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Well, that was interesting
Oct. 18th, 2024 09:10 amI spent three hours last night phone-banking for the Harris/Walz campaign, calling voters in Pennsylvania. Actually the first hour was a rather long-winded and repetitive training on how to use the calling software and the script (which you're allowed to put into your own words, but they really want you to follow the prescribed order of questions and topics), I took a 15-minute break in the middle to eat dessert with my wife, and the last 15 minutes were "debriefing", so about an hour and a half. If I do it again in the next few days, I can probably skip the training part and go straight to calling.
The calling software works best if you have a computer or tablet screen and a cell phone: the script and links are on the screen, you call one number with your cell phone, and the software forwards your call to each successive potential voter (so they don't see your personal phone number).
Perhaps half of the calls were met with either voicemail or unsolicited-call-blocking, which is reasonable: I bet if I lived in Pennsylvania right now, I'd want to block unsolicited calls too. A bunch of people hung up as soon as I identified myself as calling from "Pennsylvania Democrats", ditto. One person said "Oh, no, I'm not voting for KaMAla," while several others said "yes, I'm voting straight Democratic ticket" and two or three said "Yes, I'm voting, but I won't tell you which way." Four or five said "I've moved out of Pennsylvania; can you stop calling me?", so I clicked the "moved" button in the GUI.
I don't think I found anybody in the "undecided" category, so I never got to use the "persuasion" part of the script.
The theme for the day was "early voting": they want to encourage sympathetic voters to vote early (whether by mail or in person), against the possibility of illness, family emergency, weather emergency, etc. on Election Day. Most of the people who said they were planning to vote were unaware of the early-voting-in-person option, so I described it to them, told them the deadlines, and gave them a Web site to look up the location and hours.
I diverged from the script slightly by telling two people about the early-voting option even though they hadn't said which way they were voting. There are occasional conflicts between being a capital-D Democrat and being a small-d democrat.
At the end of the three-hour session, there was a debriefing in which people described the most interesting calls they'd had. One caller whose fiancee is Ukrainian talked with a Ukrainian who had lost family members to Putin's invasion. One voter wasn't certain whether to vote, but agreed that "a rutabaga would commit fewer crimes in office than Trump."
The calling software works best if you have a computer or tablet screen and a cell phone: the script and links are on the screen, you call one number with your cell phone, and the software forwards your call to each successive potential voter (so they don't see your personal phone number).
Perhaps half of the calls were met with either voicemail or unsolicited-call-blocking, which is reasonable: I bet if I lived in Pennsylvania right now, I'd want to block unsolicited calls too. A bunch of people hung up as soon as I identified myself as calling from "Pennsylvania Democrats", ditto. One person said "Oh, no, I'm not voting for KaMAla," while several others said "yes, I'm voting straight Democratic ticket" and two or three said "Yes, I'm voting, but I won't tell you which way." Four or five said "I've moved out of Pennsylvania; can you stop calling me?", so I clicked the "moved" button in the GUI.
I don't think I found anybody in the "undecided" category, so I never got to use the "persuasion" part of the script.
The theme for the day was "early voting": they want to encourage sympathetic voters to vote early (whether by mail or in person), against the possibility of illness, family emergency, weather emergency, etc. on Election Day. Most of the people who said they were planning to vote were unaware of the early-voting-in-person option, so I described it to them, told them the deadlines, and gave them a Web site to look up the location and hours.
I diverged from the script slightly by telling two people about the early-voting option even though they hadn't said which way they were voting. There are occasional conflicts between being a capital-D Democrat and being a small-d democrat.
At the end of the three-hour session, there was a debriefing in which people described the most interesting calls they'd had. One caller whose fiancee is Ukrainian talked with a Ukrainian who had lost family members to Putin's invasion. One voter wasn't certain whether to vote, but agreed that "a rutabaga would commit fewer crimes in office than Trump."
