Volunteering for Lamont

So I did something this weekend that I'd never done before -- I actually spent a day volunteering for a political campaign.  The short version: I took the train up to CT on Saturday and spent 5-6 hours mostly making phone calls.

It's funny to me that this should be my first experience, since despite my increasing political interest in recent years, I would not have expected to find myself helping out a statewide candidate in a state I have never lived in nor expect to.  On the other hand, my interest is at the point where I'd feel pretty foolish if I didn't actually try to get some first-hand experince as well.  And I do care about this race: it is the Democratic primary challenge of Ned Lamont to incumbent Senator Joe Lieberman.  If you want to hear my reasons, feel free to ask me; for now I just want to recount the experience, not the politics.

It was raining most of the day, so we tidied things up -- campaign headquarters need vacuuming, too -- and put stuff in order, put together lawn signs, and so on for the first hour or so.  By about 10 AM we decided it would no longer be intrusive to call up the people on our lists for the day that the campaign staff had compiled -- only registered Democrats, since CT has a closed primary, and in this case mostly seniors.  About 80% of the people I called were not home, and about 2/3 of those I talked to were undecided, or didn't want to talk discuss it.  The rest were fairly evenly split between Lamont and Lieberman.

A few notes on talking to seniors: as one of the staff commented, "I love calling seniors, they're so polite, even when they don't want to talk to you.  Other people will go crazy: 'Why are you calling me? You're spoiling my dinner/ ruining my life/ destroying my marriage! Call again and I will hunt you down!' Seniors won't do that." He was right.  One fellow answered my initial query of who he thought he'd be supporting with, "Well now, do you suppose that would be your business, or my businees?" I found that response totally charming.  But even more interesting was when they actually got talking.  One woman was for Lamont up front, but wanted to talk ad infinitum about the state of the world -- it took me at least 5 minutes before I could return to the topic of whether she would need an absentee ballot.  Someone else surprised me with, towards the end of a less coherent tirade about the current state of affairs, "...and what about all the people we send up on rockets who are disturbing the universe so that we get all this crazy weather? I don't hear anybody talking about that!"  

I had to agree with her there.  That wasn't on either candidate's platform, to my knowledge.

All in all, though, it was an enjoyable day.  The staff were young, exuberant folks with great senses of humor, who were fun to work with and talk over various recent political developments with.  And while in one sense it felt like I had accomplished little -- so few sure votes found, and all -- in another way, it was quite rewarding to have a brief conversation with someone who was undecided, and afterwards says, "Well I never was all that excited about Lieberman -- this Lamont sounds a lot more like what I believe in."  So many of the undecideds simply had not heard of Lamont -- he is after all, challenging a 3-term Senator who has run for President.  I can only hope that simply an encounter with a polite, friendly supporter of a political outsider will help persuade some of the people who remained uncommitted.

Final verdict?  For a candidate (or a cause) I believed in, I would do it again.  Even if it wasn't very exciting, I had a pretty good time overall... and I left with a sense of satisfaction distinctly different than comes from just giving a donation.