Entries tagged 'Ohio'

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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Friday, October 24th, 2008

Day 2 in Dayton

It’s close the end of my second day in Dayton and. so far, the city has been both everything I expected and a complete surpise.

Having not spent a ton of time in the midwest, I came to Ohio expecting a post-industrial wasteland. Dayton has been home to a number of manufacturing plants over the past 20 years: GM and Delphi to name a couple, all of which are now defunct. Much of the city reflects this: a quiet downtown, shuttered businesses and homes with foreclosure signs offering themselves up for sale for the lowest cash price.

At the same time, the people I spoke with during my first four-hour, 70+ home canvass are some of the nicest peolpe I’ve ever run into — excited, pretty upbeat about the situation and hopeful that a change in administration will begin to turn the economy around. We have a huge canvass this weekend, so I’m eager to see if this small sample of Daytonians is representative of the larger whole.

Equally surprising, though maybe it shouldn’t be, is how split Dayton is as a city: rich vs. poor, white vs. black, east side vs. west side, Obama vs. McCain. Yard signs serve as windows to passions of homeowners and quietly whisper the true challenge facing the next president: uniting the country and bringing together people who have fundamentally different belifs to find solutions acceptable to everyone.

And change is coming. The longer I am involved in the Obama campaign, the more clear it becomes to me that we have both the excitement and the ground game to knock this election out of the park. It’s the bottom of the ninth and we’re running for home here in Ohio.

11 Days to go.

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