When 3 Feels Like a Big Number

Tonight, I sat down to eat with a sense of real, bone deep weariness. It is a tiredness I haven’t felt in a very long time. Arguably, I’ve been spending the past year doing absolutely nothing and doing it with a vigour and energy that muggles can only envy. Now, I am throwing myself into the deep end of one of the more physically draining tasks out there - campaigning in a United States election. 

The bulk of the work done to support a campaign -- at least at this level -- comes in two forms: call people or knock on their door. When you phone bank, you get on a burner phone and call person after person after person after person. On those rare occasions when someone chooses to actually answer a call from a complete rando, you then try to engage in an upbeat, friendly conversation about whether the person on the line is planning to vote, if so who they want to vote for, and if not your guy, could they please pretty please with sugar on top take a look at your guy and consider him/her as a viable option. The conversation generally takes very little time, there is a lot of waffling on both sides, and then you hang up. This is a success. Because let’s be clear, most of the time you get routed to voice mail or /dev/null. The list we work from is that of registered voters in the state, so it’s not completely worthless. But it is a slog. The field organisers get all excited if you can knock out 50 to a 100 of these non-call calls and get even a tiny fraction of engagement. 

If you’re not on the phone, you’re out walking the turfs. Again, from a large database of registered voter history, you get a list of houses to hit. There are several lists to a turf, several turfs in a precinct and some thousand plus precincts in a state. It’s a lot of god damn doors. In fact, there are way too many doors. The magic behind this whole thing is apparently how headquarters and your field organiser cut the lists into chunks and prioritise which ones to do. At this point, I’m not gonna lie… it all looks like voodoo.

I"m a peon. I get my list, I grab my door hangers, don my red white and blue hand knit scarf and a bunch of campaign bling, and I hit the streets. My list takes me about 4 hours and 12,000 steps. One thing is absolutely clear…It’s super damn hard to be a fat canvasser. The door response rate is about as shite as the phone rate so I spend a lot of time walking up to doors, ringing, and hanging a piece of collateral and then brisk marching away. I sometimes feel like I’m on the biggest game of doorbell ditch known to man. Today, just for variety, I did a bit of training. Tiny bit. Really teeny tiny. That’s where I’d love to be, training and building confidence in a volunteer corps. But I still have a long way to go myself. To be a credible trainer of this activity, I just need to do a whole lot more of it first. 

And that’s my day. Get up, do my morning chores (exercise, Korean practice, straighten my room), and head to the office. Grab a list and a bunch of door hangers and knock out my canvassing. Go back to the office and use their burners for a phone banking shift. Head home and do a bit of remote event moderation while sipping a glass of wine and unwinding. Busy day. 

It feels like I’ve been doing this forever. Today I realised that I’ve been doing it for three days. Didn’t it sound like I’d done it forever? Yeah, that’s what it feels like. It’s long, hard, work which breathes new life into the phrase: “Endless boredom punctuated with moments of sheer terror.” TBF, I’m not terrified when someone answers the door or picks up the phone. I know how to be charming, I know how to talk to strangers, and -- as DrC always reminds me -- I know how to sell snow to Eskimos. This isn’t taxing, but it is exhausting. My goal for the next two weeks is to simply endure it. Like any other activity, time and practice will build the physical and mental muscles to make this marathon lifestyle routine. 

Also, I’m campaigning in Reno, Nevada. Trust me that not all my time out canvassing is a slog. Sometimes the views make it all worthwhile.

—-

Location Update
Currently: Reno, Nevada, United States
Planned: The Nevada Democratic party caucuses on 22 February. Unless something drastic happens, I'll be here until then campaigning for one of the D candidates. After that, probably back to California until Super Tuesday 3 March.