Oprah to volunteers: Don’t mind hang-ups

They hung up on Oprah. During a get-out-the-vote conference call with former Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke on Monday night, Oprah Winfrey told nearly 2,000 phone banking volunteers that she knows how it feels when people hang up on you.

Before she got into radio at age 16, Winfrey told volunteers she worked in sales for a vacuum cleaner company, cold-calling people all day long to set up appointments for demonstrations.

“I can’t tell you the number of people that hung up on me in those early days,” Winfrey, now 66, said with a laugh.

But she told volunteers that after a while, she learned how to cope with it: “Well, if they hang up, that means I spent less time with somebody who didn’t want to hear me and it gives me more time for the next person who does want to hear me.”

Winfrey’s pep talk came as O’Rourke leads an effort to have volunteers make 1 million phone calls to Texas voters to remind them that early voting starts Tuesday, and to ask them to commit to casting ballots.

Just before Winfrey told her story, O’Rourke, a former U.S. Senate candidate from 2018, told her he gets nervous when he’s making the calls because he never knows how people are going to react.

Winfrey praised O’Rourke and the volunteer phone bankers, saying she’s grateful to them for their work, and agreeing to make some calls herself to unsuspecting Texas voters.

“You are doing the good, great work,” she told them. “This is what we were meant to do.”

Winfrey was just one of the stars who took the time to join O’Rourke during the phone-banking marathon. U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, former San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro and music legend Willie Nelson also participated.