The State Board of Elections website shows 6.2 million total voters in the Tar Heel State, so about 40 percent of you have already voted, North Carolina! There are 800,000 more Democrats than Republicans and another 1.4 million unaffiliated voters in the mix.
That means we have to get those other 3.7 million people to the polls Tuesday if we have to drag them in a Radio Flyer wagon!
Today, not only did I motivate and send off probably seven teams of canvassers in southern Henderson County (the rough part where the Blue Ridge Escarpment meets the Piedmont of Upstate South Carolina), I managed to arrange a couple of rides for voters and dealt out water and snacks at the Flat Rock Town Hall early voting place.
I had been running by Town Hall to check the lines and learned it had grown from a 40-minute wait to over an hour. So my 12-year-old son and I ran back to our staging location about a mile away, grabbed some water, apples, Nip-Chee crackers, Chex Mix snack bags etc., and headed back to keep voters in line. I had on my Obama "That One" shirt, but just to play it safe, I told people when I made my announcement that I didn't care whom they were voting for, we just want them to stay in line to vote.
The reason is that the numbers favor us. If we get people to stay in line and vote, I'm convinced we'll win on sheer percentages alone. The latest polls showed that in the Tar Heel State, early voting favored Obama-Biden, 59 to 33 percent. I don't know if anyone would switch a presidential vote because a volunteer gave them a bottle of water and a pack of Nip-Chees, but there will be reparations to be made with McCain supporters after this election, so it's good to build goodwill now.
Meanwhile, I run into the president of our PAC. He has a voter he and another volunteer have driven over from another part of Hendersonville, but they want to get back out to canvassing and need a ride for the voter to get home to his retirement community. One phone call, and it's done; our staging location director (SLD) gets her neighbor to run over and wait with the guy through his ID process and drive him home.
When a campaign is this organized, little things like that happen. In sports, we say you create your own luck. That means you are prepared enough to anticipate the unexpected and put yourself in position to make the play.
So trust your organization from Marc Farinella down. It is one of 50 state organizations that make up the greatest, most organized campaign ever conducted anywhere on the face of the earth.
Now go out and make that campaign make history.
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