Member of the reality-based community of progressive (not anonymous) Massachusetts blogs
‘Tis the season…for kickoffs!
I’ve attended several so far - notably, Stacie Hargis, Vesna Nuon, and tonight, Derek Mitchell, on the city council side. (KRS on the School Committee side so far as well.)
Derek, impressively, held his event in the heart of the Acre, at the longstanding French Canadian club Passe-Temps. (I can’t see that without sounding it out in my head with a French accent.) I thought that this was a nice touch for a campaign whose slogan is “for ALL of Lowell.”
Here is my crude taping of his speech, as well as part of the intro (sorry, I got a call in the middle of taping at the beginning, looking at YOU Mr. Lynne!) and after his speech, there was another speaker and she got cut off by the fact my phone sim card, apparently, is full. (Could be that my method of leaving all my photos and videos on there forever might be to blame…)
Had a lot of fun tonight, and feeling really optimistic about Lowell’s candidates this year. I think you are all in for a great surprise in how good they are. I’m excited to see Van Pech running again, Jim Milinazzo has pulled papers, and many (though not all, we’ll talk later) of the challengers are on the side of Right and Good (and by that I mean, they have more than a lick of common sense and care about facts and stuff).
Welcome to the race Derek (again, since this is not your first event)!
Tis the season! The campaign for city office season, I mean.
For those of you who are not familiar with Stacie Hargis, she’s someone you will see at coordinated campaign offices doing the hard work of campaigning, on the boards of local organizations like COOL, or (formerly) working for US Rep. Niki Tsongas. I’m pretty excited to see what she will do in her campaign.
I captured as best I could her speech tonight at her kickoff at Cobblestones:
The Primary is one week from yesterday.
A note from Ariela: This is the same night as the fund raiser for the bombing victims being held at the UMass Lowell Inn & Conference Center. It is understood that at 6pm, many of the attendees will be walking over to the ICC for that event, as well. I hope to see you all soon.
I took some phone video (as best I could) of Ed Markey tonight, who was in Lowell. I didn’t catch the very beginning but got most of it. Posting it as is (I haven’t checked it for audio levels and such). So if you missed Ed Markey tonight you can listen to his speech. It was very well received by the crowd tonight at The Old Court.
According to the Boston.com results page, with all 33 precincts in Lowell reporting, the vote count was Warren: 19,678 to Brown: 13,905.
So much for all the face time he put in here, and the local “Democratic” endorsements he touted. Wonder if Rita is sweating it? There are a number of longtime supporters of hers that appear to be very angry with her. She hates it when people don’t like her…that has to be unpleasant.
This means the margin of support for Warren in Lowell was 58.7% to 41.6%. Yeah, you read that right. A huge difference of 5,773 votes.
Let me bask in that number for a few days on behalf of the amazing, wonderful, capable, hardworking campaign staff and the core set of volunteers that showed up to so many canvasses, phone banks, rallies, and visibilities. Compared to those folks, I’m just an occasional worker bee. Kudos to Andrew Howe and Ariela Gragg who ran the regional office. You deserve this margin of victory!! It’s all yours.
Update: From Fran on facebook, it looks like Chelmsford went for Obama, 9,906 to 9,534. A small margin of victory, but for Chelmsford, that is insane! Kudos to the Chelmsford crew! Also, I am guessing (someone wanna check?) that the 11,530 to 7,900 loss for Warren there was a smaller margin than the Coakley/Brown special election?
PS - Golnik couldn’t even win in Chelmsford, his 7,449 to Tsongas’ 11,413 is a pretty poor showing.
Taking a short break to eat lunch before going on to more tasks for GOTV. I was stationed at the Pyne Arts School for the whole morning, and there was hardly a lull even in the mid morning. I think turnout is going to be surprising, both in Lowell and statewide.
What are you seeing? Hve you voted yet?
Yesterday, after a few hours canvassing, I wound down the day at the Warren campaign phone bank location, making calls to remind supporters to GOTV. Standard operating procedure of a grassroots campaign. I met a woman who had been there since 1pm, who had made an astounding 12 pages of phone calls that day. She told me this was her first time ever doing any campaign work of any sort for any candidate. “Really?” I asked her. She had actually gotten a phone call invitation to the rally with Elizabeth for last Friday (she would have been in that crowd of the above photo) and had attended, and promptly signed up to work GOTV. I was pretty astounded, but not surprised, by her committment.
I’ve met an awful lot of people who have never touched a campaign before in their lives during the weeks and months leading up to this weekend. Like another woman from Chelmsford, my canvassing partner yesterday afternoon, who was also a new face in election campaigning.
Elizabeth is the sort of candidate money can’t buy - both literally, but also figuratively. She’s intelligent and full of substance, inspiring, optimistic about what we can accomplish, and genuine. All protests from Republican ads to the contrary. And when people hear her speak, or have a chance to meet her, they can see it.
On the canvassing circuit, I’ve talked to a lot of undecided voters over the last few weeks. There are still a few out there even now. Something they cite a lot is their disgust at the parrying back and forth over the airwaves - they don’t know who to believe, and they are sick of being “spun” to. For my part, I’ve told the truth about the ads Brown has run against Warren - that they are very misleading, and many of them outright lies, using victims of asbestos and others to twist truth into unrecognizable falsehoods. There’s not a lot of time to go into details, but I tell them what I can of the background behind those ads. But I am beginning to believe that ads - all ads, from all candidates - should be banned from TV. They are not helping people make good decisions about candidates, they are only confusing, particularly when you throw third parties into the mix (which, thankfully, in our Senate race, don’t exist, thanks to the People’s Pledge).
Make the people hear from the candidates directly. Replay segments from debates in full. Networks need to stop making tons of cash off of our democracy - turning it into a demock-racy. Anyway, this is a tangent…
The fact remains, though, that Warren’s campaign is historic in more ways than just the possibility she might be the first female Senator from MA. I can feel it when I am volunteering, but it’s also evident in the numbers.
Her campaign officials say they expect to have 24,000 volunteers working for them on Tuesday roughly 10 in each of the state’s 2,174 precincts to get her supporters to the polls. That would be by far a record number in Massachusetts. In the days before the election, they expect to knock on one million doors and make two million phone calls.
[…]
It has 48 field offices and 74 paid field organizers, including several veterans of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. On Saturday alone, they made more than 370,000 phone calls and knocked on more than 123,000 doors…
Having been involved in the Democratic party apparatus since the Governor’s race in 2006, I can tell you that the Warren campaign is deeper and wider than any statewide campaign I’ve ever even imagined, let alone worked on. Couple to that the state Democratic party’s “Coordinated Campaign” where the party is working together with down-ticket races and pooling their resources, and the breadth and scope is enormous. Never before in all the grassroots I’ve worked has there been a thorough “poll checking” process, at least in this city (maybe it’s done commonly in Boston). Poll checking is when you have people at every polling place, checking supporters off a list as they vote, so that when you print canvass and phone lists for the afternoon and evening shifts, you’ve struck off all those already voted so you are not wasting your time. You need a LOT of bodies to enable poll checking, as well as implementing the right technology to get the information into the system as quickly as possible. That’s on top of the bodies you need at the phone and walking the streets, and the ones doing visibility and data entry and other jobs.
In the Times article linked above, the Brown campaign tries to turn sour grapes into wine:
At a Brown rally here on Sunday, former Gov. William F. Weld, a Republican, cast the race as a showdown between “man versus machine.” He said that just as a machine was working to get Ms. Warren elected, a machine would tell her how to vote. “The machine never rests,” he said.
If by machine you mean people like the woman I met last night, who had never once stepped foot into a campaign office in her long life, but did seven hours of phone banking in one day, or my new Chelmsford friend who, despite recently coming off a horrific injury, was walking the streets talking to voters for hours on a Sunday afternoon. If by telling Warren how to vote, you mean as constituents who are so motivated by their convictions and by the ability of this candidate, Elizabeth Warren, to fulfill their hopes and dreams that they would sacrifice hours and days of their personal time to volunteer for her, then yes, guilty. Guilty as hell.
Fired up, ready to go. THIS is how we should be electing people. Not with money and ads and robocalls. But with people power. I’m ready to get to work. Are you? Volunteers are still needed. Sign up here.
PS - Senator John Kerry will be at the Lowell office today at 5pm, 73 E Merrimack St, Lowell. That would be a good time to stop by and sign up for some hours tomorrow!
This is a rally. I took this pic before the rally started, I had to leave…I could barely get in and out to get some pics.
The @elizabethforma #Lowell rally looked like this before anything had even started. Packed! #masen #mapoli twitter.com/leftinlowell/s…
— LeftinLowell.com (@leftinlowell) November 2, 2012
Around the corner, still more people. The entire floor was crowded. The cars lined up for blocks around.
Only a few more days until Election Day…if you have not volunteered, now is the time! My weekend is full of GOTV and I’ll be doing it on Tuesday as well.
Fake outrage abounded at my use of the phrase “douchebag liar” when referring to Scott Brown. But seriously. The term 100% applies. Case in point:
During a question and answer session, one firefighter commented that both campaigns are publishing advertisements featuring family members of victims of asbestos-related illness. He asked Brown how Warren gets the victims’ family members to go on her commercial.
“A lot of them are paid,” Brown said. “We hear that maybe they pay actors. Listen, you can get surrogates and go out and say your thing. We have regular people in our commercials. No one is paid. They are regular folks that reach out to us and say she is full of it.”
One of the ads, entitled “Ashamed,” features Kingston resident Ginny Jackson, whose husband died of mesothelioma after working at a Quincy shipyard that was filled with asbestos.
Reached through the Warren campaign, Jackson responded to Brown’s comments, calling them offensive.
“A lot of them are paid…We hear that maybe they pay actors.” What. A. Jerk.
This is ironic coming from a campaign which is paying black people - including some who are homeless - what “works out to” $8/hour to show up to rallies in Brown tee-shirts, don’t you think??
I’ll be working a canvass this weekend. Why not join me? There’s a GOTV training at 9am with a kickoff by Rep. Niki Tsongas, then canvassing. (Sign up for both at those links. Like, right now. Yes, you. I want to see you there.)
H/T @elizabethforma Twitter feed.
Update: Oh, so now he’s apologized (in typical lukewarm fashion). It’d be nice if he stopped freakin’ doing and saying things to apologize for. A REAL apology, though, would be to pull his misleading, lying ads attacking Warren’s asbestos and other law work, and apologizing for those as well.
This guy can’t lose this race fast enough for me. Apparently, the voters are thinking the same thing. That poll may be an outlier (no one else has yet shown Warren 9 points ahead) but she consistently goes above 50% in several recent polls. Good signs, but we have less than 3 weeks to go in this election - get to work!
You could be. This WBUR report has the details:
Thousands of registered voters could show up at the polls on Election Day only to be told that they have been put on the inactive voter list.
Voters on the inactive list can still vote, but it’s a time-consuming process. It involves showing ID and filling out an affidavit. If you don’t have your ID, you have to fill out a provisional ballot that may be counted later.
The problem is especially acute in Haverhill, where city officials fear major problems at the polls.
[…]
In Lowell, the problem is even bigger. Normally, the city has 12,000 to 13,000 inactive voters. This year, the list surged to 21,000. But because the Lowell elections office failed to send a follow-up card as required, the secretary of State and the city solicitor intervened to place most of those voters back on the rolls. The city solicitor is also taking steps to publicize the problem, and she promises an investigation after the election.
I actually have had to deal with this. If you forgot to fill in your little city census thingie, you can be placed as inactive on the voter rolls even if, like me, you show up to every bloody election. It’s not that big a deal, as mentioned - with a photo ID like a license and a few minutes to fill out the affidavit, you’ll be able to vote. And in Lowell it appears most names have been placed back into active until further notice. However, I recommend you bring an ID with you to vote in case, and have a few minutes on hand to address it if it happens. It’s unlikely to, but you never know.
H/T Marie on Facebook.
[powered by WordPress.]
57 queries. 0.915 seconds
