THE CAMPAIGN
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Just a couple of hours ago I touched down in Peru to begin Gap Year Pt. II-
BC Meets South America. As I will be blogging for that section of my year, I will use this first post to share Gap Year Pt. I- The Campaign.
I’d say my gap year officially began a week after Camp ended. On August 25th, I started my internship at the New Hampshire Democratic Party where I specifically worked with the Maggie Hassan for Senate Campaign. My job varied day to day but I will share my three most time consuming tasks: donor research, visibility, and sign assembly. Donor research meant going through lists of names and researching an individual’s donating history and party allegiances. We were the first step in determining whether the Governor should contact potential donors personally to raise funds for the campaign. The latter two jobs were the main focus of the final 5ish weeks of the campaign. Visibility meant being the advance team for the Governor at a debates, events, and forums. That consisted of standing with several 4x8 foot Maggie Hassan signs, and several more totems (sticks with signs on them), and cheering hard for Maggie when she arrived. While not the most enlightening task, visibility gave me the opportunity to tour the state and I got to travel to North Conway, Hanover, Portsmouth, Manchester and more (for those that don’t know, those places are far away from each other for a small state). Yard sign assembly was exactly what it sounds like. This rigorous task entailed taking metal posts and sliding them into plastic yard signs. I am proud to say that if you saw a Maggie Hassan yard sign I had something like a 30% chance of having made it. One time we got creative, carved out a Maggie Hassan 4x8 into a large stencil, and then spray painted a tarp with Maggie logos. Though cool looking, the tarp was much less ubiquitous across the state than were the countless yard signs.
These tasks, and several others, were made enjoyable for me by the company of two fellow interns, Will the Brit, and Andrew from St. A’s. Together we guessed that we made at least 8,000 signs, and with Will I also had the pleasure of exploring New Hampshire’s capital city of Concord. There is another shout-out I must make to two
lovely, incredible people that made working in NH possible: Carol and Gary. Carol and Gary kindly opened their doors and hosted me in Concord. More than that, they welcomed me into their family, invited me to their lakehouse, and made me feel at home. I cannot thank them enough and am so lucky to now have such a welcoming family in Concord.
Back to the New Hampshire experience. While the day to day was not always riveting there were some awesome perks to living in NH. From a political point of view, NH offereted both an engaged constituency and many political visits. I luckily got to attend several impassioned rallies where Vice President Biden, or Hillary Clinton and Senator Warren, or Senator Shaheen helped to promote Secretary Clinton, Governor Hassan, and Congresswomen Shea-Porter and Kuster. From a nature point of view, living in NH gave me the chance to work for a weekend at a local farm (with Zoe), go on a stunning climbing trip to Rumney (with friends I met at my rock gym), and hike down Franconia Ridge with Dan (a friend from home who is currently taking a gap year). On a side note, I also started cooking- a fun activity that has the wonderful benefit of giving
you a delicious meal in the end.
Now for the moment you have all been waiting for. The Senatorial race results. Every poll leading up to the election had shown a tight race so we always knew election night was going to be long. But no one would have guessed that election night-in other words the results- would continue late into the next day. At 11 am on November 9th, with her visibility team around her, Governor Hassan announced victory with only one-tenth of one percent of the vote separating the Governor and Senator Ayotte. Therefore, we were all expecting the Ayotte campaign to call for a recount. You can imagine our excitement therefore when 6 hours later Senator Ayotte conceded. We won! We won by just 1019 votes!
In other words, it’s pretty clear to me that every one of those 8,000 yard signs and that one single spray-painted tarp made the difference.
I finished up in New Hampshire on that good note and am proud to have been a part of a campaign that helped to make New Hampshire the first state to send an all-female all-Democratic delegation to Washington. Congrats NH, and Senator-elect Hassan!
Stay tuned for my adventures in Peru, BC Meets South America, by following this blog!
PS. This is my first blog attempt and it is on my phone thus I implore you to forgive the typos, formatting errors, and or general nonesense that might be included above. If there is a part you do not like in what I’ve written please feel free to include that under the category of general nonesense and then follow anyway :)
