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Just did my Biden/Peters Phone banking

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So I did it, a man of my dignity and years and position just did the second day of phone banking for Biden and Gary Peters.

My initial reaction to phonebanking is probably similar to most people: it is a pleasurable experience on the order of a root canal. Necessary but painful and one is glad that it is over. And I am an experienced canvasser and can tell you that I find canvassing in person so much more fun. Guess it helps to be mild and nonthreatening looking, but I think people will engage much easier face to face and find it much easier to be casually rude to someone over the phone.

I consoled myself that it is necessary sure, but also as a way to demonstrate my commitment to issues I care passionately about. If I really really care about Women’s reproductive rights, racial justice and enlightenment, universal healthcare for all Americans and doing something meaningful to avert the consequences of climate change — and I do --then I should really be able to endure some initial discomfort and trepidation about getting started, even in the privacy of my own home, in my own study with the door locked.

I wont bore everyone with some self-centered narrative about what my pulse rate was, or how I hooked up my phone with my computer, or how it made me feel like when I was younger and awkward and was shy about approaching the ladies for a date. Most people have those feelings. And I don’t think anyone reading this needs to be told how important this election is or how we must make meaningful change this time around to start the long healing process for the nation, or how Trumpy is a poisonous snake (by his own admission ). Too obvious, and others far more eloquent than me have made those points painfully clear. No, I thought I would be inspired to see how important this phone banking is

To start with, as one might expect, campaigns do it because it works. First obvious point: as volunteers we don’t cost anything, except in the old days when you went to campaign headquarters they might give you pizza or something. Second, you do get a lot of hangups and wrong numbers and such, but that screens the list for others to make better calls. Finally, and here is my date analogy, if you think about it, there is very little downside to rejection, compared to the upside of making a connection; I’m willing to have a hundred attractive people tell me to get lost if one likes me and gives me her phone number.

I can share several articles about this. One is from Medium where author Marie Jonas explains it quite nicely

One excuse that I had made for myself (to justify non-involvement), was that phone banking didn’t really do that much. Only, that’s not true. Studies show that, outside of face-to-face canvassing, phone banking is the most effective way to get out the vote. Personal human connections, of the type that you can get through live telephone calls, are proven to have a significant impact.... while one call might not do a lot, it’s not about one call. It is about being part of a movement. Hundreds of people, making dozens (or hundreds) of calls, reaches thousands of people. Combined, we make a difference

And she references another site about these studies which tell us almost more than we want to know

Mobilizing voters through phone calls may be a question of volunteer or professional oversight as well as strategically timing when the calls are placed in the course of the campaign. While a sufficient number of studies demonstrate that person-to-person phone calls can increase turnout, more research is needed to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of variations in the source, content, timing and quality of phone calls in mobilizing voters. At the present time, it is too early to predict with certainty which calling methods will consistently be most effective across varied electoral contexts and subject populations.
 

Also, here from a fairly impressive website run by a very impressive person:

www.resistanceschool.com/…don’t you just love the domain name? Meg Ansara makes the points that from the three E’s — efficiency, effectiveness and education, it works very well. And a point that she doesn’t make, but that will surely occur to most of us is that if we do not phonebank, the enemy certainly will. I tend to not get those calls, because I show up on everyone’s list as hardcore Democrat, and probably commiesymp radical, so no Trumpy team talks to me (they send me scads of annoying emails, but that is a different matter). But I have little doubt they are reaching out to the Trump-curious, and probably grifting them a little too.

Phone banking can also provide us with moments of humor to lighten our daily life:

             www.washingtonpost.com/…

It seems to be a standardized way these days; the script in the following website was very similar to the script I was given, except mine was specific to Biden and Gary Peters. Also, our script was specifically inquiring about absentee voting and voting knowledge in general:

callhub.io/…

I can say that I got hung up on a lot. And got a lot of wrong numbers, or at least they claimed to be. One of the numbers turned out to be a taco stand. And even some of our allies will reach saturation point and say something along the lines of ‘I-already-voted-for-the-dang-candidates-please stop calling!’

And yet even I reached a few. There was the disabled person looking for validation to go vote in person because he didn’t trust the mails and come hell or high water he was voting out Trumpy. There was the nice lady who wanted to know how to get Biden signs (put people in touch with local party branches; that’s their job). Some people wanted to chat. And I found myself reassuring someone who didn’t receive her absentee ballot because she had moved that is was perfectly OK to call the secretary of states office and ask for another one...so long as she only sent in one.

the data said that you really get out one voter , all other things being equal for every thirty five calls. You can do that in an hour and a half. I have already done fifty so I hopefully got mine. Yes, I look forward to the days when I can canvass again, and It is always fun to put up yard signs and aggravate one’s neighbor. And it is the easiest thing to write a check or send an online contribution to actblue. But phonecalls it would seem are the elbow-grease of politics; the dirt don’t get scrubbed away without it. It’s messy but it got to get done. Now to watch the debate with my favorite Scotch beverage.


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