while there aren't alot of yard signs overall, I've seen about 12 Obama yard signs to about 8 McCain yard signs, and about an 8:1 ratio of Obama bumper stickers or magnets. <ots of cars have bumper stickers/magnets (Another aside, about two weeks ago, some idiot systematically removed every Obama sign in our precinct, including some very large ones - ALL have been replaced, sometimes with two - and on the other side, some idiot Dem lit a large McCain sign on fire - one guess as to which made the local news)</p>
I think people may be surprised with the vote in Virginia. Based on the turnout at the local HQ, I don't think anyone's taking anything for granted.
Anyway, thanks for listening, hope I got all the typos.