100,000 First Bosses: My Unlikely Path as a 22-Year-Old Lawmaker by Will Haskell

Author:Will Haskell [Haskell, Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

17 November 6, 2018

I jumped up at the clanging of my 4:30 a.m. alarm, forgot that I was on the top bunk, and slammed my head into the ceiling. It was Election Day, and I hoped the day would only get better from here. In the kitchen, I flipped on the lights to wake up Liam and Emily, the same friends who had helped us move into the apartment. They finally climbed off the air mattress by 5 a.m., by which time Jack was on the phone fielding requests from interns to deliver hundreds more lawn signs. The Republicans must not have slept at all, instead spending all night planting a sea of signs at every polling location. The sun hadn’t yet risen, but already our team of high school and college students wanted reinforcements. I’ve never met anyone who decides which candidate they’ll support by looking at how many lawn signs are stationed around the parking lot, but our team didn’t want to come in second place in anything today. Jack sped off to grab more lawn signs, and I hopped in the back of Liam and Emily’s car to visit our first voting location.

Despite the chaotic start to the morning, I felt calmer than I had in months. Finally, I stopped bracing myself for attacks. I could forget my stump speech and the arcane facts and figures I’d memorized. The fieldwork was done.

This district had 70,582 registered voters, and given the press surrounding the Trump administration, we projected about a 3 percent increase in turnout compared to the last midterm election in 2014. That amounted to 61.08 percent, or 43,114 voters. In order to win, we needed 21,558 people to circle the bubble next to my name.

Since May, we had been contacting a carefully selected group of voters who we believed could be persuaded to vote for me. The national Democratic Party compiles data on every voter in the country: that data is distilled into a handful of scores, including a support score that represents the voter’s likelihood to vote for a Democratic state Senate candidate, and a turnout score that represents their likelihood to vote at all. We used this data to build a list of voters to target: women who had voted in all of the last three elections and had a support score that fell between 30 percent and 70 percent. Painfully aware after the focus group that men were harder to win over, our list criteria were more stringent about male voters and included only those who had voted in all of the last three elections and had a support score that fell between 40 percent and 70 percent. We added to the list all Democrats and unaffiliated voters under the age of twenty-four, all Democrats and unaffiliated women who had registered since President Trump took office, and a few other groups that we felt gave us a strategic advantage. That pool amounted to 25,751 people. After months of working through that list, we set it aside in the final days of the campaign and shifted to shoring up our base.

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