THE SEARCH OF THE OCCASIONAL VOTER
California is not in play this election, but Arizona and Nevada are, so local Democrats are pouring
By Bobbi Murray
The presidential candidates are busy scrambling for the last undecided voters, but the precinct walkers gathered for a Saturday morning get-out-the vote rally/training session weren't concerned at all about those who hadn't made up their minds. More than 75 walkers - organized by the non-profit, non-partisan Alliance of Local Leaders for Education, Registration and Turnout (ALLERT) - instead studied computerized walk sheets at its Mid-City headquarters in search of its main target: "occasional" voters, or those who don't participate in every election, but will vote when reminded and encouraged.
California isn't a battleground state, but many of the walkers come from what can be called battleground neighborhoods, those scarred by official neglect and where the day-to-day can be a struggle. And they wanted to tell their neighbors that their votes are important. "Occasional" voters tend to support socially progressive policy, while those who never miss an election tend to vote more conservatively.
"I can't do anything about the presidency, but I can make sure my neighborhood has proper management and assistance," said Bettye Draughan, who has lived near 90th Street and Normandie Avenue - "an area that really needs help" - for 45 years.
"I like to have myself educated and to go out and teach other people about what's really going on in the community," said Sophia Holley, who has done get-out-the-vote (or GOTV, as the jargon goes) in many other elections. But her 20-year-old son, Kevin Williams, had never gone door-to-door talking with potential voters. "I am nervous," he admitted shyly, "but I'm here with moms, she's leading me the right way. I hope other people get the image of what we're doing right now."
The ALLERT headquarters had the energy of a kicked-over anthill, though training sessions were orderly as participants broke into small groups and went over the instructions and the arguments on two ballot measures. ALLERT is non-partisan, but did take positions on two ballot measures - yes on Proposition 66, the initiative to amend Three Strikes, and yes on Prop. 72, which would oblige medium-sized and large businesses to pay for their employees' health insurance. The two issues directly affect many in the neighborhoods - blue-collar and evenly split between African-American and Latino - that ALLERT has targeted over seven election cycles.
The effort was replicated that day at six other ALLERT-organized sites in Echo Park, Pico-Union, and other neighborhoods that usually suffer from low turnout. The goal for all of them is to reach 20,000 occasional voters.
"We just did an analysis of the last set of election cycles, to see if what we're doing is making any difference," said Anthony Thigpenn, the organizing veteran who founded ALLERT, sitting in a sparsely furnished office away from the Saturday morning GOTV hubbub. "It basically demonstrated that there's an 8-to-16 percent increase in voter turnout among occasional voters that participated in our program versus people who didn't."
Thigpenn is focused on building long-term power for a constituency that's usually disenfranchised - aided by $345,000 from the Liberty Hill Foundation, which allotted the money to 11 groups - by registering and mobilizing 50,000 new voters.
L.A. County also has a host of short-term campaign efforts aimed at boosting the turnout totals among occasional voters. The California Democratic Party is hard at work targeting them, said Mary Gutierrez, a spokeswoman for the Every Vote Counts Campaign, the Democratic Party's GOTV operation. The Dems have set a goal of getting out an astounding half-million occasional voters, 250,000 of them in Los Angeles, which would bring the total Democratic turnout in L.A. County up to 3 million. The Republican Party has 30 GOTV centers set up to mobilize the 1.25 million registered in their party in the county.
Gutierrez said there have been discussions of how to keep the infrastructure intact between elections. But ALLERT has already done that through seven election cycles. The difference this year, said Solomon Rivera, deputy political director and field director for Every Vote Counts, is that campaign finance reform laws now mean that there can be absolutely no coordination between ALLERT and the Democrats. "Things are settling into a new configuration," said Rivera.
All totaled, the 11 groups funded by Liberty Vote (including ALLERT and the Los Angeles Coalition to End Hunger and Homelessness, which registered people on the visitors line at L.A. County jail) plus the Democratic Party GOTV and other efforts, could get some 500,000 people out to vote who otherwise would be disinclined to participate without an extra push - many of them raising families and working two jobs, as Thigpenn describes the target voters.
But not all of this L.A.-based effort is focused on local issues. Angelenos sweating the national outcome of the presidential election are being welcomed as GOTV workers in nearby states. George Bush won Nevada by 20,000 votes in 2000. The state has seen a demographic shift over the past several years as Californians flee a cost of living squeezed by housing and gas prices, plus the state's Latino population has exploded (up 272 percent between 1992 and 2002). Both trends have changed the electoral calculus enough to put the state up for grabs in the national contest, attracting California activists.
"You have a lot of groups just pouring into the state," said Javier Gonzalez, political director of Service Employees International Union 1877, which organizes janitors in L.A. and has fielded a contingent of 30 people. The organization Americans Coming Together (ACT) provides an infrastructure for the GOTV operation, Gonzalez explained. "We're sending about 70 percent of our staff at the end of this week, and other unions are doing the same," he said. Gonzalez said that union staff and activists were also going to Arizona, where voters must decide on a ballot initiative similar to California's infamous Prop. 187 - which would have blocked undocumented residents from access to public health care and schools. In an unusual alliance with labor, the business community there opposes it.
But Nevada is the mother lode, teetering on the brink of going Democratic, and ACT, called the biggest independent voter contact organization ever, is bringing an unprecedented get-out-the-vote effort to bear in the state. "If everybody hits their target, there will be thousands of people out on the street on Election Day," said spokesman Kevin Griffis.
Members of such organizations as Planned Parenthood and the Sierra Club, which have made the defeat of George Bush a priority, joined in precinct work under the ACT umbrella for the voter mobilization effort in Nevada. And California chapters have sent members.
The presumed beneficiary of all this effort is the Democratic Party, which has chipped in a few walkers. One of those is Danielle Valentino. And she is no political naïf - she's a staffer for Democratic Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez. She's only walked precincts in a presidential election once before, but has certainly never driven several hours out of state to do so. Valentino recently walked precincts in Las Vegas with a Nevada woman who had never done such a thing, but was now worried about the direction of the country.
Voters on her walks responded, Valentino said, when she told them: "'I drove all the way from California to talk to you for just two minutes.' They'd think - if you drove all the way here, maybe there is some information I should get." She knows she changed some minds by the personal contact. "They were genuinely listening, genuinely looking for information."Published: 10/21/2004
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