Dashing Into A Swing State

Today we went on our day trip to Carson City, Nevada for a little bit of get-out-the-vote work. We met Susan and Barbara at nine in town in Davis and rode in Susan’s Subie Forester. Our first stop was just outside Auburn for fuel. The attendant at the gas station, a middle-aged guy with a long white beard, said we were the third group to pass through wearing Kerry-Edwards buttons, and wondered if there was a rally somewhere. We explained we were headed to Nevada. He said he was probably the only person in his precinct to be supporting Kerry, and they knew who he was! On the way over the mountain, we passed another car clearly filled with volunteers; we waved and they waved back.

We were told to arrive by 1 PM; there was no point in doing work in the morning since it was Nevada Day (celebrating the founding of the state) and there was a big parade downtown. Our coordinator was Kris, a youngish guy wearing a Yes on Kerry, No on Yucca Mountain t-shirt, who’s been at this since mid-August. Our brief was to visit voters not so much to persuade them to support Kerry but to get them to go to the polls, and offer them help if they needed any. Volunteers had already contacted most of the registered Democratic voters, so we started in on the non-partisan voters.

Nevada has early elections: one of the things we discovered is that a large fraction of the people have already voted. The people we talked to seemed pretty evenly split between Bushites and Kerry supporters—it is a swing state after all—and we had only one overtly hostile encounter. We figure our afternoon’s efforts probably netted the cause a couple more voters, and certainly helped the Carson City locals cover more ground. Kerry’s sister Peggy was in town campaigning today as part of the Nevada Day activities, and Anne Richards, the former governor of Texas who was defeated in 1994 by Bush, will be speaking there tomorrow, so Carson City is definitely getting some upper-level attention.

We stopped at a restaurant for dinner on the way back. On one of the televisions by the bar they had figures from I think the last day of early voting. This showed about 37,000 votes cast, apparently evenly between those registered Democrat and Republican. I think this is a good sign for Kerry, since far more Republicans are going to cross over and vote Kerry than vice-versa.