As the U.S. Presidential Election winds down to its last two weeks, supporters are actively campaigning for their candidates in the “swing state” of New Hampshire.
Chittenden County for Obama has been sending volunteers to Lebanon and Claremont, N.H. to canvass for Barack Obama as part of the “Drive for Change” campaign.
A door-to-door effort
Every Saturday from Sept.14 through Election Day, volunteers from Chittenden County have been meeting in the Staples Plaza in Burlington to carpool to the Democratic headquarters in Lebanon and Claremont, according to the Vermont for Obama Web site.
Sanjay and Anita Sathe, of Burlington, have drove down to New Hampshire as part of the Drive for Change campaign twice this fall.
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"You have to set your expectations pretty low because you knock on a lot of doors and a lot of people aren't home," says Sanjay Sathe, of Burlington.
(Photo by Cailey McDermott) |
“It's like an addiction,” Anita Sathe says. “You start doing it once and it's just so exciting and you feel so involved and energized. You feel like you are part of the whole process, it's just great.”
The Democratic headquarters in New Hampshire has been active in bringing in supporters from other states, through programs such as Drive for Change, to help secure the Democratic vote in the “swing state,” says Christian Bergland, a volunteer on the campaign.
The Obama campaign would not have had such success if not for the volunteers going to door-to-door and making phone calls to voice their support, he says.
“In order for it to work on Election Day, we need the ground organization,” he says. “We need the volunteers to be out there knocking on doors and making phone calls. We need all the volunteers we can get.”
Political activism
The St. Michael’s chapter of Students for Barack Obama set up an event through Facebook for students to sign up and take part in the Drive for Change campaign on Saturday, Oct. 18, sophomore Kate Bailey says.
Coordinated by Bailey, the group has been organizing events throughout the semester to keep students involved and knowledgeable about the election, she says.
“We’ve been organizing trips down here to New Hampshire and we did the debate-watching parties,” she says. “We coordinated that with Grace Kelly and got the advertising for that to get people informed about who they are voting for.”
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Kate Bailey '11 canvassed for Obama in New Hampshire on Oct. 18.
(Photo by Cailey McDermott) |
Students for Barack Obama is also planning on setting up phone banks to continue getting students involved in campaigning for Obama through Election Day, Bailey says.
“We are going to continue tabling in Alliot and doing as much as we can to make sure people are registered to vote and have absentee ballots,” she says.
St. Michael’s senior Dan Hock has also been involved on campus making sure students are registered to vote come Nov. 4, he says.
At the beginning of the semester Hock thought it was important for students to be aware of their options to either vote in Vermont or in their home states through absentee ballots, so he got involved with the effort put forth by the Student Association, he says.
“Students have the right to vote, so we need to make sure that they use that right,” Hock says.
Bringing the election to the classroom
This semester students have been given the chance to get involved with the election academically as well as outside of classes.
Every election year, the St. Michael’s history department offers a class focused solely on elections, sophomore David Mitiguy says.
The course focuses mostly on prior elections, but at the beginning of each class the professor, Douglas Slaybaugh, leads students in a discussion about the current election, Mitiguy says.
The political science department is also offering a course related to presidential elections this semester, Hock says.
“We are mainly studying election cycles and trying to decipher what the Electoral College really is,” he says. “But we start off each class with an open discussion on the latest election news.”
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Buff Lindau, St. Michael's director of public relations, joined the Drive for Change campaign on Oct. 18.
(Photo by Cailey McDermott) |
It is important that St. Michael’s offers these classes so that students can become more knowledgeable and involved in the election process, Mitiguy says.
“If it wasn’t for this class I would probably have watched some things concerning the election, but I definitely would not have been as involved in it,” he says.
Bailey agrees that it is important for students to get involved in the election and become more knowledgeable about the issues, she says.
“I feel like young people have the most to lose in an election like this and at the same time they are the least informed,” she says. “Barack is a very relatable candidate for the young generation so it is really important that we have a candidate that we actually latch onto and that represents us, which is really exciting.”
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