■ LOCAL: South Floridians heading to Iowa to campaign for their favorite 2020 candidates.
Canvassing key in early state in election cycle
As travelers stream into South Florida for the Super Bowl, some are headed toward snow and cold. A stream of Democrats, both elected officials and committed citizens, is headed to Iowa to work on behalf of their favorite presidential candidates.
Christine Hunschofsky, Kevin O’Connor, Shevrin Jones and Kaitlin Walters, are all part of the quadrennial ritual, in which people who are passionate supporters of various presidential candidates head to early caucus or primary states to help their preferred choices.
Melissa Shiff, of Pompano Beach, is in Iowa campaigning for former Vice President Joe Biden. She’ll be on door-to-door canvassing teams, and help at a caucus Monday night.
“I’ve never been to Iowa before,” she said. “Hopefully I’ll be coming back on the plane in a good mood and energized regardless [of the results] because it’s definitely a marathon, not a sprint.”
Why is she there? “I just decided I had to do something. Had to go. Felt compelled.” For years, Shiff said, “my idea of participating in democracy was going to vote. That’s what I did. And I just felt like that wasn’t enough. I felt like we really have to reset America’s moral compass.”
Just back from her first trip to Iowa is Kaitlin Walters of Cooper City, who was there last weekend working for a stylistically and substantively different candidate — U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
She flew to Chicago on a Friday, took a “Bernie Journey” bus to Iowa on Saturday, returned to Chicago Saturday night, and took another Sanders bus to Iowa on Sunday.
A highlight: a rally at the University of North Iowa featuring Sanders supporter and progressive superstar U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and leftist filmmaker Michael Moore.
And there was a lot of neighborhood canvassing, which involves “knocking on doors and talking to people there. A lot of it was just like talking to people that were already Bernie supporters
and reminding them when and where to get to the caucus.”
That’s essential in a state like Iowa. The caucuses are very different from primaries in states like Florida, where people go to the polls, or vote early, for their preferred candidate. In Iowa, candidate supporters have to turn out on Monday night for events at which they’ll divide into groups of supporters for each candidate.
The process can take hours, and it’s essential for campaigns to do everything they can to make sure their supporters actually turn out.
Part of the work was to make sure how people they visited know how caucuses work, Walters said.
Canvassing is important in all election contests, but it’s especially so in the relatively small, early states where people expect personal contact — unlike Florida, which is so big that mass media advertising and social media outreach are much more important.
That’s why the campaigns welcome people like Walters to deploy on door-to-door teams. What used to be lists of supporters, often identified through previous rounds of canvassing, are now provided to the teams on phone apps. They know where to knock.
It was different the first time O’Connor knocked on doors in the northwest suburbs of Chicago — at age 10, for John F. Kennedy.
Now a Fort Lauderdale resident, he’ll be in the Des Moines area through Monday night’s caucuses on behalf of Buttigieg. He’ll be going door to door to encourage people to turn out. “I’m committed to Pete’s campaign,” he said. “And I want to be part of it on the ground when it’s happening.”
Walters said she didn’t run into supporters of other candidates campaigning at the same time she was canvassing, but saw campaign literature from other contenders that had been left at peoples’ doors.
Some people didn’t want to answer the door, she said, but it was generally a good experience. “It was about 30% you would get positive responses. Some people would invite you into their houses, so it was really nice,” she said.
“They were pretty impressed that I came all the way from Florida,” she said, though “some people looked at me like I was crazy.”
Hunschofsky, the mayor of Parkland, is so devoted to presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., that she’s made several trips to Iowa and New Hampshire on his behalf.
“It’s easy to stay home and yell at the television” or post on social media, Hunschofsky said. “I like to focus on what I can do and contributions I can make as opposed to be frustrated about things I can’t control or can’t contribute to.”
She’s back in Iowa, in the Des Moines suburb of Ankeny, this weekend.
The state’s voters, Hunschofsky said, “take their job of being the first caucus in the nation very seriously. They do their homework. They ask questions, and they want to be engaged. So for me, as someone who’s not from Iowa, ever been to Iowa prior to this, it’s just fascinating to see this in progress.
To see people really taking their job as citizens and voting so seriously. They see this as a big responsibility that they have and want to get it right.”
State Rep. Shevrin Jones, DWest Park, also said it’s different to campaign in Iowa than in Florida. He visited three Iowa cities early this month — alongside former Secretary of State John Kerry who was the party’s 2004 presidential nominee — on behalf of Biden.
“The people in Iowa are very fired up about the presidential election,” Jones said.
Jones said he got a lot out of the experience. Until the trip he had “never come into contact with real farmers. But just listening to their stories brought tears to my eyes. These are real people with real issues.”
South Florida supporters of Massachusetts U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren weren’t sure who was traveling to Iowa this weekend. But she has many supporters campaigning there on her behalf. Journalist John Heilemann said Thursday on the MSNBC “Morning Joe” program that among the 50 savviest Democratic staffers in the state “there’s close to unanimity that the Warren organization here is the best organization in Iowa.”
For the most part, the out-oftown campaign workers cover their own expenses. (Shiff used points to pay for this weekend’s flights.)
They’re giving up their time to go to a state where temperatures will be in the 30s during the day and 20s at night, in contrast to South Florida’s 70s and 60s.
Last weekend “was my first time seeing snow,” Walters said. She thinks she’ll do it again, but it’s more likely to more temperate location — South Carolina, which holds its primary on Feb. 29.