Pennsylvania Volunteers Frustrated by Disorganization of Democrats
New Yorkers swamped the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Election Day. After weeks of relentless door-pounding and phone soliciting, some New York canvassers questioned whether they were needed and how much campaigning was too much.
“I don’t know who you are, but you are not supposed to be here,” the local leader of the get-out the-vote drive told Barbara Winter, a volunteer. Winter is a social worker in New York City who voted early so she could go to Pennsylvania for the effort. She boarded an 8 a.m. bus sponsored by America Coming, one of the activist groups supporting Democrats. The volunteers thought they were going to Allentown, the third biggest city in Pennsylvania, but were then switched to Easton. Allentown already had too many volunteers, they were told.
“I was fed up with it being so poorly organized,” Winter said.
Winter and others hurried to Easton, only to discover that they were not needed there either. After calling ACT, the volunteers were then redirected to Bethlehem, a city of about 73 thousand people six miles northeast of Allentown.
But despite the problems, some of the other volunteers felt what they were doing was important, and were pleased that so many people were willing to help.
“It was annoying,” commented Sarah Yorra, an actress from New York City, “but I thought the fact that they had a surplus of people was good.”
Natalie Behm, who works for the History Channel, was also surprised at the number of volunteers and the size of the operation. “I didn’t understand before how big the effort was and how hard it was to have it coordinated,” she said.
The effort was big, indeed. Nationwide, Democrats and Republicans each claimed to have a million volunteers, who directly contacted tens of millions voters. A big part of the movement was to register new voters in the months and weeks leading up to the election, and 500,000 were registered in Pennsylvania alone. The other part was bringing people to vote on the Election Day. Organizations like ACT, MoveOn and others brought in thousands of volunteers from New York, New Jersey and Virginia—more than 1200 to Bethlehem alone—and local unions in Pennsylvania coordinated the effort.
Ben Waxman, a steelworkers’ union representative in Bethlehem, instructed the volunteers to “knock on the doors four times, drive them nuts, drive them out of their houses.” So they did.
A few felt uncomfortable though. Volunteers from parallel groups were doing just as many rounds of the same houses, and local people were getting dozens of visitors, and possibly even more calls on the telephone. Winter said she felt sorry for people who were at home. “Gee, am I bothering you?” she kept asking when she knocked on the doors. Debbie Andrews, a musician from New York City, was concerned whether she was actually doing a disservice to voters and just annoying them. Some Bethlehem residents said it was none of anybody’s business whether they had voted or not. However, most people, according to the volunteers, were generally nice and understanding.
Some volunteers, like Winter, were discouraged that there were so few people at home and felt they hadn’t been used in the most effective way.
“They put me in the district where everybody was at work, and others have already voted,” she said. “This made no sense. I thought if they were bringing us here, they must need the help.”
But others felt that the experience was gratifying anyway. “I think what matters is being engaged,” Yorra said. “If every of us got one person to vote, this is great.”
She and some others agreed that the best moments of the day were when they met people who voted for the first time or were able to help voters. One woman who couldn’t get to the polls because she had moved to another town and got a lift from volunteers called them “a blessing in disguise.”
