The experts say this exercise works to draw in voters, solidify support, nudge people on the fence into one’s favored column, or at least (and according to some, most importantly) gather data on their preferences for future strategizing. It takes a lot of effort to roam through neighborhoods, finagle one’s way past locked doors of apartment houses, find people home, and get them out on their front porches for those crucial two minutes. Campaigns either fund this activity with expensive staffers or have to draw in armies of volunteers.
Iowans bask in the attention of the entire country once every four years for their famous caucuses, whose results often provide a crucial insight into who has the chops to snare the nomination and eventually the White House. Caucusing is not as simple as merely voting because electors have to show up to a caucus site, publicly stand with their preferred candidate, and wait for the process to unfold over a couple of hours. It takes place in the dead of winter, which in the Midwest can mean serious inconvenience.
Here in eastern Iowa, signs have sprouted up on the snow-covered lawns advertising sympathy for “Pete,” “Bernie,” or “Amy,” the chummier first-name candidates, as well as the more sober placards boosting “Warren,” “Yang,” or the occasional mournful “Delaney” (and even one forlorn “Bennet”).
You’d think after months of pre-caucus positioning and relentless news coverage—not to mention the barrage of candidate ads bombarding the broadcast channels every evening—that people have made up their minds. You’d be wrong. Plenty of people remain undecided even to the point of stating without embarrassment that they will decide at the event itself after the candidates’ reps make their appeals to the assembly. One voter reminisced that Hillary lost her vote in 2008 when the HRC stand-in pitched her as “a mother and a grandmother.”
Door knocking has advanced with the help of software that can slice, dice, and shuffle a candidate’s database to best utilize the staff and volunteer time available. Instead of blanketing a neighborhood, campaigns can focus on a given subset, such as known Democrats, prior voters, or already identified Bernie sympathizers. A volunteer enters a “turf” into their cellphone complete with names, ages, and addresses of the prospective caucusers, along with a handy map of the neighborhood by which to organize the route of the slog. Three quarters of those listed won’t be home or accessible, but the others, no matter how they react, will provide crucial information to add to the dataset. The volunteer rates them on a 1 to 5 Likert scale from strong pro-candidate to strong opponent, then types in any other key facts such as “says wife won’t caucus because she fears falling on the ice”—which will trigger a follow-up offer of transportation.
Our unscientific “convenience sample” survey reveals that the polls are respectably accurate given what they can measure, which is really not very much. Support is pretty spread out among the choices though the supposed Biden edge is invisible—a Biden sign is an oddity, and only a rare respondent claims to be staunchly in his corner. (My fellow canvassers and I have met exactly two all week.) If he has a hidden base of support, it’s a well-kept secret. Plenty of households refuse to engage, so maybe they’re the buried pro-Joe treasure representing platoons of Obama nostalgics gathering in catacombs to wave his flag in silence. Speaking of which, the (admittedly biased) rival camps claim his campaign offices are sepulchral. But all the candidates are fairly evenly represented in the vapid and generic TV ads, which are said to move voters for reasons future paleoarchaeologists may someday uncover.
Friday afternoon, Jan. 25, the Bernie headquarters in Iowa City hosted a volunteer booster session with some some of their backbench organizers from Chicago and Iowa politics. All delivered a preview of their speeches later that night at the U. of Iowa rally headlined by Michael Moore and AOC, both standing in for Bernie who was trapped in the impeachment jury. (More on them later.) I’m pretty immune to the rah-rah at this stage of life, and I don’t often get sentimental.
That said, something happened in that little campaign ritual that I’m still trying to put my finger on. Amid the usual phrases and standard campaign tropes, I felt something inexplicably potent. There was no obvious explanation for it, no particular anecdote or inspired thought from the crew up front. Instead, it seemed to emanate from the crowd, the very young, hopeful, generous, kindly, respectful kids perched on rows of folding chairs in the anteroom of a battered storefront at the edge of a slushy, antiseptic shopping center. It was something that would only be trivialized by definition, an intuitive, bodily, ineffable, and collective force, dare I say a spirit. I have no idea what it was, but it moves among us.
No comments:
Post a Comment