As their candidate slips in the polls in the shadow of the GOP’s rising female star, New Haven’s Women for Obama are gearing up to influence the presidential race by employing a “one-on-one” personal touch.
With just 55 days to go before the Nov. 4 election, Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama supporters gathered at Yale’s Afro-American Cultural Center Tuesday night for a grassroots organizing meeting. The event drew over two dozen women and a half-dozen men, only one of whom appeared to be a college student. The planned phone-banking and trips to battleground states.
Catherine Shannon (at left in photo), who started Connecticut Women for Obama back in January, joined fellow enthusiasts in a circle of folding chairs. As Republicans get energized about presidential candidates John McCain’s new running mate, Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin, organizers like Shannon are gearing up to target undecided voters, especially women.
“I find it insulting,” Shannon said of the GOP choice to put a woman with no foreign policy experience on the presidential ticket. “They use feminism when it’s convenient.”
Palin’s speech at last week’s Republican convention has lifted McCain slightly ahead of Obama in several national polls. Meanwhile, Shannon said she’s staying focused on her task: Making personal connections with undecided women.
Returning from a summer hiatus, she said Women for Obama will be reviving some of the operations they ran during the primary cycle.
During the primaries, the group made thousands of phone calls to battleground states and sent 6,000 handwritten, personal postcards to women in other states. Shannon, a Catholic mother of four adopted children, said she used a personal touch, often sharing details about her own life, to connect with women across the country.
“I’d have a woman tell me she had an abortion when she was 20 — and this is a stranger in Indiana I’d never met before,” Shannon recalled. She said that personal connection — rather than an abstract discussion of what a candidate’s stances on the issues are — can make the difference in bringing women to the polls.
“That one-on-one call, that note, is where women will come into play,” Shannon said.
Across the room, blogger and Milford Democrat Tessa Marquis (at right in photo at top of this story) whipped out her laptop so she could let the room know of another organizing effort: Sending troops to New Hampshire through the pro-choice group Planned Parenthood.
The group will be sending volunteers to New Hampshire nearly every weekend from now until Nov. 4, Marquis reported. She and her partner, Mike Brown, plan to jump on the caravan for a couple weekends. The volunteer effort is separate from the Obama campaign. The idea is to knock on the doors of unaffiliated female voters who have self-identified as pro-choice, and tell them about McCain’s record, Marquis said.
McCain advocates overturning Roe v. Wade. He has said he supports banning all abortions, except “in cases where pregnancies resulted from rape or incest, or pregnancies that threaten the life of the mother.” Obama supports Roe v. Wade and is pro-choice.
Grassroots organizer Jennifer Just (pictured in Denver waiting to hear Obama speak), of Woodbridge, just landed a job as field coordinator for the Obama campaign in Connecticut. Her post is the campaign’s only paid position in the state, she said.
In her new role, she’ll help send volunteers to door-knock for Obama in New Hampshire — just as she did for that state’s contentious primary.
This weekend, a small group of volunteers plans to drive out to Scranton, Pennsylvania, where the latest FOX News/Rasmussen poll shows Obama leading by only two percentage points, 47 to 45, among likely voters.
Tuesday’s New Haven meeting comprised of many middle-aged women, who Just said are retired or work part-time.
Just encouraged them to go out and talk to other women about the issues at stake: “Do you really want to vote for someone who would overturn Roe versus Wade?” The key will be, she said, “person-to-person contact.”
The notable gender split — about 4 to 1 women to men, with ex-Black Panther George Edwards helping represent for the men — has been typical of the campaign, Just said.
“A secret of this campaign is that what has driven it has been women.”
The group was predominantly white.
“She Is George Bush!”
Closer to the heart of the city’s African-American community, a trio of women have been holding weekly meetings at a new makeshift Obama headquarters at 300 Whalley Ave.
Carroll E. Brown, president of the West Haven Black Coalition, is one of the women in charge of the New Haven chapter of CT Women for Obama. The chapter has been focusing on, among other things, getting more African-Americans to vote.
Reached by phone, Brown got instantly fired up at the mention of the name “Palin.”
“This pistol-toting hockey mom has no substance!” replied Brown. “I think that she is George Bush.” Brown said she was “insulted and offended” that Palin “mocked Barack Obama’s experience as a community organizer” during her acceptance speech.
Meanwhile, Brown has been doing some organizing of her own. She’s co-chairing a fundraising event called Hats On For Obama, an old-fashioned garden party at a Woodbridge home geared towards women. Brown said her group has been helping the Obama campaign with voter registration drives at places like Shaw’s Supermarket, and hitting the phones, too.
As the GOP gets energized, Brown said she’ll be revved up too, fueled in part by anger. Palin “has definitely energized the Republicans because they were a dead party,” Brown said. “She’s charismatic, she’s attractive, and people like her, but it’s what comes out of her that angers many people.”
I was going to sign on to the phone banks at ctdems.org but if this group can set me up with numbers I would love to help. Not seeing a contact.
PS My heart just skipped a beat with a wonderful memory of my mother. if someone sees Carol Brown please tell her that Bert and Rich Angeletti's daugter Becky said hello!! What a blast from the past to see her name!