Monday, June 11, 2012

Election Day in Wisconsin (5 of ?): Walker voters.

I met 2 Walker voters -

1) This (perky) (white) mom with a little girl who answered the door at a nice house in an otherwise rundown neighborhood.  She was confused about who we were canvassing for, and it seems like she was doing a million different things, but then she said she was voting for the governor... 

At that point me and the other volunteer (who was with me since we only had 3 houses left for that shift and were doing them together) left shaking our heads - why would any mom vote for a politician like that?

There was a huge contrast with the much lower class (white) mom who lived a few blocks over and was just irate at Scott Walker's name.

2) This one dad who came back to the house at like 7:45pm when I was checking to see if the 18y.o. (white) daughter would vote, she was the only person who I had discovered hadn't voted in my 2.5 hours in the (almost entirely) (black) neighborhood in Racine that I was in. 

The daughter had answered the door, and she said everyone in her house had voted except her and maybe her brother who was there with his girlfriend, and so I talked with her about the candidates, and she got him too, and it turned out that he had already voted.   She seemed anti-Walker, and said she would go to the polls (which were 2 blocks from her house), and this was around 7:30pm.

So, I come back at 7:45pm, and her dad is unloading groceries and taking them in through the front door, and he just gets *pissed* when he sees me coming.

"Do you know how many of those things have been left at my house?", he was like, gesturing to my canvassing literature.

(Republicans always make a property rights argument, about why people who disagree with them shouldn't knock on their door.)

He also started going off about how Democrats were going to take away his pension (? - because Walker, you know, is totally not going to eff over the middle class in order to give tax breaks to billionaires).

When he went in with the groceries, I asked the 18y.o. what she thought, as she smoked on the porch with her friend (which was odd - they were both clean-looking kids, and you wouldn't expect them to smoke!), and she said she was still deciding but would go vote, and so I just left, since I knew she would put stuff off and wouldn't go to the polls.

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