The Indiana Adventure

Even with less than 12 hours until the inauguration, I've got to admit that there's still some neurotic little part of me that can't entirely believe this is really going to happen. It's not that I fear the unthinkable. Mainly I fear some 'crisis' will erupt elsewhere that can be used to justify a 'delay' of some kind, leaving us all in kind of this ambiguous state where we won't know what will happen next without some thorough discussion and study of constitutional law and legal precedent. What with the Minnesota recount, Burris, etc. I've had enough of those for one election season!

That neurotic little part of me is obviously batshit f'ing loco, but I gotta say that this anxiety was kind of a helpful thing to have during the campaign, if only because it finally got me off my ass and into the campaign offices to help out.

Though I was in Chicago the days up to November 4 mainly to check out a town I've been wanting to visit and take in some sights with an old college friend before the big, big night in Grant Park, I felt the need to spend at least one day helping out the campaigns in the battlegrounds around Illinois.

But which one? Illinois bordered two major battleground states: Missouri and Indiana. Mizzou seemed to be the sensible place to go -- so much hay was made of Missouri and its bellwether status, and none other than fivethirtyeight predicted that Indiana was going to be close but ultimately lost. Indiana has been pretty safely Republican since the 60s! Clinton lost to Dole (Dole?!?) there by 6% in '96!

But laziness won out: St. Louis, MO was a good 5-6 hour drive away while Lake County, IN was (in theory, at least) about 41 minutes away. So I signed on with the Gary Office for what I expected was going to be the go-down-with-your-guns-blazing fight in Indiana, bellwethers be damned.

While Indiana was safely red, Gary, however, was a different story. It was run down but had a large black population that tended to swing Lake County blue. It was because of this that the networks just could not call Indiana in the Democratic Primaries until all the votes came in from Lake County the morning after.

The Indiana Primaries, as best experienced... Gary was kind of a bleak place, as I had been warned, but I've got to admit I've been in more dangerous parts in East Oakland.

Seen better days The places I visited had obviously seen better days, but they were actual bedroom communities -- neighborhoods, not the high-density projects that I had grown up around in Oakland. In spite of it all, Gary had a certain kind of look that makes me wish now that I had taken many more pictures.

The Gary office was, as might be expected, much scrappier than the Reno office I was in weeks earlier. It was in a run-down strip mall in a shop that still had the signage for a computer parts store. Next to it was a police department inside a converted mall shop. It didn't have nearly as much schwag to hand out, which kind of bummed me out because so many people wanted it when I went out. I guess it's kind of the penalty of being a safe territory. Like many in California I had to buy my schwag, but in tightly-contested Reno, NV we went out with armfuls of yard signs, buttons, and stickers to hand out at will. But Gary's schwag supply could've been sparse because we were there on election eve -- that sort of thing wasn't going to do that much good anymore.

Appearances aside, the campaign was tightly organized. They had staffers there recently pulled out of South Carolina and they still had the nice packets and lists put together for us. Being election eve, we were now in the GOTV (Get Out The Vote) stage of the campaign. Our mission was no longer to cajole and persuade, but to talk to everyone on that turf about voting and blanket a it with literature with precise instructions on the polling location and what to bring and be prepared for, Obama supporter or not.

Who's turf? No really, who's turf??? This was where that good sense of map-reading and checking lists helped me out quite a good deal. I can't be sure if there was some kind of electoral board chicanery was going on, but it did seem to me the turf for a given polling place was particularly small, so that many people across the street from each may well have had entirely different polling places to go to. I canvassed with a guy who had worked the Gary office before and felt comfortable just heading out after a good look at the map and lists and leaving them back on the car.

The first 3 blocks were good, but after that I noticed a copy of literature already posted with a different polling place on it. Due to previous mix-ups the office told us to go ahead and destroy any of these we found and place our 'correct' information, and my canvassing partner was ready to go ahead and do that. I got antsy and insisted we go back and re-check the map, and indeed, we had gone outside of our turf. Luckily we didn't get far (and we removed our bad info) but I shudder to think about how many votes we could've lost if we'd just tore up the 'wrong' literature and replaced it with ours. I think we wouldn't have been more than a block off, but you never know how this kind of thing could add up. What could that be? 20 votes? 50 votes?

I mainly thought about how crushed these people would be if the campaign misled them. Unlike the sheltered suburbs of Reno, the people in these neighborhoods were thrilled to see us and incredibly kind. Many appreciated seeing an Asian guy out from California and a White guy from Illinois coming over to help out. One old guy undid several deadbolts and a unlocked a screen door to come out and shake my hand and talk. Amost teary-eyed, he told me he had been a lifelong Republican but told me he had to vote for Obama. People hailed us from across the street. It was great to see a bunch of people who have obviously seen a lot of tough times finally have something to be really excited about. "Flip Indiana and we can start the party early tomorrow!", we often told them.

And so it was -- Obama squeaked by in Indiana by 0.9%, the first time the state went blue since '64. By the time it was called, Obama had already clinched the win with the results from the west coast (so 10pm CST, a reasonably good time to kick off a party). But winning states like IN and NV were the kinds of firewalls we needed to keep us from repeating the nightmare scenarios where one silly electoral college-heavy state could've swung the entire election sometime in the wee hours of November 5. IN was particularly sweet since it was a state many had not expected to win.

I actually caught the moment we clinched the win with some shoddy camera work on my digicam in Grant Park...

Countdown to victory! The whole experience was terrific and I actually find myself looking forward to go back into the trenches in 2012! Hopefully I'll see some of you there.