Driving Votes the Democrats' Way
News: On the road with Driving Votes, whose volunteers drive from safe states to swing states to get out the vote for Kerry.
September 9, 2004
|
|
On a Friday in late August, thirty-some men and women, young and old, gathered after work outside a train station in North Berkeley. They piled into cars and made a 200-mile beeline from the San Francisco Bay Area down I-80 for Reno. They weren’t going to test their luck in the nickel slots. Rather, these strangers, brought together by a group called Driving Votes, were road-tripping from Kerry-leaning California in hopes of bringing home the political mother lode this November: a Democrat in the White House.
Driving Votes is bringing volunteers from red and blue states where the presidential election is all but over to work with organizations to get out the vote in swing states like Nevada, which in 2000 narrowly fell to Bush. The state's four Electoral College votes make it a smaller prize than, say, Ohio or Floirida, but Nevada could tip the balance to the next president. Hence this weekend trip.
"I feel a strong sense of urgency around this election and a need to contribute in a way that will have a concrete effect," said Jennifer Kane, 27, the San Francisco-based assistant director of Driving Votes. Kane took a leave of absence from her work as a scientific illustrator to work for the organization full-time. "The only way to do that is to get out the vote in a swing state."
A typical Driving Votes trip pairs volunteers with organizations such as America Coming Together (ACT), a $95 million voter-mobilization effort sponsored by America Votes, itself a coalition of 32 member organizations such as the AFL-CIO, Planned Parenthood, and the Sierra Club. ACT focuses exclusively on new and persuadable voters in swing states, employing 1,400 paid canvassers in those states and organizing volunteers from around the country to register voters, identify key voter concerns, and provide information to those on the fence. On a typical day, ACT employs twenty full-time canvassers to roam the neighborhoods of Reno with PDAs, entering data on voters that is instantly synched with a database of Democrats and swing voters. On Saturday, thanks to the rush of Driving Votes volunteers, mostly from the San Francisco Bay Area, some 120 people were canvassing Reno’s streets.
The perennial drive to register new voters and swing persuadable ones has taken on outsized importance this election, with the country more or less evenly divided between Bush and Kerry, and most voters already decided. As early as July, only 18 percent of voters said they were open to persuasion this year, according to a USA Today/Gallup poll, while only 2 percent were undecided. (Compare 1996, when 39 percent considered themselves persuadable at the same point in the cycle.) As a result, Democrats and Republicans alike are using both high tech and old-fashioned tactics to reach those few who are still up in the air. Central to this effort is the creation of huge databases that merge information from voter rolls, the census, and consumer data, among other sources, to predict and shape voter behavior. Volunteers then use that information to go door-to-door to talk with those people and discuss issues.
Driving Votes entered into the fray this spring. Founder Matt Lerner, a 29-year-old manager at Microsoft in Seattle, got the idea after a friend suggested a trip to a swing state to register voters. After tossing the idea around and cajoling some friends to help out, the group launched a website in April and began organizing trips. Interest exploded, and soon full-time staff were needed to handle the logistics. Leighton Woodhouse, a Berkeley graduate student who has put his studies on hold till the election is over, now directs the operations of the four paid staff and 500 volunteers in the 30 chapters in 27 states around the country. Many of the chapters host weekly trips, and the organization’s website also allows others to post trips of their own on a "Ride Board." More than 1,000 trips have been posted, according to Woodhouse, who estimates that at least 5,000 people of all ages have taken part in a trip either sponsored by Driving Votes or planned on its Ride Board since April. Woodhouse estimates that the group has registered "tens of thousands" of voters, in addition to its other activities, though he notes that the organization’s effect may be even more substantial, since many of the trips planned on the Ride Board have not reported their successes.
In Reno, there were three trips planned from the Ride Board for the same weekend as the official chapter trip, including trips themed “Bush Smackdown 2004” and “Viva Blue!”, organized by the “League of Pissed-Off Voters,” which targets “pissed-off” 17-35 year olds around the country. The group arrived from Berkeley in a party bus stripped of its seats and decked out with couches.
The volunteers were first given a brief introduction to a script and a series of do’s and dont’s from seasoned veterans like ACT’s Maria Zamora, who first started canvassing with the United Farm Workers in 1962. “Never ask, ‘Are you registered to vote?’” (people ignore you) she tells them, and warns them not to enter houses with fences (they likely have dogs that bite). The volunteers were then given a list of names compiled by ACT and members of America Votes, including MoveOn.org, and split up into teams to go door-to-door, looking to register voters and identify the top priorities of those already registered.
A pair of roommates from Emeryville, California, Christina Corodimas and Holly Fisher, who heard about Driving Votes through friends, were dropped off at an inconspicuous lot of tract homes. As the team approached the first house on their list, though, the women became wary. The patio was untidy, a punching bag hung from a tree, a tattered workout bench beneath it. When the man they sought came to the door, he was tall and large with a full beard. When asked what he thought mattered most in the upcoming election, he said Yucca Mountain, a location nearby where the federal government plans to dump nuclear waste, a solution favored by Bush and opposed by Kerry. “Nevada’s a mining state,” he said. “They should give us a lot of money, let us drill a big hole and give everybody a job.” Corodimas and Fisher recorded his concern in a box marked “Yucca Mountain” on a computer-scannable form, that would later be entered into a database where the information will be paired with the man’s voter registration data.
The next name on their list, a registered young mother of two working at a chain restaurant, would have likely stumped both Karl Rove and James Carville. Her top two issues: the right to carry a gun and the right for same-sex couples to marry. She didn’t like either of the candidates. It was an introduction to politics in a swing state, where political views do not fit neatly into either the Republican or Democratic camps, making issue identification all the more important. As before, Corodimas and Fisher checked boxes on their forms, building the database of what undecided voters look like, one conversation at a time.
Others they talked to were bitter. “The way the system is now, I keep my opinions to myself,” said a man washing his car. “I don’t vote. That’s that.” Even that was useful information, though. On a line marked “Other,” Corodimas and Fisher noted that he doesn’t -- and won't -- vote. Future canvassers will know not to waste their time.
Big dogs yelped at every door, and in one dusty lot, two llamas rested in the shade of a single tree. By lunchtime, having knocked on over fifty doors, they had registered one new voter, and talked about issues with five others.
Their experience was typical. Michael Reppy and David Leaf had road-tripped from the Bay Area, but their morning’s efforts had yielded no registered voters. “It’s a terribly inefficient way to get out the message,” Leaf said, noting how many people weren’t home and how long it took to walk from door to door. “But it’s still the best way.”
Leaf, who first became politically active working on Adlai Stevenson’s 1956 presidential campaign, rediscovered going door-to-door last fall while working as the San Francisco coordinator for Wesley Clark’s campaign. “It was such a high,” he said. “I thought, ‘This is what democracy is all about.’”
Reppy, who was part of the student takeover of Columbia University to protest the Vietnam War in the Sixties, had almost given up on politics. “After Bobby Kennedy was shot, it was too much,” he said. But with Bush, he’s back in the game. “You’ve got to stand up,” he said. “Now is the time to fight back.”
After a brief lunch, the teams hit the streets once more. Matt Macdonald, a firefighter from Santa Cruz, was assigned a set of low-slung, adobe-style apartments. Macdonald had participated in a Driving Votes trip to Las Vegas earlier this year, where volunteers staffed a booth and registered 169 voters in a day. Given that only 6,589 more Nevadans voted for Bush than for Gore and Nader in the last election, every extra vote is especially important. “In the morning we registered six Republicans and two Democrats,” he said of the Las Vegas trip, noting that with booths, election law requires that voters from all parties be accepted for registration. “I was so upset,” he said, “But that changed in the afternoon,” when the registration numbers picked up and almost all were registered Democrats. At the end of the day, Macdonald had registered five new Democratic voters. Though it was far less than he’d registered in Las Vegas, he was happy to be going door-to-door. “It’s important to be out here,” he says, “even if it’s just people getting to see the face of a liberal and know we’re not crazy, that’s worth it.” Macdonald added, “I just can’t believe how many anti-political people there are, people who just aren’t willing to vote. But,” he adds, “I’ve had good luck if you can get them talking.”
Driving Votes is also sponsoring a caravan that left Seattle in August and will wend its way through all the swing states for the next few months. But perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the organization remains how the Ride Board, which also provides downloadable instructions for registering voters, empowers non-politicos to get involved. And they are getting involved. More and more people are betting that a road trip may make the difference in November. “Bible Belt or Bust,” “The Northern New Mexico Meander,” and the “Quality Time With a Bunch of Strangers” are but a few leaving soon.
Stephen R. Miller is a freelance writer living in San Francisco.
