Sometime around 2 p.m. on Election Day, one of the head honchos at Obama headquarters announced that our turnout was way down across Ohio.
People, he said. As of right now, we are losing Ohio. We are losing this election.
Amalie, a friend of mine who was in the office at the time, told me that within minutes, the staff was literally weeping. And these were not folks prone to melodrama. They’re some of the toughest, nose-to-the-grindstone, focus-on-the-task-at-hand-and-ignore-the-doubters people I’d ever met.
I was at a staging area a few blocks away when I heard the news, along with maybe a half dozen others, and I swear, by the body language, you would have thought the election had just been called for John McCain.
It wasn’t hard for me to believe turnout was down. My morning job had been to monitor the polling locations in Ward 8 — there are 10 of them — to make sure there were no problems. The longest line I’d seen was maybe twenty minutes. At the poll on Shatto — where two of our targeted precincts voted — people were getting in and out in 15 minutes.
I quick texted our voluteer coordinator to ask her whether it was really that bad. She confirmed the reports (I blogged about it later: “My Obama Minute: Ohio, Midday Report“), but she texted back: “Keep fighting.”
What followed was a kind of determination that you rarely see. At the staging area, I overheard a phone conversation, a volunteer calling her husband: We are losing this election. Get off work and get out canvassing, now. Amalie called her husband and asked him to start knocking on neighbor’s doors. Her message: Drag them to the polls if necessary. My wife, Marcella, and mother-in-law, Maggie, redoubled their efforts, determined to knock on as many doors as possible. It was as if this small band of canvassers in Akron had early warning that the Obama campaign might be going down to defeat, and had put the entire thing on their shoulders. What are you still standing there for?
I phoned my uncle Jon and aunt Barbara. Jon suggested the announcement might just have been a tactic, to motivate the staff. Or, maybe, so many of our voters had come out early, so the predictions were off.
That didn’t make sense to me, though. All across the state, she’d said, the lines in the suburbs were long, the lines and the cities were non-existent. It wasn’t just that our numbers were low — theirs were high.
I went back to one of the neighborhoods I’d canvassed the prior weekend, this time, nearly running from door-to-door, breathing hard, trying to find someone — anyone — who was home, who hadn’t yet voted. Mostly, I came up empty. A few told me they’d already voted Obama. A few wasn’t enough.
What’s the response? I thought. If we lose — what’s next?
Sometime around 4, Marcella and Maggie peeled off, to go drive someone to the polls. (Read Marcella’s account of what happened here.) I went to check a few more polling locations. Each one, more quiet than the next. Our targeted precinct: dead. Where were our damn voters?
It was getting dark. I got a Starbucks (free — on Election Day), then met up with Marcella and Maggie in a neighborhood off White Pond, a few quiet blocks of tree-lined streets without sidewalks, mostly middle-class homes, bordered by train tracks.
I knocked on one door that was cracked open. The kitchen light was on. An Obama hang tag sat on the chopping block. No one came.
I found the next address. Empty house, no one home. Then another. And another. At one home, an elderly woman came to the window, shielded her hands, saw me, and said: “I already voted!” At another, the driveway was packed with cars, the TV was on, every light in the house glowed, and still, no one came.
I met up with Marcella and Maggie on a road that paralleled the tracks — they weren’t having any more luck — and we divvied up the remaining walk sheets. I heard the whistle of a train just then, and, a moment later, a giant locomotive appeared from behind a stand of thin trees, its light boring down on the tracks.
I stopped to watch it.
I stopped, because this train was huge and solid and real, and there were 85 minutes until the polls closed, and I wanted to be alive in a world where there was still a possibility Barack Obama might be president. Standing there — not in a car, behind a wheel, but on the sidewalk, maybe twenty feet away, as the engine slid past – it held me in the moment.
I turned and walked up the block, past a road barrier. It was too hard now to see the street numbers on the homes. I tried a house, anyway. Peered into a living room lit by TV flicker.
No one home. Or, no one coming to the door. No voters left.
It was just a quiet Akron neighborhood, 6:15 p.m. on the night of November 4, 2008. There was still a chance, unrealistic, maybe — and fading fast, like the day – but a chance, that Obama could be elected president.
I was right where I wanted to be.