An Encouraging Word

Written by: April Johnson on Nov 26, 2006 5:00 PM EST

Whether your role was minor or major, sharing your experiences will help build the movement. Thanks in advance!   ---  Arshad Hasan   

No, thank you, Arshad, and thank you, DFA Night School creators, contributors, and financial supporters.  DFA Night School gave me the optimism and skills to work making calls for DFA and (later at night, into the SW and West coast from FL) MoveOn.  At the local level, I became reacquainted with another cross-cultural (MoveOn and traditional Democratic precinct working) Dem at Dem headquarters, who I met when we delivered a MoveOn petition to pressure our local Repug Rep to fire Tom DeLay.  As the election neared, I helped local Dems various ways:

• Recruiting phone bankers, encouraging them with information I learned in DFA Night School
• Recruiting drivers for rides to polling places
• Arranging and joining a rally to support our statewide candidate outside of the Republican headquarters to picket their candidate arriving from out of town
• Screening calls for the busy Dem execs before the election
• Pollwatching for 15 hours on Tuesday.

An especially encouraging takeaway message from DFA Night School helped me in the 2006 campaign: No matter how discouraging call after call could be, I knew if I called for an hour and changed just one voter's mind, and I multiplied that by thousands of upbeat progressive phone bankers also changing just one voter's mind in that hour,  that's thousands of votes for progressives.  Some elections were won or lost by fewer than 100 votes.  And not only was I encouraged, but working in the local Dem headquarters, making GOTV calls locally, I could share that encouraging message with GOTVers who may have been discouraged talking to local likely voters.

After the election, I was delighted to read an article about Red states going Blue, including New Mexico and Nevada.  Those were the two states I called into for MoveOn GOTV at night when I had some time, when it was too late to call locally.

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Location: Duval, FL