Since I've been hanging around these parts, I've come to the opinion that those most worthy of praise are those who get out and take an active part in the political process, whether it's involvement with the local party, doing grass-roots campaign work or even running for office. I mostly come here to stay informed and to vent my opinion. But with so much at stake in next week's election, I needed to do more.
I've given a little money, but living in San Francisco where the contests are pretty low stakes most cycles (including this one), I haven't gotten involved in local campaigns. So, I decided to sign up for a GOTV phone shift.
There are still quite a few shifts available between now and election day. I signed up for a turn calling for the Iowa Senate race today from 2 to 5 pm PDT.
The process is pretty easy. You give them your name, email address and couple of other bits of information, you pick a shift and they send you an email with a link to the website that connects you to the phone system.
The shift was supposed to begin with a 15-minute training call, but I misunderstood the instructions. It turns out you're supposed to dial a separate number for the training call. So, I ended up just being thrown on the phone starting at 2 pm.
A screen comes up with the name, age and sex of the person you're calling. And there's a script leading to a couple of questions. You record the results of your call and they immediately throw you another call.
That part of it felt a bit relentless. Though the FAQ says you can pause, the only way to do so is by holding off on recording the results of the current call. That's not entirely comfortable. If you've reached an answering machine you're leaving a long, empty message, and if the call has ended, the voice prompt starts nagging you to complete recording the results. It would be a big improvement if they had a button for you to just pause between calls.
I had gone in intending to do the full three hours. But it made me edgy having to be so relentlessly 'on'. I think I would have liked it better at a call center where you have the company of other people doing it. And it certainly gave me some compassion for people who work in call centers for a living. So, after an hour and a half I was done.
Statistics
I made 57 calls with the following results:
- 11 gave a definite yes to the question of whether we could count on their vote
- 7 had already voted, presumably for our guy
- 2 were old people who were physically impaired from getting to the polls
- 15 times I reached an answering machine
- 19 were not at home or did not answer
- 3 were wrong numbers
For the yeses, the script had information about the polling place and then we were supposed to ask what time of day they intended to vote. I suppose there's some value in getting people to imagine the actual day and where it would fit in. But it felt a bit like pestering them. Some had an answer, others were unsure.
And this brings me to another thing. The choices for recording results did not seem to completely reflect the possible outcomes. For example, for the question, "When will you vote?" The choices were: Morning; Afternoon; Evening; Refused to Answer. Well some people answered that they weren't sure when they would vote. Recording that as Refused to Answer seems wrong.
And there was no way to differentiate between a call that wasn't answered and a call that was answered but the target was out.
Impact
It's hard to assess how much impact this has. Before I started I had visions of winning a dozen or more extra votes for our candidate. That was a fantasy. I doubt that during my 90 minutes I talked to a single person who would not have voted anyway.
I'm sure that the value must come just from the brute force of dialing hundreds of voters to turn out a single under-motivated voter. At the same time, there was clearly some fatigue in the electorate with the incessant political calls. I wonder what the adverse impact of that might be.
But I liked talking to the people in Iowa. I'm from Chicago originally, so I didn't feel like I was speaking a different language, as I might have calling to the South. And there was a great guy who went on about Republicans always screwing people.
I'm considering doing a turn for Mark Udall tomorrow at 5 pm PST. (Don't forget to change your clocks tonight.)