It is the night before election day.
Yes, there are little things left to do but the big things are done.
Now there is just the silence as we all sit with ourselves before the polls open.
No matter how many election eves you’ve lived through on a campaign, every one is the same, and everyone handles them differently.
The night before my first election I wrote in my journal “that I wished I could bottle up this intoxicating feeling of anxiety, hope, and the unknown that only exists before the polls close.”
Because election DAYS are mostly great because they are moments where anything is possible.1
But while E-Day is the end, and you will always remember if you won or lost, it is the journey that gets you there, the campaign, that you will never forget. Campaigns are like any intense mission-driven experience that bonds and changes people. You may not do campaigns for the rest of your life but good organizers never really lose the craft.
And because campaign organizing in the Democratic Party is a craft whose fundamentals, for better or worse, have not changed in many decades, you can return to a campaign every few years to help out and find yourself in the rhythm in a matter of hours. The printer ink pickup at 9pm, the endless clipboard organizing, the check-out calls, they all take you back in time all right now in the present (the field hands were right the auto-turf cutter is bad and I paid for my blog post hubris).
There are endless fair discussions to be had about how to do better long-term campaign organizing, of the need to reorient ourselves to community or relational organizing, to be a presence that doesn’t just appear in the month before an election.
But no matter what we change about campaign organizing, GOTV2 will always be GOTV. Because voter attention and enthusiasm peaks heading into election day and no campaign can afford not to direct that into turning out their votes to win. GOTV is simple but it is not easy.
And once one campaign veteran volunteer (popularly referred to as “Late Help”) ends up on a campaign, there’s always a need for more help, and their friends from prior campaigns often end up joining in. Campaigns are hard but GOTV is magic in that they integrate strangers into a team faster than almost any other experience in life.
One of my favorite election day reads is Nancy Leed’s “Your Official CampaignSick Pep Talk (TM)” blog post from 2008 where she writes:
“campaign people are incredible. No offense to my wonderful classmates, but I feel more comfortable out for drinks with the people I’ve known here for three days than with the people I’ve spent time with for over a year. We get each other. We’ve dealt with yard sign activists, we’ve built 10,000 person events on 24 hrs notice, we’ve knocked on doors, looked strangers in the eye and promised them that their vote can make a difference. We are all willing to dial a phone until our fingers break if that’s what it takes, because this is just that important.”
And so we find ourselves back on the campaign trail GOTVing the night before an election. And one more election eve.
There are totems we return to on election eve. Mine is the famous 2008 “Barack in the Virginia Rain” video which you should absolutely watch in its entirety now but which starts with the question, “The day after the election…will you done all that you could have?”
I have an election day creed, “All you can do is all you can do.” It is the thing I ask myself when I wonder it I should go back out on the trail, what I mutter when I have ten more turfs to cut, when I have to leave my daughter behind and try and make her understand it is for this idea called democracy.
“All you can do is all you can do.”
For every single person out there on a campaign, it is all that we can ask of ourselves and each other on election day. I know you’ll all live up to that creed tomorrow.
Now lets go win this fucking thing.
Election NIGHTS on the other hand are a different experience and today are mostly staring at little screen while occasionally looking up from that screen to look at bigger screen where Steve Kornacki is standing in front of screen.
What is GOTV? I previously wrote this description of GOTV and I think it is pretty good:
“GOTV is the acronym for Get Out the Vote. The phrase means a few different things: As a descriptor, GOTV describes the actions a campaign takes to turn out your supporters to vote for your candidate to try and win an election. As a specific time period, GOTV is the four days before and including election day, including the final weekend (“Final Four”). As a job, GOTV is the team responsible for preparing for and executing the final efforts to get supporters to vote in the election. Confused? Much like how fuck is the most versatile word in the english language, during a campaign GOTV is a noun, verb, and an adjective (Fuck is also a word liberally used by GOTV during GOTV for GOTV). GOTV is politics, campaigns, and elections at its most elemental. It is campaigning stripped down to its essence, GOTV is the campaigning that I live for.”