Campaign notes from Pennsylvania

For the next 24 hours I will mostly be thinking/blogging about US politics. Just received this from one of our local readers who is currently working with the Obama campaign in Pennsylvania:

The machine here is so awesome that there has been little contact with floating voters for a while, we have been in GOTV (Get out the Vote) this week so have been concentrating soley on people we know are supportive.

Previous to that there has of course been times when I have encountered opposition, including some underlying racial issues and even a few “could you honestly vote for a black man?” questions…..ehhhhh ‘YES!!!’

The area where I have been concentrating in Pennsylvania is pretty poor, literally no one will benefit under McCain, but there are some Democrats who just dont want to vote this time, we have been working to insure they do.

Having said that the enthusiasm is very high, even in areas notorious for low turnout and high voter apathy, I have had numerous “I will crawl to the polls to vote for this man” “I will be there unless I am dead” that type of thing.

This campaign is unimaginable in size and there is alot of work in the background, data maintenance and analysis (which we do at night) but during the day its grassroots led and the people are fired up and ready to go. We also have alot of out of state volunteers, who have come to what they rightly perceive to be a vital state, we also have a german field organiser and me…..I guess the world cares enough this time to get involved.

In Pennsylvania alone we contacted (phone and door knocking) 1.6 million people yesterday (in one day!)

fivethirtyeight.com are claiming a +6 for obama nationwide with a +8 in PA, we are ignoring all polls and just going through what we have to do.

The early figures for georgia are amazing, almost 2 million early votes cast (only 3.3 voted total last time out).

Sorry if this is a little disjointed but it was written in 5 second bursts throughout the day.

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