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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Despite the fruitless search for many of the people on their list (and one curt rebuff from a Bush supporter), their quest may have helped nudge a few votes to Kerry. Retired electrician James Preston remained undecided, but reports of the debate (which he had inadvertently slept through) impressed him. "We are at war," he said. "No matter what the economy is, this country's at war. But I actually think Bush got us into it, and I don't approve of how he did it. He should have consulted with other nations." Ninety-two-year-old Evelyn Kluever, on the other hand, was enthusiastically for Kerry, even though she thought he should fight back harder against Bush. And she was hopeful that Arthur -- her more taciturn live-in partner, a retired union member leaning toward Bush -- had been swayed toward Kerry.
Kevin Mahnke, a foundry worker and union member, aptly characterized the conflicting pulls from each campaign. "Before the debate, I kind of had my mind made up [for Bush], but afterwards I wasn't so sure," he said, standing in front of his apartment door, decorated with a "Support Our Troops" poster. Mahnke, 46, has tended to vote more Republican in recent elections (though he supported Ross Perot in 1992), reversing his youthful preference for Democrats. While he strongly disapproves of abortion, opposes gun control, distrusts the United Nations and didn't like President Clinton, he is deeply angry about the jobs being shipped overseas, wants an alternative energy plan to cut our dependence on oil, and has turned against Bush's tax cuts. "It seems to me the greedier are getting greedier," he said. "These tax cuts sounded good, but it didn't trickle down. It trickled up."
He is torn about the war in Iraq. In the debate, he was irritated by Bush's smirking, stuttering, "cowboy" manner and was impressed that Kerry seemed to have a plan for Iraq. "We're there, and things are starting to look bad," Mahnke said. "You've got to have an exit plan. I don't think George is thinking properly." But he still leans ever so slightly to Bush, he said, as Morton handed him a detailed comparison of the two candidates on the issues and promised to stay in touch.
The next morning, Republican Brandon Rosner, a 24-year-old engineer who ran an energetic but ultimately losing campaign for the Milwaukee City Council last spring, was out in the same neighborhoods, pursuing people thought to lean Republican but with "spotty voting records." He had prepared scripts, tailored to what the campaign thought were each voter's concerns. The first, reinforced by a leaflet handed to everyone, focused on social issues -- abortion, gay marriage, judicial conservatism; the second, on taxes; and the third, on an upbeat but generic account of the president's actions on healthcare and the economy. The first two voters Rosner encountered -- a building maintenance engineer and a Teamster truck driver -- said they were solidly pro-Bush, mainly because they supported Bush's military action in Iraq.
The next pursuit was Rich Gillard, a steelworker forced into early retirement when his employer shifted production that had once employed more than 2,000 workers to Brazil and China. A Rush Limbaugh ditto-head and avid follower of Fox News, Gillard abandoned the Democrats for Ronald Reagan, then switched to Perot, and now denounces illegal immigrants, taxes, mosques in the United States, abortion and the liberalism of his college-educated kids. He loves the PATRIOT Act and is willing to let anyone search his house and even look for the guns he keeps. He's largely resigned to the closing of factories as inevitable, though he owes his early pension to the work of his union, which sees Bush as a deadly threat to organized labor. But he does not see Kerry as an alternative. "What good have the Democrats done?" he asked. "Who was the guy who instigated NAFTA? Clinton."
The "lazy Republican" list included a few clinkers. Germaine Jahn, 77, a retired accountant, voted for Bush last time but will not now. "I don't like the man," she said. "I don't like what he's done to the economy. He hasn't done anything good. This time I'm going back to the Democrats." And who knows how Donald Lyons, 64, ended up on Rosner's list. The machinist had to scramble for seven years to get a job that paid close to the one he lost in 1990 when his employer moved out of the country. "The man has no foreign policy," Lyons said of Bush. "The economy is worthless. There's nothing for the middle class. He's killing us, all for tax breaks for people making over $500,000."
Ever the optimist, Rosner figures his visit will at least help clean up the list for the next election by removing the Lyons household. Over the course of the morning, he had handed out two absentee ballot applications. "There might be two more votes for the president," he said. "That makes my day."
Two years ago, Republicans launched a final 72-hour get-out-the-vote effort in Wisconsin and other states after seeing that Democrats often outperformed them in the preelection polls on Election Day. "Now the polls have us up quite a bit," said one Bush campaign strategist in Wisconsin, "but I think it's a lot closer. I think it will be the ground game -- who can motivate their base and turn them out -- that will decide it. What we've been doing the whole time is talking with undecideds: Are you pro-life? Do you hunt? Are you concerned about national security?"
