Staten Island Get Out the Vote, Round 2

I haven't written in a while...this is a new habit I'm trying to pick up here, so there's bound to be periods of blankness. I'm just hoping to keep them short.

So, the first phase of the get out the vote campaign I've been doing in Staten Island is over. It ended with a relatively successful meeting on Staten Island I've talked about below. Last week, we got a bunch of money to do a much larger campaign for the general elections. People are interested in Staten Island because it forms the majority of a congressional district (NY-13, the other part is a sliver of Brooklyn) where the Republican incumbent is leaving and the Democratic candidate has a good chance of taking the seat. We were going to be doing the campaign on behalf of a large umbrella organization. What exactly the campaign will end up being is still in the works -- going to be figured out by us, other organizations, etc -- but what we do know is that there will be a get out the vote campaign on Staten Island.

Given that there were only really two people working on the campaign before the primaries (myself and Karina), a lot of the coordination of the campaign is going to be up to us. This is cool; we're going to build a team of door canvassers, train them, and run a big canvassing operation on Staten Island. We're going to get to figure out which voters to spend our energy on, and make sure people are having positive conversations at the door. The fundamental idea here is voting. People need to vote. Some initial goals thrown around were contacting roughly 16,000 voters, with the goal of increasing turnout by roughly 4,000. This means starting big -- talking to all 16000 and then narrowing the pool as we identify voters we definitely want to make sure get to the polls, and those about whom we don't care as much. This could change, though, should our only focus be participation, in which case we wouldn't weed anyone out. We'd try and get everyone to vote. But, money is coming from certain people, who care about certain issues, so we're going to probably be working to turn people out who support our platform on immigration or health care or education or whatever it happens to be (probably will be immigration).

Whatever happens this is interesting work for me -- meeting people in the community, talking with other organizations in Staten Island, getting a lay of the land a little bit. There are many many service organizations in Staten Island, but not to many people doing community organizing. One woman told me the other day that organizers ran screaming from Staten Island, that the place was too tough to organize in. That may be. It is a tough place, that is for sure, but, at the same time, things seem to be moving. Which is why I really hope that once all these non-profit politics get played out, that Staten Island is a focus, because a) its a race that really counts and b) its a place ready to break out i, in my cursory knowledge, think.