Wednesday, August 27 at 7:30 am
Thursday, August 28
Friday, August 29
Saturday, August 30
Sunday, August 31
Monday, September 1
coming up...
Our most important task is deciding on locations for Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, AND THEN telling our volunteers and new volunteers where to show up on each of those days. We need places (in or near our turf - see map link on previosu post) to register voters on
We have talked about
Does anybody know what is going on this weekend in Atlanta for Labor Day? lety's talk about that on Wednesday am too. We will need to do some phonebanking to let volunteers kow about the weekend plans (once we set them). So, let's be thinking about availability on Wednesday and Thursday for phone banking.We are meeting on Wednesday at 7:30 am at the coffee place Dannemen's at Boulevard & Edgewood (former Javaology)See you there!
Click on this link to see the turf that our particular neighborhood team is most focused on: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&msa=0&msid=103858818230022199399.000454e3d78a14cb474a4&z=14
It is based on the boundaries of three precincts in Fulton County, which were put together into one team by the campaign. If you live outside of our precise boundaries or across the line in Dekalb, no worries! You are welcome here! We aim to register and reach out to voters in this general area. We are all working for the same goal: electing Barack Obama and turning Georgia Blue!
Please stay tuned for opportunities to reigster voters this weekend.
We are doing voter registration (and hopefully some volunteer recruitment) today at the East Atlanta Village Farmers Market (if the rain holds out!).
Yesterday, several team coordinators - Ann, Naeemah, Reed, & me - met with Peter (our brave leader with the campaign's Fulton County HQ) to discuss getting our activities ramped up between now and OCTOBER 6 (last day to change address or register to vote!!). Our other goal is to recruit volunteers to do voter registration and then GOTV (get out the vote) for Obama on November 4. Some locations that we thought of IN OUR TURF (or nearby) include:
Please leave your suggestions in the comments!!
There are a lot of condos and townhouses that are gated in our area and we need to brainstorm ways to reach people who live there.
Events coming up IN or NEAR OUR TURF that will be good place to reach people include:
Do you know of other little festivals in our area? Please leave suggestions in the comments!!
Please leave any ideas here!
As the Clintons and some media observers have been busy qualifying Barack Obama's landslide victory in South Carolina, I've been thinking about the demographics of SC. Yes, a third of the state's population, give or take, is African American. BUT that percentage is not distributed evenly across the state. Almost all of the voters in some counties, especially in the SE corner of the state, are African American, whereas other counties have much lower African American populations.
If the South Carolina vote was merely the result of race politics, Obama would have won where black people are concentrated and not in the whiter counties. HE WON 44 of 46 counties. Obama prevailed in ALL except two counties (John Edwards took Oconee, where he grew up, and Hillary Clinton took Horry, where Myrtle Beach is located). Obama did not prevail only in places like Orangeburg and Kingstree and Jasper County.
He took Greenville and Spartanburg. He took Lexington County, one of the whitest and most republican counties in the state. He took all but one of the counties in the upstate, which are demographially more similar to North Carolina that the lowcountry of South Carolina. The NY Times has a map showing the margin of victory and prevailiong candidate by county. In Nevada and NH, Obama took substantial geographical areas of the state. The maps for Iowa, NH, and NV show that Obama and Clinton both took a good number of counties. The map for SC, with its great expanse of green (Obama's color on the map) reveals what a landslide this was for Obama. (As a side note, the Republican map looks almost evenly divided between McCain and Huckabee - the democrats were more unified than the republicans were last Saturday.)
I wish the media would focus on the votes and not the exit polls. All of this talk about the black vote is based on polls. Remember the polls in NH? How about the exit polls in the 2000 presidential election? Why are the exit polls in SC going unscrutinized?
Further, I am sick and tired of Bill Clinton's attempts to make this election all about race. For him to compare Obama's win to Jesse Jackson's wins in the 80s is nonsense. For one, Jesse Jackson was a native son, like John Edwards. Jesse Jackson took only 10% of the white vote, whereas Obama took almost a quarter of the white vote. Funny that Bill didn't mention that he won the SC democratic primary. That seems like a better comparison to me.
Do you remember when all of the talk was about whether African Americans would even support Obama? It wasn't that long ago. Some people said it took Iowa to convince African American voters in SC that Obama could win white votes. The results show me that he can and did win those white votes. Instead of looking at SC as a whole, and dismissing the results, because other states don't share it's demographic profile, I think we should look at the counties. I think we would find that some of the counties, especially in the upstate, are reasonably similar to to the February 5 states.
The fact that Obama won SC overwhelmingly, in all areas of the state, tells me all I need to know about his success from here on out. Remember, also, that he won in IOWA, a place with very few minorities. There is room in this tent for everyone, regardless of race, who is more concerned about the issues than partisan politics.
