Life of Wry

Did I mention the con man president made a visit to Sacramento yesterday (Monday) to meet with Governor Newsom and hear about the California fires? Way too little, way too late… these fires have been raging for a month. And I can assure you, his visit had nothing to do with his compassion for the people who’ve lost lives, or property, or livelihoods. Nothing to do with his concern for our forests or charred hillsides. Nothing to do with his understanding of the impacts of climate change. Frankly, I don’t know why he came, but I do know it was a calculated political move. He does nothing that does not benefit him in some way. Like nothing.

I imagine most of us in SisterDistrictIndivisibleYolo world had heard about the Monday presidential visit when it was announced on Saturday. By early Sunday morning, a couple of folks had decided we should do something about it.. some kind of protest? Some kind of online event? Some kind of political action? Emails flew. By mid morning, we decided it would be a big, giant — as giant as we could make it — phonebank; Rachel had prepared a detailed to-do list, and by midday, the Comms Team was done with its work — a name for the event, accompanying graphics, calendar notice, Facebook event notice, social media promotion, blurbs for e-newsletters. Good work Comms Team! For the next 24 hours, a team of folks got to work in countless other ways to plan for said big, giant phonebank. A trizillion details later, we carried off this event.

Which went off without a hitch and was an enormous success.

For the last six months or so, our phonebanks — we host five per week — were chugging away at about 6-8 attendees per. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Then, based on some compelling stats about the value of direct voter contacts, we shifted our attention and most of our Comms Team focus to promoting phonebanks. We have always known that direct voter contacts were effective, but with Covid and face-to-face canvassing out, phone calls became the next best thing.

By last week — due to the Comms Team efforts and a new intra-org texting platform that allowed our Text Team to bug our entire volunteer base with texts to their phones — we were starting to see 2o to 35 folks showing up for phonebanks. Which has been phenomenal.

But Trump’s self-serving visit really awakened the bear. Everyone, even phonebank-averse volunteers, loved the idea of showing their disdain by attending our SAC TRUMP phonebank and calling thousands of critical voters in swing states to make sure they vote for Joe Biden. Which we did in record numbers.

We set a goal of 2020 calls. We made over 2600!

So there! Do come again.