Election Day

Election Day started at 4:30am. We opened up our staging location at 6am. Leadership volunteers began arriving at 6:30, and callers and canvassers began showing up soon after 7 for an 8am start time.

We had been knocking and calling eight or nine hours a day for three days straight. On Election Day, we only started earlier. Our trainings were shorter, our volunteer intake system was faster, and our packet distribution more streamlined.

On our first round of canvassing, we silently left door hangers with polling location information. No knocking. We hit almost 8,000 doors before 11am. On our second round, we knocked to verify that voters had cast their ballots. We finished round two by 2:30pm.

During this time, teams of callers had made close to 4,000 calls. We directed as many people as possible to the doors, because face-to-face contact increases voter turnout by 7-10%, but our phone captains still took in less mobile volunteers, trained them, and were contacting huge numbers.

We delayed launch of the third (and final) round of canvassing until after 3:30, when students and parents would return from school and adults would begin trickling in from work. We wanted to reach out and contact to voters as they returned home.

Meanwhile, throughout the day, other teams of volunteers had maintained a steady supply of food, including a full lunch and a full dinner—nearly all of it homemade. Over 500 volunteers would pass through the office by the end of the day. None left hungry.

Despite the level of activity, few reports came in of complications at the polls. Some lines had grown, but drizzle had fallen, but people were patient, and in Bristol there were no major problems.

Eleven hours in, at 7pm, while volunteers were out on the third round of canvassing, we began preparing bundles of food, water, and rain gear for any lines at polling locations. Anyone in line at 8pm, when the polls closed, had the right to vote. If anyone left, to run home or even to go to the bathroom, they could not reenter the line.

At 8pm, a caravan of cars was sent out, one for each polling location, to report back about voter lines. We began amassing what snacks and volunteers we had left to send to those locations most in need of support.

By 8:30, when the information was to come trickling in, we received word that ABC News had projected Pennsylvania for Obama. Our director called, we were to send no one else to polls and to begin calling Nevada, where voting would continue for another hour and a half.

We called until 9:45, when we were given hearty thanks for our work and told we could head to a nearby hotel where the local Democratic Congressman was hosting a results-watching party and press conference.

Exhilarated, exhausted, we drove out and watched the electoral map turn blue.

Around 11pm, the race was called, and cheers went up everywhere. Hugs and a dazed elation.

But after the last five months of seven day weeks from 9am to midnight, after the last four days of managing thousands of volunteers for Get Out The Vote weekend, and after 19 hours of the final, full court Election Day press, without which none of the previous day’s, month’s, or year’s work mattered—after all that, the results that came in felt more like a great relief than a triumphant explosion of joy.

Of course he was going to win, some said.

But only if everything went right and we did our jobs well.

We were so tired we almost didn’t stay for the speech.

We huddled around a wall-mounted television in a hotel lounge. There were tears, cheers, cries, and the palpable sense that something profoundly different, new, and right was happening.

It was in Senator McCain’s gracious concession. It was in the buzz and cheer of the crowd in Grant Park. And it was most certainly in Senator Obama’s speech.

We left soon after, and the car ride home was calm and peaceful. News of the great denouement—block parties in Harlem, historic headlines splashed all over the web, celebrations in the streets of cities around the world—would trickle in over the next few days, but in the moment, the shape of this great narrative felt like the shape of a dramatic comedy: an achingly long, gradual and deepening conflict resolved finally by a single meteoric and cathartic return to the world not just as it once was, but the world as it should be.