Hopeful America Votes For Change:
As many of you know, over the last five months, I’ve worked as an organizing fellow and field organizer for the Barack Obama Campaign For Change in Dona Ana County in Southern New Mexico. Throughout this wonderful and intense experience, I have forged many new, close relationships and learned a great deal about myself as an activist and leader. With Tuesday’s triumph, I, along with millions of other Americans, feel an unprecedented sense of joy and hopefulness. Along these lines, the main conclusion that I draw from this campaign and its result is as simple as it is profound: anything is possible. To be sure, working on the campaign has been one of the most meaningful, formative experiences of my life, and I’d like to share with you some of the experiences I had along the way.
In 2004, Dona Ana County went for Democratic Presidential Nominee John Kerry by 2%; in 2008, Dona Ana went for Senator Obama by a resounding 16 point margin. Not only that, but, largely due to the efforts of the Obama field team in the county, as well as effective coordination with other candidates, every single Democrat who contested a race in this year’s election, won, including Congressional candidate Harry Teague, whose victory over Republican challenger Ed Tinsley represents the first victory by a Democrat over a Republican in this race in nearly 30 years. Moreover, due to our aggressive voter registration efforts, the Obama ground team in Dona Ana registered over 1,000 voters in the final two days of the registration period in early October, and was part of a broader effort across the state by the Obama Campaign to register 30,000 voters in a 30 day period, which we exceeded by 5,000. All told, when the networks called New Mexico for Obama on Tuesday night, we had produced an effort that resulted in an entirely blue Congressional delegation, as well as the widest victory margin of any swing-state across the land. Our ground game in Dona Ana County played a vital role in this success.
I also had the privilege of establishing the first presidential campaign field office in the history of Hatch, New Mexico, a small agricultural town at the northern tip of Dona Ana County, famed for its reputation as the green chile capital of the world. Hatch and the surrounding communities of Garfield, Salem, Rhodey, and Derrey, which, when taken together, encompass a larger area known as the Hatch Valley, has a total population of just under 2,000 people. I remember feeling excited when my regional field director, Allison, sent me an e-mail requesting information about the Hatch office for Campaign Manager David Plouffe, who was interested in our efforts because, apparently, Hatch is the smallest municipality in the country to host an Obama field office. Setting up shop in Hatch, I believe, powerfully illustrates the Campaign For Change’s sincere commitment to reaching out to communities not traditionally involved in presidential politics. This, to be sure, played an important role in helping us succeed in New Mexico, as well as other states.
Farm and migrant workers make up the majority of this population, with many undocumented laborers traveling to the valley during chile season to get jobs that others will not take. During my time as an organizer in Hatch, I had the opportunity to speak with several small-scale farmers, who, in the wake of a severe lack of meaningful immigration reform, had had a dickens of a time finding legal labor to tend their crops. At a time when millions of Americans feel a disconnect between their everyday lives and policies enacted by the government, it was powerful for me to see how public policy done right, and wrong, played a meaningful role in Hatch farmers’ lives.
Looking at things from a more day-to-day vantage point, my responsibilities as a field organizer included employing the Obama Campaign’s neighborhood organizing model to build localized teams to optimize voter turnout for Senator Obama in more than 20 Dona Ana County precincts. My ‘turf’ included parts of Northern and Eastern Las Cruces, as well as areas between Las Cruces and the Hatch Valley, which, as mentioned earlier, was also part of my territory. The neighborhood organizing model is based on a method of organization made famous by César Chávez and the United Farm Workers Movement more than forty years ago. The idea is that people working within their neighborhood can communicate a message more powerfully than, say, a television commercial, slam attack advertisement in a newspaper, or critical newspaper article. Some of the tactics my teams and I employed to reach as many voters as possible was holding regular canvasses (or door-knocking), conducting weekly phone banks, as well as doing tabling and holding regular house meetings for undecided voters. Before October 7th, a great deal of my work centered on registering new people to vote. After much work, I can happily conclude that, the neighborhood model, which gives people very specific roles in, and ownership of, a portion of the campaign, represents the most effective method of campaigning that I’ve seen. I feel convinced, no doubt, that this type of model will be utilized by President Obama to mobilize support around many of his initiatives and ideas.
Over the last five months, I’ve had the opportunity to make history, but our work is far from complete. I left my students in Church Rock, New Mexico, to be part of a movement that would change the way people look at, and are affected by, politics and public policy in our country. Now, I will return to Washington, with hopes of being on the front-lines of shaping policy that will create the type of systemic change needed to bring new hope and opportunity to communities like Church Rock and other, similarly situated areas across the country. Immediately, I plan to go to work for the good offices of U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman, a noble lawmakers and true champion for the State of New Mexico. In future, I’d love to work directly for the new administration, particularly within the area of foreign policy. Drawing back to my main conclusion coming out of this election, I know that anything—anything—is possible.
Though our efforts were not perfect and our work far from easy, I feel as though my team in Dona Ana County was part of something upon which future generations will look back and say, ‘that was the moment when the youth of the United States took back its future. It was a time when people of all walks of life stood up and said, ‘we deserve something more, our country is better than this, and now is the time for us to create the change we need’’. What one saw last Tuesday as the television cameras roamed over tearful faces in the audience in Grant Park as President-elect Obama took the stage was an outpouring of emotion from a country that finally decided to take control of its own destiny. Yes, we can- and, yes, we did!
