Making a small difference?

On Saturday, I finally got a little more involved in the politics (as opposed to simply contributing money to campaigns and winding up on 20 ActBlue mailing lists): a friend decided to host a phonebanking session for the day, so I joined in. We had about half a dozen of us making phone calls, and a few more being support staff, which worked nicely: enough to provide some mutual support and collegiality, but not so many as to be really noisy. We collectively decided (more or less on the spur of the moment) to phonebank for Kathy Manning, who is running for Congress in North Carolina, and who looks sensible and decent.

The systems are reasonably well-designed. The session started out with us watching a five-minute how-to video, that was thoroughly cutesy and idiotic (seriously, having a comedian for color commentary is not needed here), but which did hit a bunch of the important high points on how to do the phone effectively. (Including the need to smile. No, they can't see you, but it does make a difference in how you come across vocally.)

We all signed up for the online phonebanking system, which works pretty well, although we found some flaws. It feeds you people, one at a time, showing you all the important information (including, crucially, where their local polling place is). But there were some dumb bugs -- it shows up to four members of the household, and a "More" dropdown if there are more than that, but the dropdown didn't actually work. And you could tell that the data was far from clean: not just a bunch of disconnected numbers, but some "households" that strongly looked like unrelated people that just happened to have put in the same phone number at one time. (And quite a lot who shared the same phone number but not the same polling place, curiously.)

It was both easier and harder, emotionally, than I expected. I didn't hit any problem cases -- I was sincerely nervous about calling an irate Republican by accident (the numbers were pre-screened to be at least plausibly favorable to Manning, but some households were clearly mixed). The people I did talk to were mostly pretty friendly and polite. OTOH, the vast majority of numbers I dialed either didn't pick up or went to voicemail, which got a bit tiring.

Did it actually make a difference? Hard to say. I spoke to several folks who turned out to be strongly pro-Manning and had already voted, who I was able to thank. (Including the lady who happily burbled that her grandchildren were finally old enough to vote, and she had strong-armed them into going and doing so.) A couple of the younger people I talked to were vaguely pointed in the right direction, but knew very little about the race, so I was able to give them more information and an encouraging shove to go vote. At least one woman really knew almost nothing about the election, but reacted quite positively to my description of Manning's views -- enough so that she called me back later, asking for help finding a ride to the polls. (We passed her information on to the local campaign.)

I figure, on balance, that there's a reasonable chance that I added one vote to the tally. Not a huge difference, maybe, but it at least feels like it was worth the effort, and it was a reasonably pleasant afternoon, being productive with friends. Probably worth doing more of, when the next election rolls around...