This has been a tough election for progressives. The political winds were against us and it turns out that there was little that we could do to stem them. I’ve written here about what we do next.
But the disappointing results came despte our best efforts and those of other progressive around the state.
The difficult political climate made fund raising for electoral work difficult but Penn ACTION brough close to $150,000 into the state for electoral work and carried out a number of important operations.
On the C4, indpendent expenditure side, where we could explicitly work for a particular candidate, we
- Built a major canvass operation in support of Congressman Patrick Murphy in Congressional District Eight. We canvassed over 11 days and knocked on almost 17.000 doors, including 4158 on Election Day.
- Phoned 25,000 voters twice in Philadelphia, Bucks County and Montgomery to urge them to vote for Congressman Murphy
- Produced and ran a radio ad in support of Congressman Murphy. Click here to listen to it.
On the C3 side, where we do non-partisan work turning out voters of all kinds we:
- Phoned 11,000 voters in Bucks County twice to urge them to vote.
- Phoned 8,000 voters in North Philadelphia twice to urge them to vote. The phone calls to Bucks County and North Philadlephia incorporated the latest techniques created by the Analyst Institute (recently profiled in The New York Times) to make those calls.The calls to Bucks County and North Philadelphia reached a combined total of 16,000 voters.
- Joined with One Nation Working Together to Canvass about 1300 doors in Northeast Philadelphia. We talked to 400 voters.
- And had hundreds of volunteers from all over the state use our Activate system to call 7059 voters. Those calls connected with 2313. About forty-five percent of these calls went to people in North Philadelphia, about a third went to voters in Northeast Pennsylvania and about twenty percent with to environmental activists in the Northern Tier of the state.
The picture on the left is one of our canvassers at work last week. The picture on the right is Congressman Murphy thanking our canvassers on Friday after the election.
More details and pictures coming soon!