I'm Back!

Whew! I'm finally coming up for air from what have probably been four of the most intense days of my life! As physically exhausted as I feel, I'm thrilled that all the hard work paid off completely.

I spent Saturday through yesterday running (with another volunteer) our phone banking operations in the Upper Valley Democrats' office in Lebanon. We had 50-100 volunteers in every day making calls. Saturday and Sunday were about reaching out to undecided voters, talking to them about where our candidates (Obama/Shaheen/Hodes) stood on the issues. We addressed the concerns of Hillary supporters who had still yet to fully get behind Barack; we responded to voters who still believed smears that Obama was a Muslim; we cheered every time we talked to someone for whom this was their first time voting!

Monday we moved on to contacting all of our known supporters in the region to make sure they had information on where their polling place was, what the hours were and how they could make sure they wouldn't have any problems when they got to the polls. There were a lot of people who were registering to vote at the polls and we needed to make sure they had the necessary documents. We reached out to elderly voters and offered them rides to the polls (I think we ended up driving about 30 voters to the polls from our office alone).

Yesterday was such a great day - all of our supporters were happy to hear from us and to confirm that, yes, they had stuck out the long lines and were exited to have voted for our candidates. The energy in the office was really high all day as we counted off the hours until our polls closed at 7. Then at 7 we made calls to other parts of New Hampshire where polls were open until 8.

It was such a great experience for me and I'm so glad I really committed to such a big role, even though it was totally out of my comfort zone! I was thinking about that yesterday when I was standing on a chair in the middle of a room full of callers giving them instructions on what to say and how to report responses, "This is so not me... but I think I'm actually doing a good job at it!"
Everyone talked about how young the Obama staff is but I think my favorite thing was all of our volunteers that were my parents' age and even my grandma's age - how cool to see an 85 year-old volunteer telling a 20 year-old voter that she's voting for Obama because she needs to make sure her grandkids grow up in the right kind of America! I had another volunteer tell me the last time she had done volunteered was when she worked for Kennedy's campaign!

Moral of the story? Great experience, glad I did it, exhausted but giddy!