I live in Illinois, but my father has a summer home in western Michigan about 20 miles north of Muskegon. Before I got up there, I was interested in helping out the Obama campaign up there. I was talking with my sister, who was up there as well, and she said that she wanted to help too when I got there. This was surprising since my sister has never been very interested in politics and certainly not interested about a presidential candidate as long as I remember. BTW, I'm 43 years old so my memory goes back to at least Nixon-McGovern in 1972. Needless to say, I was happy to hear about her interest, so I contacted the campaign at their local office in Muskegon Heights to see what we could do.
I'm used to canvassing door-to-door, so I was up for doing that and again I was surprised when my sister said she was willing to do that too. For someone who has not been involved in politics to not only volunteer, but also have the nerve to go door-to-door, was truly astonishing and obviously a testament to Barack Obama and his campaign that inspired her to do this.
Well, once we got to the campaign headquarters, we met with the field director, who was a young man, formerly from Michigan but living in Chicago now. He was a great guy and helped explain the do's and don'ts of canvassing to my sister and told us what the plan at this point was. Unlike other canvassing I have done, including in the primary, we were not give a walk sheet with registered voters' names and addresses to knock on. Due to the "non-primary" in Michigan in January, most of the ground work has not been laid here in Michigan. Part of that ground work includes registering your potential voters and that is what we were sent out to do. We were given a 3 block square portion of Muskegon to canvass, knocking on every door to see if they were Obama supporters (which 90% of them turned out to be) and if they were registered. If they weren't we had the voter registration forms there to do it on the spot.
Before we get to our experience, a little background on our little part of Michigan. It is part of the 2nd congressional district in Michigan with a Cook rating of R+9. While the district as a whole is Republican, the largest city, Muskegon (just under 40,000), is a decidedly Democratic one. It's population has been in decline for decades as have the manufacturing jobs. Still about a quarter of the jobs in the city are manufacturing related. Roughly 30% of the population is African-American and over 20% of the population lived below the poverty line as of the 2000 census. As many of the large manufacturing cities in Michigan, it has and is going through a rough time economically. No one has definitive unemployment statistics for Muskegon, but with the Michigan unemployment rate at about 8%, Muskegon is probably at least double that. It has a proud union tradition, but many of those jobs have slowly gone away. Retail and the service industry are the fastest growing sectors there and even those are shrinking in this economy.
Both the 2000 and 2004 elections gave Gore and Kerry about a 6,000 vote margin in Muskegon. For Obama to offset other losses in this district, he'll have to win big here again to make it close in western Michigan. With big wins in Detroit, Lansing and Ann Arbor, it will be key to keep his losses minimal in the other regions of Michigan like this one.
So, to get back to our canvassing highlights, the area we were sent was a predominantly African-American neighborhood with many vacant buildings and most houses split into separate apartments. It was about 4 or 5 blocks from the main high school in town, Muskegon High School, but there were not many school age children in this particular pocket. Most of the people there had lived there most of their life and have seen it go from a fairly stable working class community to one teetering on the edge of viability now.
To begin with, my sister and I went to a few houses together so that she could get the hang of canvassing. Besides the introduction, I usually don't adhere too closely to the scripts as I find them too much like you're talking at people instead of to people. She got the hang of it very quickly and after about 4 or 5 houses, we split up with us working on opposite sides of the same block.
As I said earlier, the people we canvassed were strong Obama voters and so most our work was to make sure they were registered to vote. Having canvassed before, I was surprised by the amount of people we were able to contact on a weekday afternoon. I'd say that nearly half the doors we knocked on had someone answer the door. This was true for both me and my sister and not like other canvassing days where I was lucky to get a 20% response rate.
One of the people we met was a middle aged black woman who was a huge supporter and very engaged in the whole process. She told us to tell the campaign that Barack needs to visit Muskegon before the election. I told her we'd forward it on to our field director. I was overjoyed at the excitement that politics was bringing to people's lives there and hopeful of the change that it could bring to a community like this. There is no reason why Muskegon couldn't become a huge center for wind power in the midwest. There are constant on-shore breezes from Lake Michigan that could produce energy throughout the year there.
As it turned out, my sister and I knocked on over 60 doors that afternoon and we registered 9 people. A very good day for us and hopefully for Barack in Muskegon and in Michigan come November.