I feel so fortunate that I could help Representative Jared Golden (and our other endorsed candidates) win on Election Day! I was one of 40 Sierra Club organizers across the country who participated in Victory Corps, Sierra Club’s electoral program where organizers work full time with endorsed congressional candidates to get them elected! The Sierra Club’s Political Committee selected key Congressional races to defend a champion in a swing district or work to flip a seat and get a climate champion elected. You can see where we won here.
For one month leading up to Election Day, half of my time was spent organizing our Sierra Club members/supporters to help elect Jared Golden (and our other endorsed candidates); the other half of my time was organizing directly with the Golden campaign. With Sierra Club, I hosted over 16 phonebanking events, and recruited dozens of volunteers! With the campaign, I organized for 25 events and recruited dozens more volunteers.
For my Sierra Club work, my volunteers and I called and texted 1,295 Sierra Club supporters throughout the state. Of those we spoke to, 34% said yes to volunteering! Of note, many of our supporters were already volunteering in our national letter writing campaign or with the campaigns directly. I also connected with folks around our Chapter work, and hope we will have more volunteers moving forward!
On the campaign front, during GOTV (the last four days) we called over 60,000 people, and organized dozens of volunteers to ensure people had plans to vote. Prior to that, we made tens of thousands of phone calls and texts for Jared Golden.
The work was not always easy - I worked weekends and long hours, spending much of my time making phone calls. Day to day, I was organizing trainings and phonebanking calls, using technology to reach as many folks as possible. I was coordinating with Sierra Club’s Political committee and the Golden campaign.
This took a lot of training. I had to become competent on several new technologies, including Slack, Mobilize, VAN, and more. For the weeks leading up to Victory Corps, I worked with other Chapter staff to offload much of my work. I was not allowed to do Chapter work for a month, so we had a lot to plan for (and now I have a lot of emails to catch up on)!
I had really interesting phone calls in CD2, and I feel honored and humbled to have held space to hear people’s hardships, experiences, concerns, and more. There is a lot of struggle, especially in terms of health, and there are a lot of people living on edge of financial security. While I was confident in Jared Golden’s win based on these conversations, it was still close. Trump won the district again, and many people I talked to (even Democrats) voted for Collins.
In only four weeks, I received incredible campaign experience that will continue to inform and guide my work with the Sierra Club. Although I will not miss some days of hundreds of calls, I feel grateful to have helped Jared Golden win another term and to have listened to the issues facing Mainers and many of the hardships that we need to help solve.