E-blast. Phone calls. More phone calls. My sense of humor kicks in, and I find myself doing a “tricky pose” to snap my mind and my body in and out of the otherwise required chair pose of phonecalling. “Tricky poses” were Sam and his friend Michael’s response to my yoga poses. When they were younger, they would twist themselves up, until they would fall down, asking me to judge whose pose was “trickier.”
My office has a long shelf full of nothing but photographs of family and friends. It is remarkable how hard campaigning pulls you away from the people you love. There is only so much work you can do during regular business hours. Most committees meet on weeknights. Most special events are on the weekends.
We’ve made great systems progress in these two weeks, and, with any luck, by Friday, I can resurface into the world, again, for a moment. It’s like this on campaigns. With each level to which you reach, you have to focus to get there. You do the dishes, but don’t have time to clean out the refrigerator. You get sufficiently behind on laundry that you are digging into your closet and people are saying, “Oh, new clothes?”
All the while, I smile and appreciate my husband, Peter, who has the most to put up with of anyone. We didn’t exactly discuss this before we got married…
Phone calls. Phone calls. Phone calls.
I am glad that I purchased a cordless headset last month, fully anticipating where this was going.
We’ve started to set up “Capanna & Coffee,” a series of meet-and-greets at family restaurants and independent coffee houses throughout the District. This is a landscape with which I am familiar. My eyes site these signs with the precision of a big game hunter as I drive hundreds of miles around the vast territory of our District. (The 54th is more than 100 miles on the diagonal, in case you’re wondering.)
Small business owners are people I know well. I am one of them. My parents were, too. And, I have represented a number of small business owner clients across the years in their family law cases. Everything about a successful small business is personal. The owner. The staff they hire. The unique décor. The story of the life of the business as if a child of the owner.
So, amidst the day-to-day phonecalls, we’ll start turning our coffee stops into campaign events. A chance to get to know the owners better. A chance to meet their customers, and introduce our supporters. A chance to listen to the hum and buzz of democracy, as people debate politics and issues with their friends at the local diner over coffee.
It only took three days to find enough rhythm to start closing my door for uninterrupted call time. Focus on the call sheet. Dial. Voicemail, not the target donor, the donor. Message, chat, ask. I emerge, saying I’m not dialing another number today, and I don’t.
But I do get on e-mail. Writing a steady stream of copy with vibrant language and economy of word is a must. The “re” line is like a book title; it has to make you want to grab it off the shelf.
When I first started running for office, I thought that the weekends would hold more activity than the weekdays, especially on-line. Not true. Which does mean that you get some down time. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, you might run a 15-18 hour day. But by Friday, late afternoon, people turn off politics like a lightbulb.
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Call time, day #3. (I suspect you have the gist of they typical day, at this point!)
Call time, day #2. Many more of these days to come, with the hours on the phone steadily getting longer, until the life force of the day becomes the phone, the ask, and the appearance.
I play the various tricks with my mind necessary to get the job done. I have a call count target. In front of me, the stack of sheets with the contact information for “traditional Democratic donors,” those people who have previously given to Democratic candidates. These lists are available all over the Internet, particularly concerning donors to federal candidates. Pair those lists to a telephone number search engine and you generate your call sheets.
Some numbers will be disconnected. Some numbers will be outdated. Some will go to voicemails without a personalized greeting, to which I wonder how many messages are actually left on Republican voicemails. Some people hang up. Some people say call back later. Some people say not interested (politely).
But with this race, there are a tangible number of people who are happy to hear the sound of my voice. Running a long-forgotten race is cause for celebration. To those race watchers, doing my part by running sparks their contribution.
Every session, I push myself to keep dialing until I end on a good call. Tonight, it was Janet, who was also connected to Dan Maffei’s and Eric Massa’s respective congressional races. We marveled with a hold-your-breath belief that both will win their elections. We laughed that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee wanted us to message on a “blue tsunami” in 2006, when Maffei, Massa, and I wondered if we even had a puddle.
Two years gone by, already. How many fundraising calls since September 2005 when I started my run for Congress?
I am bolstered at having released a platform of campaign finance reform with an objective of public funding of elections. These hours could be spent analyzing data and developing policies.
My time in for the day, I gladly put aside the telephone. A quick bite and some green tea, and it’s off to the Webster Democratic Committee meeting through a miserable February sleet.
Call time. Day #1.
“Call time” is the beast that separates candidates from winners. It is the ability to self-discipline yourself to sit down for so many hours per day for so many days per week to call people to ask them for money.
The beginning of fundraising each campaign cycle is fun. It involves family, friends, colleagues. The person you are calling knows who you are. And, because this is my second campaign, they also know why I’m calling. It doesn’t mean that they take my call on the first or the second or the third try, but they know that at some point they will have to give up and give something. If anything, the difficulty is getting these target donors off the telephone. This is not “call time.”
“Call time” are phonecalls to people you don’t know. Cold calls. Sales calls for democracy.
Candidates are trained to time themselves to an :08 limit to close “the ask” for the money and to obtain the pledge. The powerhouse fundraisers then pass the phone to the Finance Director to take the credit card information.
If volunteers are the heart of the campaign, lists are the pulse. “List generating” is that process of setting up names, addresses, and phone numbers of your targets. Target voters. Target donors. No candidate, even those with multi-million dollar budgets, can reach every voter who shows up at the polls. So the question becomes who is most likely to vote and/or contribute? You then develop a profile from what is available: gender, age, employer, and residence.
Working on a campaign means endlessly looking at information from the Board of Elections and from the phonebook. We spend our days with digits. Street numbers. Phone numbers. Birthdays.
Then your list gets vetted by the beep-beep-beep of the telephone company message that the number has been disconnected, no further information is available + mail returned as undeliverable.
These early days of direct connection to the public are like a walk across
a vast desert. In the distance, the mountain we will have to climb as of Labor
Day. Now, it’s about pace and discipline. Nothing more. Nothing less.
A house party or dinner function for only a moment’s rest.
Volunteers come in to make phonecalls. It may only be February, but there are more than 187,000 people in our District. Being grassroots means finding communication pathways that are cost effective, even if more time intensive.
In this day and age of robodialers (automated telephone messages), people are happy to hear a live voice. It also gives them an opportunity to ask questions.
Candidates these days focus on fundraising to have money for masses of television, radio, and newspaper advertising. It’s not only the fundraising process but also the advertising process that pulls candidates further and further away from personal interaction with voters. Big money has disengaged the public from its role and responsibility to interview the candidates and be in a position to debate their merits at the dinner table.
It will be exhausting and require a steady stream of volunteers, but I am
determined that we are going to run this campaign in the spirit of our Forefathers:
in person.