Blog: Philadelphia

The next morning it was off to win the battleground state of Pennsylvania for John Kerry. ACT assignes us to assist their operation in rich, Democratic Lower Merion, home of Bryn Mawr and Haverford colleges, among others. We arrived at the ACT operation, located in a gymnasium on the grounds of Bryn Mawr college, and received our assignments - walk the streets of one of the local precincts, knocking on doors and dropping literature.

I volunteered to be the van driver and took our group out to their routes. All along the streets were teams holding "Honk for Kerry" signs, and in this area huge numbers of drivers honked. When I got back to the ACT headquarters to drive other teams, I found the gymnasium entirely packed. Many buses had arrived from New York full of volunteers. The parking lot looked like the Port Authority, with many vans that have Port Authority gate numbers painted on them commandeered to help in the effort.

Since ACT was mobbed, after we finished our routes we went to the local Kerry-Edwards office to help them. They had us holding signs outside Lower Merion High School where we received countless honks. We got so many that a neighbor, who had "Doctors for Bush" signs on his fence, asked us (very nicely) to stop. We could understand that all the honking did indeed make the neighborhood irritatingly loud, so we finished up some door to door canvassing and met a few commuter trains.

Lower Merion, though, was already hugely Democratic and almost everyone had voted. In fact, many people were getting annoyed by the number of times they had been contacted by canvassers, phone bankers, and others. Thinking our energy might be better spent elsewhere, we found some organizers from MoveOn who needed help in a neighborhood in West Philadelphia. They were walking the streets to make sure everyone voted, and we arrived in time to help them for the last hour before the polls closed. Almost everyone we spoke to had voted, but it was very invigorating.