The success of the Democratic Get Out The Vote (GOTV) campaign in this year's election is more crucial than ever. Guest blogger Sarah Auerswald reports on her experience in Southern California.
I did my first voter registration drive at the Abbot Kinney Festival in Venice. It’s largest street festival in Southern California and organizers had hoped to really capture a lot of new voters there.
The Democrats are aware of the reality: that people generally don’t care about mid-term elections and certainly won’t turn out to vote in the same numbers they did when President Obama was elected.
So their strategy is to make sure new voters get registered – and then empowered to vote – and to encourage people to request their own vote-by-mail ballots, eliminating any excuses like having no time to get to the polls.
I was inspired to volunteer when I heard Marta Evry speak recently. She’s a community organizer and the blogger behind Venice4Change, and she really hooked me.
She said that if Democrats don’t turn out in November, California will have Meg Whitman for Governor. And that’s all it took; I signed right up.
It was a ridiculously hot day in Venice, and of course, most people weren’t there to speak to a woman with a clipboard, but I did manage to sign a few people up – and Marta Evry had a whole team of people with clipboards there, all of whom managed to register over 300 voters.
And even though we didn’t actually register quite as many voters as we would have liked, we did of course remind people about the upcoming election.
Betsy Butler, the Democratic candidate for the 53rd district in the California Assembly (Ted Lieu’s former seat), was on hand to help, as well as one of her opponents in the primary, Nick Karno. It’s all for one and one for all now, among the Democrats. We’re uniting to see our candidates get elected.
Guest Blogger Sarah Auerswald is the blogger behind Mar Vista Mom and Sarah’s Blog.
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