Left Atlanta at 5PM and somehow avoided rush hour traffic while hearing on the radio that Atlanta was voted #1 for traffic by Forbes magazine. Made pretty good time to Asheville until I got pulled over for speeding, just prior to heading up a mountain where speeding would have been impossible! $150 smackers, ouch! Arrived in Ashveille around 8:15 just in time to make the tail end of a Cinco de Mayo party that was being held for Rep. Susan Fisher.
My cousin Beth Trigg is a political activist in these parts and she was the campaign manager for Rep. Fisher, so that's how I knew about the shindig. It looked like it had been a lot of fun too! Her husband John made all the food from local fresh produce, and they had well over 300 people in attendance. Great white sangria too! I got to finally meet some NC CampaignWindow clients too! Shout out to Richard and Kathy Sinclair with the Buncombe County Dems and also to Blue Century!
Saturday I arrived at the local Asheville Hillary HQ! It's in a cute bungalow just minutes from where I'm staying with my cousin Mary Trigg, and in the heart of downtown Asheville. On my way up, I wondered if I'd see Carol Cross, an Atlanta volunteer whom I ran into in Houston. Sure enough, when I opened the door, I saw Carol by the window! I brought in a box of leftover chum we had in Georgia, which was met with tons of thanks as apparently they were out/running low. The 3 rolls of stickers was especially welcome, as they had none, as well as the small stack of bumper stickers. They were also running low on rally signs, so our nice stack was put to good use! They started immediately unrolling lengths of the stickers to divvy up to volunteers. At 10AM, we were joined by Congressman Marion Berry of Ark. who gave us a great pep talk before we hit the streets!
We teamed up and took rally signs down to Black Mountain to an early voting location there to do visibility. Man it was windy and cold! But we stuck it out and waved to folks going by, etc. Judging by the thumbs ups we were getting, this seems to be Hillary land! There was one enthusiastic voter who arrived bringing her elderly mother to vote for Hillary and just when we left, she pulled up again and said "I'm bringing another!" which I'm assuming she meant another voter and not another mom :-)
For a short while, we were joined by some Obama supporters who had a "Bark for Barack" sign with dogs, but they only stayed for about 1/2 hour. Thought it was a great idea though:
Early voting ended at 1PM, but it started to rain around 12:30 so we packed up. Back at HQ we ran into fellow Atlanta for Hillary volunteers Rachel Rosenblatt and Victoria Kingsland and we headed down the street to a wonderful bakery for lunch, City Bakery Cafe, where I had an awesome Turkey, Brie and Apple Pannini, mmm....
Rachel, Carol, Victoria, and I, plus a volunteer from TN, were given targeted female voters in Hendersonville to go talk to, so we packed into my Element and headed south to Hendersonville! Luckily Carol had a portable GPS that we could use, which made this so much easier. We developed a system where I dropped of 2 in one street, dropped the other 2 on another and circle back to pick the first 2 to another street. We had to do it this way instead of walking the neighborhood because the list would typically only have 1 or 2 houses on a street to hit. Most of the women we were able to reach were Hillary supporters and we were able to talk at least one undecided into supporting Hillary! We also got several who needed to be called back about where their polling location was.
We stopped by the local Hendersonville HQ, which seemed to all of us to be what we pictured a small-town campaign HQ to look like!
Back in Asheville, we grabbed some homemade dinner brought in by some local supporters, which also included a native plant I'd never heard of: Ramps -- an onion looking herb that tastes like garlic? I'd broought my own printer and we decided to make a 1/4 sheet flyer for a free midnight movie event the campaign was doing, so we hooked up my laptop and printer, sat on the floor and typed and printed the puppy out; ventured to a nearby Staples to print off a bunch and cut them up!
We then headed to Pack Place downtown to do visibility and hand out the movie flyers, which was a ton of fun! We got lots of honks and waves, though by around 10PM we got our first "moon".
Am now at the Asheville office while Bill Clinton is in Marion giving a speech, waiting on marching orders (we're waiting for church to let out).
UPDATE: A family just arrived bringing some homemade Hillary cupcakes!
.jpg)
