How I (and thousands of others) helped the Obama landslide in SC.

The victory on Saturday in South Carolina wasn't a surprise to all the volunteers who had been working for the Obama campaign there, but the extent of the victory was.

For the past few weeks I was one of thousands of volunteers working all over the state of South Carolina to make sure we got the result we saw on Saturday evening.
I'll try to give you a little peek behind the scenes of the campaign from my personal view.

There wasn't any new groundbreaking strategy used as far as I could see; the same old tactics to win political campaigns was put in motion: build an army of volunteers, identify your supporters early and then do everything you possibly can to get those supporters to the polls.

When I first got involved with the local Rock Hill headquarters, several weeks ago, the emphasis seemed to be on identifying who would vote for Obama and convincing folks who were still undecided to join our side.
This was done through phone canvassing and door-to-door canvassing. The headquarters were always filled with people making phone calls, sometimes it was hard to find a little corner to sit in and make your calls.
We noted who was already convinced to vote for Barack and the folks who were still doubting got literature in the mail and sometimes a house visit in an effort to help them "see the light".

The week before the primary the tactics shifted to finding volunteers within the group of people who said they would vote for Obama. These volunteers would help on primary day, by phone canvassing and making door to door visits. This time I decided to walk around neighborhoods and participate in the door to door canvassing.
I usually drove to the HQ in Rock Hill where I picked up my "walking lists" and then drove even further south to places like Lancaster and Chester to knock on some doors.

What struck me as I was driving all over the northern part of SC was the hundreds of Hillary signs you saw everywhere along the road. You hardly saw any Obama signs. You see, the Obama campaign didn't invest a lot of money in signs, for a good reason.
Maybe somebody should have told the Clinton campaign that yard signs don't vote and that it's better to invest money in organizing your supporters and volunteers. On the other hand, maybe Hillary's campaign just couldn't find all those volunteers?

Another thing that struck me was the poor state a lot of the areas that I drove through were in.
While I'm sure that the folks who live in Charleston and Hilton Head island are not doing too shabby, it's obvious that the rest of the state is really hurting. Why a lot of them keep voting republican is beyond me. The only reason I can come up with is that probably some preacher told them they would go to hell if they voted Democratic.

The folks I talked to on their door steps were all very nice and I found about a dozen volunteers for election day.

The day before election day most of the people who the campaign had identified as strong Obama supporters got a big personalized door hanger placed on their front door explaining where they had to go vote and how the electronic voting process was going to look. Thousands and thousands of those got distributed all over the state and I hung up a few hundred myself.

On January 26th, the day of the primary, we had the most volunteers working, in an effort to make sure all of our supporters went to vote.
The staging area for the campaign in Rock Hill was moved that day from the headquarters we had on Ebenezer Road to the Freedom Center in downtown Rock Hill to be able to accommodate the hundreds of volunteers working that day.
I was the precinct captain for Precinct 8 in Rock Hill. That day about 60 volunteers were working in Rock Hill alone, going door to door and visiting everyone on their list of Obama Supporters. Many more volunteers were making phone calls out of the Freedom Center as well. The plan was to visit all of our supporters once before noon, once more in the afternoon if they hadn't voted yet and also call them to remind them to vote. So if you waited a long time to get your butt to the polling station you might have been "harassed" 3 times that day.
I walked door to door with a young team member from Pennsylvania from 9 am to 6 pm. What was really satisfying to see was that the work we were doing had an immediate effect. At one point while walking along a long straight street we looked behind us and saw 3 cars pull out of different driveways at the same time, all of them on their way to vote. In my precinct we also had the problem that the polling place was different from the one people were used to. We met a lot of people who said they went to vote that morning at their usual polling place,but found it locked and empty and they had returned home without voting. We were there to tell them where the new polling place was and a lot of people immediately went out again to vote as soon as they found out. If there hadn't been any volunteers visiting those folks that day, they would not have voted.
The 8th precinct is a very diverse area. We walked through neighborhoods that look very much like the one I live in but we also walked on dirt roads to visit people living in totally run down houses with no sewer facilities. They all had a port-a-potty standing in their front yard. This is also America.

My energy was drained by about 6 pm and I drove down to the Headquarters on Ebenezer road that I had worked out of the past few weeks. I found a small group of people watching TV, anxious to get some results. Most folks had driven down to Columbia to join the celebrations there. We ordered pizza for everyone and counted down to 7 pm.
When at 7 pm CNN projected Obama as the winner the roof almost came off the building. All the hard work had been more than worth it.








I'm impressed by the very diverse crowd that volunteered for Obama, from all walks of life and from all over the Country, with folks coming from Texas, Kentucky, New Hampshire and all over the place, next to a lot of native South Carolinians.
I also met several people who had never voted before and a lot of folks who never voted in a primary before.
The headquarters was run by folks who were all less than 30 years old. The energy and excitement was always around.
It's the same energy, inspiration and drive that will help us win the presidential election.
It's the kind of coalition of new voters, young voters and experienced voters that will win the presidential election.
The only candidate that brings all of this together is Barack Obama.

In case you're still wondering why I support Barack Obama, I can just use the words Senator Kennedy used today: "Barack inspires me, it's that simple."
And in the words of President John F.Kennedy:
"The world is changing. The old ways will not do... It is time for a new generation of leadership."

On a sidenote:
You'll remember from my previous post that the Belgian media has been interested in my work for the Obama campaign. You can now see an interview online that a reporter from Public TV in Belgium had with me and my lovely wife by clicking on the following URL: http://www.deredactie.be/cm/de.redactie/mediatheek/1.241790
You'll hear a lot of dutch, but big parts of the interview are also in english, so go ahead and have a peek.
I'll be going to Chicago this weekend with a crew from a commercial TV station in Belgium. We will walk around in the neighborhoods where Obama used to work as a community organizer and also visit the national Obama Headquarters. I'll keep you posted as to how that trip goes.