SWING STATE slide show click here
New Hampshire is a “swing state” in the 2008 US presidential elections, and symbolically important to both candidates, especially John McCain, who won it in the primaries. While it has only four electoral votes, it also boasts the first place it is possible to vote in a regular Election Day: tiny Hart’s Location, population 28, most of whom are likely to vote just after midnight on November 4th.
Conway, at the center of Carroll County, is a rural community in the heart of the White Mountains, with an older population, and there has been a stark contrast between the Democratic and Republican strategies for getting out the vote.
The Obama campaign’s ongoing, technology-driven attempt to convince New Hampshire voters to go Democrat has impressed Conway, to say the least. With up-to-date techniques, paid staffers from the national effort, and a large volunteer force, they have put into place what Conway Town Chair and Democrat Dave Robinson called a “city” organization, with visibility events, sign waves, literature drops, and 24/7 monitoring of the “get-out-the-vote” plan.
The McCain campaign, on the other hand, has taken a different tack, with “victory offices” in major New Hampshire cities, but little representation here in Conway. Just across the street, the Carroll County Republican Committee office is housed in the lobby of the Majestic Theater. It has a single telephone and no computers, and in fact was closed on two visits, even on Saturday night three days before the election. Volunteers are friendly, but hard to find – they pencil themselves in on a desk calendar, and there is a lonely donation basket beneath a printout of the 9/11 rescue workers raising the flag Iwo Jima-style at Ground Zero. One can wander in, pick up a sign or two, and go back out without much of an interaction.
That these efforts are just across the street from each other in small-town Conway is fitting, it seems, to the life-and-death, “red-state, blue-state” mind-set Americans seem to have gotten themselves into. It remains to be seen whether the desultory Republican effort here will complement the predicted last-minute, “72 hour” thrust toward Election Day, but if the election is to go to the candidate that has been better-organized, and has the energy, it will have to go to Obama...
Full set of images available November 2nd. SWING STATE slide show click here
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