Canvassing is nothing new to us here. We’ve been canvassing hard since 2002 after we sat down and took a hard look at what it might take to win an election for Democrats in our Republican county. Canvassing --combined with other smart strategies like women-to-women letter writing campaigns, quality candidate recruitment, candidate training, and comprehensive absentee and other GOTV efforts, among many other things-- have helped us turn our county from red to blue even though we are still out-registered by Republicans.
We’ve moved our county from about 5 determined activists to now hundreds of volunteers and team leaders. It does my heart good now to go to Executive Party meetings and have to stand because all the chairs are taken. I didn’t beat the crowd there.
When we first started canvassing, we felt like we were re-inventing the wheel. There were very few "models" so to speak out there, so we sent out small teams to test drive our plans.
The very first thing we found out was that we had our heads in the sand.
We few came back to report on our first contacts, eyes wide with new knowledge that while our big issue might have been lobbyists in Washington, the voters’ issues were how to get the kids to school as well as get two parents to work on time with just one car. While we thought voters would be concerned that Roe V. Wade was in jeopardy, they told us they were worried about the meth lab up the street . While we wanted to find out how they felt about the bickering in Washington and how the Republicans were outright liars, they wanted to tell us about how they thought their water smelled funny and might be contaminated .
Long story short, we discovered that in order to win a couple of commissioner seats, we couldn't focus on broad statements like "clean water and clean air." We needed to focus on our county’s corrupt ambulance service provider and how he had been ripping off old and sick people for over 25 years.
The first year we actually managed to win an election was the first year we finally "got it."
I once had a candidate say to me:
"I don’t know why on earth the voters don’t get what the real issues are."
My response to him was:
"The voters are telling you what the issues are. The real question is: why don’t you get what the real issues are for them? And why aren’t you talking about what they’re talking about?"
We now require that our local candidates canvass at least twice during the election season.
So here we go again this year. We canvass every Saturday, pushing out into the rural areas of our county to find out how to win our candidates and how to better frame our message. We are all committed to an Obama win and will do whatever it takes to get there.
But while Team Obama talks about lobbyists and their hold over Washington , we tell Mabel Critcher if she votes for McCain, her social security check is going down the drain. While Team Obama tries to defend himself against pigs wearing lipstick, we ask Charlie Hollar how he is going to keep gas in his tractor if McCain keeps giving all of Charlie’s hard-earned tax money to big oil companies. While Team Obama gives up on talking about Iraq at all, we console Steve’s grandmother who is terrified she will never see him again because he keeps getting redeployed. While Team Obama talks about how McCain can’t push the buttons on a cell phone, we try to help Sally Ward figure out how to pay for her landline. While Team Obama talks about "change, change, change" generically, we tell a Sarah Palin fan how McCain/Palin is going to tax her health care benefits. (Talk about eyes getting wide on that one: "Really? Are you sure? Oh my God. I didn’t know that.")
All is not lost.
Team Obama can fix its message, but it must do so quickly and forcefully. Fact is, the currently messages coming from Team Obama in no way reflect what we are all finding out from boots on the ground. The messages coming from the Obama campaign, simply put, are ineffective because they concern issues that have no direct effect on the voters. The messages coming from Team Obama are not the issues voters are actually talking about.
This election, like every one before it, is not about what we think the issues are, it is about what the voters think the issues are. And what the voters think the issues are is clear, even though not necessarily in this order:
High cost of gas and groceries
Health care costs
Fear of losing or getting a job
100 more years in Iraq
There are 52 days left in this election. We can win it. But we will not win it if we don’t actually use the information we are gathering not just here in our small county but most certainly from canvasses across the country.