{"id":10217,"date":"2009-10-06T15:51:20","date_gmt":"2009-10-06T15:51:20","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2009-10-06T15:51:20","modified_gmt":"2009-10-06T15:51:20","slug":"stepping-out-of-my-comfort-zone-in-the-real-maine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/2009\/10\/06\/stepping-out-of-my-comfort-zone-in-the-real-maine\/","title":{"rendered":"Stepping Out of My Comfort Zone in the “Real Maine”"},"content":{"rendered":"

BANGOR – “Welcome to the real Maine,” said Regional Field Organizer Gabi B\u00e9rub\u00e9 as I arrived yesterday at the “No on 1”<\/a> office in Brewer, just across the Penobscot River from Bangor.  That’s what Mainers up here call their part of the state, and it’s where I am spending the rest of my time on the campaign.  I asked to go to Bangor because I wanted to help our field effort in more challenging places, after “No on 8” spent too much time last year preaching to the choir.  The Bangor office covers everything north and east of here – in other words, two-thirds of the state’s land mass.  Replicating Howard Dean’s 50 State Strategy, “No on 1” believes we have gay marriage supporters everywhere – and it’s our challenge to organize them.  But we’re also targeting the University of Maine in Orono, whose 11,000 students make it the largest college in the state.  Mobilizing young people on campus – and turning out identified supporters in rural areas – will prevent us from getting creamed in northern Maine, which will help us win statewide.<\/p>\n

Last year, “No on 8” had an office in the Castro – which made sense, because they could get a lot of walk-in volunteers.  But the campaign never had them engage voters outside of San Francisco, instead stupidly having them wave signs at street corners.  Meanwhile, LGBT activists in the Central Valley were ignored and under-utilized – prompting a mass rally in Fresno<\/a> on May 31st to kick off the movement to repeal Prop 8.  If our side simply writes off those who live in conservative areas, how can we deserve to get a single vote there?<\/p>\n

I’m not asking to be sent to the outer reaches of Arostook County – but Bangor appealed to me as a marginal area with enough voters to decide this election.  With a population of 30,000, it is the second largest city in Maine (third if you count Lewiston-Auburn as one city.)  It has a “small town” vibe, where many residents don’t lock their doors.  Bangor has a vocal LGBT community, but it currently has no gay bars – and the 1984 murder of Charlie Howard<\/a> in the Kenduskeag Stream still haunts that community’s consciousness.<\/p>\n

I came up from Portland yesterday morning, on a two-hour drive that took me through the most gorgeous fall colors I have ever seen.  I would have taken more time, but Gabi had asked me to arrive in Bangor around 12:00 noon.  She had to leave at 1:00 p.m. sharp for Washington County (also called “Sunrise County,” because it’s the easternmost part of Maine) to run a phone-bank in Machias – and wouldn’t be back until very late that night.  When I heard she was driving 83 miles on a two-lane road to go supervise ten volunteers, I was floored.  But that’s what it takes to do campaign organizing in the “real Maine.”<\/p>\n

Just like Howard Dean’s 50 State Strategy showed Democrats they can start winning if they competed everywhere, “No on 1” has identified marriage equality supporters in the most conservative pockets.  Even if we still lose those areas badly, mining enough votes by encouraging supporters to “vote early” can pay dividends on Election Day.  As I wrote yesterday<\/a>, Maine’s gay community had a 20-year losing streak of statewide ballot measures until 2005.  One of the strategies we changed that year was to start engaging conservative regions.<\/p>\n

But working from the Bangor office won’t always be about driving for hours to meet ten volunteers.  The University of Maine is in Orono (about 15 minutes away), and same-day voter registration means we can generate a huge turnout for marriage equality on campus.  I met up with the four campus organizers yesterday afternoon, who had spent the whole morning doing volunteer recruitment.  Before they had to stop because of the rain, they had signed up 84 students to a shift.  They are organizing phone-banks on campus, and we discussed more outreach strategies.  I’ll be spending some of my time there.<\/p>\n

It’s important, however, to realize the challenge “No on 1” organizers are facing in this area.  On Sunday night, I was at a phone-bank in Portland – with over 50 volunteers that required an overflow room.  Even if you take out the twenty volunteers who had come “from away”<\/a>, we had 30 Portland residents making calls.  Last night, I was at a volunteer recruitment phone-bank on the outskirts of Bangor and only four people showed up.  The good news, however, is that pretty much everyone we called and spoke to committed to a volunteer shift later in the week – as we conveyed the urgency of mobilizing early voting.<\/p>\n

This is actually the second time I’ve been to Maine.  The first time was in the summer of 2000, when I did a 28-state road trip after college.  I set out to do the entirety of Route 1 on the East Coast – which goes all the way to Key West, Florida.  That meant I would go to Maine, and drive up to Fort Kent in Arostook County – at the very northern tip of the state.  Before going, a lot of Mainers told me I was crazy – telling me that all I would find up there is “moose and woods and French people.”  I doubt that I’ll be going back to Fort Kent this time – but it’s exciting to be working out of the “No on 1” office for this region.<\/p>\n

EDITOR’S NOTE: Paul Hogarth is the Managing Editor of Beyond Chron, San Francisco’s Alternative Online Daily, where this piece was first published<\/a>.  He is helping to run Travel for Change<\/a>, which helps bring out-of-state volunteers to Maine with money and donated airline miles for the “No on 1” campaign.  Hopefully later today, the site will launch “Drive for Equality” to organize carpools in East Coast states for day and weekend trips to Maine. Stay tuned …<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BANGOR – “Welcome to the real Maine,” said Regional Field Organizer Gabi B\u00e9rub\u00e9 as I arrived yesterday at the “No on 1”<\/a> office in Brewer, just across the Penobscot River from Bangor.  That’s what Mainers up here call their part of the state, and it’s where I am spending the rest of my time on the campaign.  I asked to go to Bangor because I wanted to help our field effort in more challenging places, after “No on 8” spent too much time last year preaching to the choir.  The Bangor office covers everything north and east of here – in other words, two-thirds of the state’s land mass.  Replicating Howard Dean’s 50 State Strategy, “No on 1” believes we have gay marriage supporters everywhere – and it’s our challenge to organize them.  But we’re also targeting the University of Maine in Orono, whose 11,000 students make it the largest college in the state.  Mobilizing young people on campus – and turning out identified supporters in rural areas – will prevent us from getting creamed in northern Maine, which will help us win statewide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":125,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1608],"tags":[7925,537,7904,7917,1203],"class_list":["post-10217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1608","tag-7925","tag-537","tag-7904","tag-7917","tag-1203"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pvhz-2EN","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/125"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10217\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}