Tuesday, October 28th, 2008
A Hopeful Day in Dayton
Canvassing is an exhausting affair: hitting the road early in the cold morning, wandering through unknown neighborhoods, knocking on door after door and repeating the same speech about a thousand times.
Contrary to popular belief, most people are at the very least coutreous, regardless of their political views, but their reaction is often less than excited. We’re interupting their day-to-day life and, unlike me and many of my closest friends, politics isn’t something in which they’re particularly interested.
But then you run across people like Mattie, a 56-year-old woman who couldn’t wait to tell me that she was heading down the next morning to early vote for Barack Obama. “I’ve never voted before in my life,” she beamed. “But this year I couldn’t imagine not.”
And you have the chance to stop by community events, like the Sharks football team, which was selling delicious BBQ rib sandwiches out of a smoker at a major intersection. “We’re raising money to take our kids to the state championship,” their coach said, while agreeing to pass out early voting reminder flyers to any of the team’s customers.
The handful of Matties and the full belly of Sharks barbeque you run into over the course of a canvassing shift easily make up for the cold fingers and sore feet that are inevitable in such an affair.
John Kerry lost Ohio by about 9,000 votes — just nine votes per precinct. Our ground game is awesome and we’re going to shift the electoral landscape here in Dayton, across Ohio and then throughout the country. Change is coming.
One week to go.
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