ON A crisp autumn afternoon, armed with “I’m with her” balloons, a boombox and a clipboard, Eli Clark-Davis sets out dancing down the street with his friends to get out the Democratic vote in Fishtown, a gentrifying neighbourhood in Philadelphia. The group’s mission is to knock on as many doors as possible, reminding registered voters of whom they should back, when election day falls and where to cast their ballots. They ask potential supporters to sign an “I commit to vote for Hillary” slip, which the campaign hopes will adorn refrigerator doors. Hillary Clinton’s campaign has set up 300 of these “staging posts” across the Pennsylvania, from which armies of volunteers set forth to mobilise her party’s base. On the campaign’s penultimate weekend, they knocked on 500,000 doors—roughly one-tenth of the households in the whole of the Keystone State.
From a distance, such laborious work might seem a questionable investment. Advertising scales up far better than street-to-street glad-handing. And there is no guarantee that whomever these ground-game battalions convince to vote will in fact plump for the intended candidate: a...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/2fg6avB
EmoticonEmoticon