Brynn Marie Evans

It’s hard not to follow U.S. politics right now. And especially when we have two presidential candidates who promise to bring us “change”! Heh. Hmmm.

Christopher and I have been feeling strongly that we need to do something to bring this country back on track. (Specifically, get Obama elected.) In all likelihood, California will go to Obama, but we are bordered by the “battleground” state of Nevada, which also appears to be a high “return on investment” state (according to FiveThirtyEight.com). We noticed that the local Obama campaign was looking for volunteers to make calls to Nevada, so we decided to spend a few hours last Saturday volunteering our time.

I’ve never phone-banked before and I never thought I’d be good at it. In fact, I was not good at it. But we also had an interesting experience. Instead of calling to get people to vote or to talk to them about Obama’s issues, we were simply taking a poll of who they were likely to support in November. Apparently this is the tactic at this stage of the game (we were not leaving voicemails)—this is still considered “early on,” I guess. By assessing people’s support, they said we would have a better idea of how Nevada would vote than the weekly polls announced by other groups. Furthermore, we could ask voters what issues were most important for them, relay this info to Obama headquarters, who could then target advertisements locally addressing these issues. In theory, it sounds great and makes a lot of sense.

In practice, I’m not sure exactly what we accomplished on Saturday. Our local office may have had as many as 3,000 voters names from the Public Database of Voters. Among the 20-some volunteers that day, we placed calls to everyone within 2-3 hours. I can really only report on my experience, and a bit of the experiences Christopher reported to me—surely, other people had better (more promising?) experiences?

The large majority of people I called didn’t even answer the phone. This could be because they were busy (mid-day on Saturday) or because I was calling from my personal cell phone and they might have screened their calls. Most of the people on my list were “independents” or “non-partisans”; probably less than 2% were “democrat” or “republican.”

When people did answer, many of them hung up the phone as soon as they heard that I was volunteering with the Obama campaign. (This discouraged me.) Two or three snickered and said things like, “And what might you be calling about?” I only connected with a few people who were willing to have a three minute conversation about what their issues were. One said illegal immigration. One said Obama is talking a lot of talk, but she can’t see how he will execute. One said he was disappointed with both candidates, but would be confident he will have made up his mind by November. One said he’s voting for “anyone but Obama” and promptly slammed down the receiver. One woman seemed wholly disenchanted—she was leaving the country for a vacation, didn’t care about absentee voting, and basically was just ignoring everything that is going on in politics. I only spoke to two people who said they were definitely voting for Obama, and one of them somehow made up for all the negative feelings I had that day. I don’t even remember his name anymore, but he said that he was about to start getting paid full-time to work for the Obama team in Nevada. Yay!

At the end of the day, I felt that I didn’t learn much about Nevada voters. True, I was mostly talking to folks who were undecided, but even then, I didn’t get much information from them that I thought could be used by the local Obama team in a positive way. Since most people didn’t answer the phone or refused to talk to me, I didn’t even get a sense of the overall political vibe in Nevada. In fact, a few people were annoyed that they have been called several times recently; some asked to be taken off our list. How is this type of semi-intrusive calling actually benefitting Obama’s cause?

This post is really meant to document my experiences phone-banking last weekend. I may do it again, though I don’t think I am very good at cold-calling like this. I do want to encourage other Obama supporters to find some way to get involved, though. Perhaps after another few weeks, the tone of the phone calls will change in a way that we can better connect with voters. But perhaps we should instead focus on getting people registered to vote. A short day-trip to Reno, Nevada, close to the SF Bay Area, could prove to be enormously useful.

I found these tips about voter registration deadlines (in Nevada). Anybody want to take a day trip with me in the next few weekends of September?

Nevada does not provide for online voter registration, but you can do it by mail with this downloadable voter registration application. You can register in person at Nevada DMV offices, university campuses, some social services agencies, and county clerk / registrar of voters offices. In Washoe County, go to Registrar of Voters, 1001 E. Ninth St., P.O. Box 11130, Reno, NV 89520-0027.

General Election [registration deadline]: October 4, 2008, if you register to vote by mail. October 14, 2008, if you register to vote in person.

Nevada provides for early voting; general election early voting begins October 18. Early voting locations and polling places for the regular election are provided on sample ballots mailed to registered voters. If you don’t receive this information or want to confirm that you are registered to vote, call the Washoe County Elections and Voter Registration Center at (775) 328-3670.