Me and Hillary - Part 2: New Hampshire

As I left it in the first part, my blue Civic and I were lost somewhere in northern Vermont. After some shady corner store directions leading me on small winding roads through the woods, I found myself crossing a small bridge and at the New Hampshire border.
My target was the field office of Hillary Clinton for President in Berlin, New Hampshire, where I was told to expect long hours of repetitive work and only a small chance of seeing Hillary speak, let alone meet her. What I arrived at on a dark and snowy night was a dismal looking working-class town. I met the two full-time staffers in the office, Erik Balsbaugh and Nick Shepherd.
Erik was a 29-year-old from the Boston area who had worked for Howard Dean’s unsuccessful 2004 campaign. Nick was a 23-year-old Notre Dame graduate from Sacramento, California. I would get to know these two pretty well over the next two weeks.
The campaign was supposed to pre-arrange housing for me with a local volunteer. As it turned out, Berlin was lacking in political volunteers, among other things. Erik brought me to the supporter housing he was staying at, a 40-minute drive into the snow-covered hills, practically back in Vermont. I still remember having to switch from listening to New Hampshire Public Radio over to Vermont Public Radio half way through the commute each day. The commute was scenic, as I would find out the next morning. The route passed through the valley north of the massive Mount Washington.
As no good alternatives presented themselves, I ended up staying at the house for the duration of my two-week stay. My host was Nancy Ehrig, a lovely woman who was all too hospitable. She and her towering husband Ron were military parents who didn’t seem to see eye-to-eye on politics. It was safe to say Ron was not a Hillary fan. They gave me a pullout couch in the sunroom, which was more than sufficient. I gave them a bottle of wine as a thank you, and they looked like they didn’t know what to do with it.
The first night I sat down and read the documents sent to me by the state intern coordinator. It suggested getting up to date with Hillary’s bio and platform, which I printed out from her website. I also remember it mentioning that I scrutinize any information I had on social networking sites and look for anything “inappropriate”. Was the media that insane that it would use my drunken pictures on Facebook against Hillary? This was my first taste of how stringently controlled communications were within the campaign. Later I would be told not to continue writing my blog while I was with the campaign.
Every day for two weeks Erik and I commuted through several feet of snow to the storefront campaign office on a less-than-exciting Main street in Berlin. The main diet in the office was donuts and coffee, with the occasional wrap from across the street. Weekdays began with a 9:30am conference call with all the staffers in the state, and the day continued until 9:30pm, including nonstop automatic dialer calls from 6 till 9pm. The rest of the day was a mix of call lists, data entry, and miscellaneous tasks. I got my own desk and computer, and of course, a phone.
To be honest, I was pretty nervous about calling random registered voters and selling them on a political candidate, especially when I also liked one of her main rivals. Even if I could articulate why I thought Hillary Rodham Clinton was the most qualified for the job and I had some experience with cold calling, how was I supposed to call someone’s home and engage them in a conversation about it? I think I sat and stared at my first call sheet for about an hour before I summoned the courage to call the first name. To make it easier, the campaign handed out optional scripts for callers. These scripts were borderline useless, as they were long and impersonal. It felt like reading a press release to someone who picked up the phone during dinner.
With the advice of the staffers, I eventually came up with a good strategy. I would introduce myself, ask the person if they had decided who they were voting for, why, then add one reason why Hillary would be a better choice (if they didn’t say Hillary). I learned that it was easier to stick with issues that were close to home in small town New England, like health care and the economy. If I got to that point with someone on the phone I would be thrilled, as most people didn’t answer or found their own creative and polite ways to tell me to fuck off. I probably left fifty voicemails a day, and spoke to an alarming number of people who “had a spouse in the hospital” and didn’t want to talk politics. On some days, we would pretend to ring a “sale” bell on the rare and joyous occasion that we would even have something we could define as a conversation with a voter.
Some days the campaign would ask us to call pre-determined call lists (called “universes”) to encourage absentee voting or invite locals to visit the campaign office. These were better days.
Every night we would sit on automated online calling systems that would call multiple people and toss you a call when someone would pick up. The name would show up on the screen and you’d already be on the phone with the person. The system was called predictive dialer, and if you’ve done telemarketing, you might know enough about it already. These were always persuasion calls, and we would do them every night for three hours straight.
Weekends were reserved for door-to-door canvassing. I’ll never forget the first day I got to experience it. Normally a volunteer would first shadow a more experienced person on the first time knocking on doors, which is how I later made volunteers more comfortable with it when I was a field organizer. Since we had no volunteers willing to canvass, it was only Nick, Erik and I going out on that first Saturday. I was given a canvass packet (a neighborhood map, a multi-page list of houses and voter names, and a clipboard) and dropped off in some random neighborhood alone in
-15°C and several feet of snow. Sure I had winter gear on, but you try handling a pile of papers with ski gloves. It was freezing, I had no idea what to say to anyone who might answer the door and talk to me (and who would want to stand in their doorway and talk politics in that weather?) and must have spent 45 minutes just trying to figure out the map and where the houses were. I probably spoke to three or four people that whole day. The Sunday went better as a couple residents felt sorry for me enough to invite me in to regain feeling in my joints and hear what I had to say.
Despite a lack of local volunteers, there were a couple interesting characters that were regulars at the campaign office. Chuck Dodge was a retired local who came in for a few hours every day and brought us our much needed donuts. He would make some calls and seemed to personally know all five to ten thousand residents. Every weekday morning our 17-year-old high school intern Breally Bunch would come by and spend five minutes flirting with me while I set up her computer then half an hour pretending to do data entry.
The work itself wasn’t all bad, as it made for great practice at selling a political candidate to the average small town voter. Previously, I only had experience talking politics with people who liked talking politics. This meant there was always a need to have well thought out and researched arguments and a deep understanding of political science. Working field taught me how to speak on the same level as the average person, rather than talk down to them as if you’re educating them. This meant being able to simplify your reasons for liking a candidate and figure out what key language the voter could identify with. Clinton=90s=Good Economy, Hillary=Health care for all, Democrat=bring back the troops, etc. It’s not political science dissertation or Washington Post editorial material, but it works on the phone or on someone’s porch.
There was one day in my first week where Erik and I got the chance to speak to Breally’s high school civics class, which she organized with the school. We got to talk about ourselves for a while then judge group presentations on political issues and test them with questions. I’m pretty sure I aimed way too high on most of my questions, as I got several deer-in-headlights looks from the kids. This was a great time and gave me a nice inflated sense of importance.
Breally’s mild political interest turned out to be majorly impressive at Gorham High School, as she was asked to introduce Bill Clinton when he spoke in her school gym a couple weeks before I arrived.
Daily life with Nick and Erik turned out to be pretty fun, as they were both pretty laid back people and understood the need to get away from phone calls periodically to joke around, toss a football, or watch an episode of South Park in the office. As the northeast was having massive snowfalls in December, there was even one night where we decided the roads were too dangerous to drive home. We went to Wal-Mart to purchase blankets, pillows, foam mattresses, and a $5 DVD of The Running Man. All you need to sleep on the office floor. It was freezing cold, and we never did it again.
Spirits were high, and they had to be. Mid-way through the second week we ran out of heating oil and it was about -5°C in the office. It was business as usual, with full winter gear on at our desks.
There were two events that happened during my second week in Berlin. We held a volunteer meeting in the office to brief people on Get Out The Vote (GOTV), which is the voter turnout effort every campaign undergoes in the final few days before an election. Big surprise, five people showed up after days of “crowd build” calling and we would never see any of those five again. At this event, I met our regional field director, Kansas native Nick Black, who ran the meeting.
The other event was Bill Clinton speaking at a private school in Plymouth, about an hour and a half southwest of Berlin. The three of us spent a few days prior doing crowd build calls to invite people to the event, where I had trouble understanding the lack of interest many people had with the idea of seeing Bill Clinton for free. Whenever he spoke in a Canadian city, it was the hottest ticket in town, not to mention an expensive one.
We got to attend and help with the event, which was my first political function. Setting up chairs and doing crowd control alongside secret service agents seemed heavily cool to me at the time. Seeing him speak was even higher on the impressive scale, as he is an awesome speaker. After the show Nick Black took all the “north country” staffers who attended backstage for a photo-op and handshake with the former president. This would have been the coolest if it weren’t for my incredibly awkward stance in the photo. It’s embarrassing I look like a raptor.
After a very educating two weeks, I drove back home for Christmas, and returned on January 2nd, the day before the Iowa caucuses and six days before the New Hampshire primary. I returned to find out that the campaign had organized to bus dozens of volunteers up to Berlin from Washington DC, give us all motel rooms, and feed us for the duration.
The volunteers, with whom we spent the next five days canvassing and doing visibilities (holding Hillary signs on busy street corners in groups, usually in mornings), ranged in age from teenagers to seniors. Some of the older ones did very little and spent a lot of time eating and complaining about having to share motel rooms. The first night, I slept on the floor of Erik and Nick’s motel room to give an older couple their own two-bed room. You can imagine how annoyed I was when I heard they ended up getting their own hotel room elsewhere and the room was empty that night. The younger volunteers included political staffers in DC as well as a young Virginia native who nearly got frostbite during a visibility. He apparently didn’t understand the dynamics of cold, and avoided going to a hospital because of the cost.
The two most interesting volunteers I met were Brigitte Legault and Steve Behar. Brigitte, 27, also drove down from Montreal and mentioned being involved with the Liberal Party of Canada. I gave her my two cents on the idiocy of picking Stephane Dion as leader over Michael Ignatieff and how useless the party was because of it. I shortly found out that her involvement in the Liberals consisted of being vice president.
Steve Behar was a 19-year-old frat boy/linebacker trapped in the body of a 43-year-old securities lawyer from Queens, New York. We spent a couple days canvassing together. He was a ton of fun and great with talking to voters, not to mention one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. He was planning to run for city council in New York.
On our canvassing journeys we encountered some very strange people in the dingier parts of town. One lady who supported Hillary asked us how anyone could support Obama. “Don’t they know he’s part of Iraq?” She said. I remember knocking on the door of a very small house and startling the hell out of this whole family and their dog, who started running around in a panic, stirring up the garbage and filth that was all over the floor. There were also definitely a few older women who thought the presidency was a man’s job. For the most part, though, people seemed normal.
By the eve of Election Day there were thirty-something volunteers in the office and we had all watched Obama win in Iowa and Hillary near tears on camera a few days later. By then, there were about thirty of us in the office and several thousand across the state prepared for a hectic turnout effort. I was given the official position of Driver/Odd Job Guy on Election Day while the two Nicks held down a boiler room in the office and Erik coordinated the canvassing efforts from a church basement. I promptly changed my title to Deputy GOTV Coordinator, strictly for resume purposes.
Election day started at 4am, with three hours of blitzing the town with door hangers reminding people to vote and offering free rides to the polls through a 1-800 number. After breakfast and 1-hour of visibility, the day of nonstop canvassing until the polls close at 7pm had begun. My job was actually perfect, as I don’t think I spoke to more than a few voters all day. I drove all the volunteers to their designated neighborhoods with canvass packets and back to the church when they were done. I also drove one voter to her polling station three blocks from her house (in her defense, she was sick) and went to the polls three times to get turnout numbers and relay them to the boiler room so tactics could be altered. I spent the whole day in my car, and loved it.
The last few days, we weren’t blind to the fact that Obama was 12 points ahead in the polls in New Hampshire. I was motivated to finish what I had started, but we all thought it wasn’t likely to go our way. At 5pm, someone noticed volunteers toasting in the Obama campaign office.
All of the volunteers left right as the polls closed, and the bus went back to DC immediately for people planning to work the next day. Erik, the two Nicks and I watched the results come in from the campaign office, while Nick Black communicated with the other regional directors. He consistently got results well before they were reported on TV, as many staffers including Erik waited at Town Halls to get official counts as soon as they were counted. After an hour of Nick Black yelling about having won most of the Manchester area, the other two toasting over having won an astonishing 50% of the vote in Berlin, and MSNBC reporting a close race, Nick Black ran out of his office and yelled “AP called it! We won!”
I was hooked…