The severed deer head tossed Oct. 27 into the parking lot of a Colorado Springs headquarters for Barack Obama may be the nastiest tale from Colorado’s 2008 campaign trail, but volunteers and campaign workers have no shortage of stories to share.
Returning from canvassing door to door, someone will begin, “You won’t believe this. . . .”
That’s the cue for the others to look up from the phone banks, the snaking cords of cellphones and laptop computers recharging on crowded power strips and far too many abandoned cups half-full of cold coffee.
“I can’t think of an election like this, ever,” said Sigrid Freese, who was a few weeks too young to vote in the 1960 election. Freese, a Democratic Party stalwart, has worked local polling places for more than 22 years, including this year, as a supervising judge.
She loves the stories she’s hearing about how the 2008 presidential campaign has re- animated disillusioned and loyal voters, and galvanized candidates, some who have their own anecdotes about the campaign front.
Jefferson County commissioner candidate Jason Bane loves telling people that his second-grade teacher, Pat Richardson, and his third-grade teacher, Jeri Rogers, are stumping for his campaign.
“They are great (and hilarious) at the door, talking about what I was like in second and third grades at Peiffer (Elementary),” Bane said.
“They swear you can tell how someone will turn out as an adult at that age, which I think is really interesting. My third-grade teacher called me months ago when she saw that I was running and said that she tells people I will be great because I was smart and honest as a third-grader.”
Rogers confirmed that, but noted she schools herself to keep on-topic, omitting the story of the year that Bane dressed as an angel for the mayor’s Christmas party.
Possibly she was unaware that costumes figure heavily in the campaign strategy of the progressive voter registration nonprofit New Era Colorado, which adopted costumes to attract attention on the last day to register to vote, and again on Halloween.
On Halloween, their Trick Or Vote canvassers were out in force, including a contingent dressed as “Clue” characters. It may have been the first time Professor Plum and Col. Mustard personally identified the locations of neighborhood polling places.
With a list of 60 addresses, Stevi Quate went canvassing in north Denver to sign up voters.
A little intimidated because it was her maiden canvassing trip, and “feeling very nervous about invading people’s Sunday afternoon,” Quate was surprised by the enthusiastic welcome from a 40-something woman who confessed that she had never voted.
Walking on to the next address on the list, she heard someone running after her.
“Are you registering people to vote?” the woman asked after chasing her down. She led Quate to an apartment where she and her adult son were spending the afternoon.
“It was the first election for both the mother and the son,” Quate said, “even though she was certainly old enough to have voted many times before.”
Dolores St. John, along with her son, daughter and two grandsons ages 2 and 4, were going door-to-door to encourage voters to sign up — and, they hoped, vote for Obama.
Walking toward the next address on their list, they saw a man in a wheelchair sitting in the yard. He spotted them, too, and didn’t like what he saw.
“He jumped out of the wheelchair and ran into the house,” St. John said.
“We thought that was pretty funny. How badly does a person not want to talk to us?”
They knocked on the door anyway.
