Massachusetts voters can’t cast a ballot in the presidential primaries until March 1st. But state lines mean nothing to passionate campaign volunteers who are heading up to New Hampshire this weekend ahead of the first-in-the-nation primary.
Carol-Ann Dearnaly is among them.
“I know more about New Hampshire than I do my own neighborhood at this point,” she says.
Dearnaly started campaigning for Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire back in June. She now travels four times a week to Keene, about 40 miles away from her home in Millers Falls, Mass. Dearnaly meets up with a New Hampshire native, they turn on the GPS and make their way around town. With voter lists and scripted questions in hand, they knock on doors.
“They’ve been knocked to death,” Dearnaly says and then starts to laugh. “You literally see people hit the floor to keep from answering the door!”
That reaction is not unique to Clinton volunteers. Diana Allen of Montague, Mass., is campaigning for Bernie Sanders.
If they don’t want to talk to her that’s fine, she says. “I just say, ‘Have a nice day.'”
This is the first time in Allen’s life she’s gone to door -to-door in New Hampshire. Sanders is the first viable candidate she believes in, she says, and she’s taken some of her neighbors multiple times with her to New Hampshire.
Like Allen, some volunteers actually have spare time to leave the comfort of home, and spend a weekend, or more, in the cold Granite State. Volunteer recruitment is key to getting that ground swell of warm bodies willing to tell strangers who to vote for, as state Rep. Ryan Fattman knows. He’s from the Central Massachusetts town of Spencer and is running Marco Rubio’s campaign in the state. And he found out building a grass roots organization requires a lot of work.
“I spent a tremendous amount of time on the phone in July and in August calling through a list of people who had signed up on Senator Rubio’s campaign for president,” Fattman says.
At first, he says, a lot of people weren’t that interested, but Fattman invited them to come up and meet Rubio. Now their ranks are 350 strong, campaigning in Keene, Concord, Durham and farther north. They are teenagers who can’t vote and people in their 80s; some UMass Amherst students are in the mix, and Fattman says one Smith College student.
More than ever, this election has been about the many millions in Super PAC spending. But Jim Lyons, a state representative from Andover who chairs Ted Cruz’ Massachusetts campaign, says volunteers are key to winning over the many undecided New Hampshire voters.
“I go back to the 1980 race, and the fact that grassroots was what brought Ronald Reagan into power and basically changed the direction of this country,” says Lyons. And he adds, the similarities are very real to what he sees happening today.
Volunteers, maybe even more so than paid workers, are the kind of people who want to see change and believe so fervently in a Carly Fiorina or a Ben Carson or a John Kasich, they spend hours and hours working for free.
None of this is new, says Jesse Rhodes, a political scientist at UMass Amherst. Rhodes studies how candidates mobilize volunteers. It’s an enduring theme in U.S. politics, he says, and it goes from the the anti-slavery movement up to the modern conservative movement. In New Hampshire, it gives out-of-state volunteers some sway.
“You can take your advocacy and have a huge effect early in the process,” Rhodes says. “It allows people who otherwise couldn’t feel like they were participating and having an impact on national, presidential politics [to] have an impact in that way.”
Politicians want to get in on the action, too. Congressman Jim McGovern from Worcester is heading to New Hampshire this weekend to campaign for Hillary Clinton. On the Republican side, Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker will endorse Chris Christie.
The New Hampshire push will be over after Tuesday. Even though the South Carolina primary is next, Bay State voters cast ballots March 1st. Maybe it’s time for the volunteers to get back home?