I was reading, and perhaps lefteh can share how accurate he thinks this is, about some voter outreach efforts. The stats that they gave were that if you were to go door to door (and I believe this was a national average), you would find only 1 in 4 people answer the door. Of those people who DO answer the door, one in 12 will be a persuadable voter, someone who perhaps is willing to listen to you, or who maybe isn’t registered to vote and you can get them the registration materials. So essentially, for every 50 doors you knock on, that equals essentially one more vote for your candidate.
When you look at that on a micro scale, you can say, wow, what a collosal waste of my time, but if you have thousands of volunteers in every single state knocking on hundreds of doors every weekend for 3 months, it really CAN make a difference.
Knowing that though, it’s just not something I’m personally comfortable doing. I’d rather support Obama by giving him as much money as I can and by spreading the message far and wide to people I know and on places on the internet like this. I guess there’s a term for this…slacktivisim (i.e. slacker activism). I have made calls on election day to remind people to go out and vote, and I have done telephone polling to gague voter attitudes, but I’m just not comfortable going up to someone’s door, because I personally don’t answer the door at my house if someone unexpectedly drops by, and I screen my calls…I’m not moved by advertising, and if I want something from you, I’ll let you know. So, it’s a pretty far stretch for me to try to persuade anyone to come to my side, because I think you should vote your conscience, even if you don’t agree with me…the only thing I really try to fight back against is lies and distortions, and I do that wherever I see them.
So, I thank people like lefteh who actually take their time to do this, I know they make a bigger difference than anyone else, and I’ll keep supporting their efforts by giving Obama an occassional donation from my credit card. But I’d prefer to stay out of their way and let those who feel more comfortable with that do the job, because I know they will do it much better than I ever could.