Monday memory: electioneering

A couple tales from my days in enemy territory: Toledo, Ohio.

This may have been one of the few Election Days I didn’t work a poll, the one year I voted here.

Tomorrow is Election Day, and since I already voted I’m just going to watch the results come in like the rest of you.

However, there was a time back in the day when I spent my Election Day at a polling place because early voting wasn’t a thing yet, trying to get people to vote for the Republican candidate. For several years in the late 1990s, this is how my Election Day went down:

At 4 a.m. I would be up doing what they called “dawn patrol,” where I would fill up the back of my old Ford Festiva with a batch of signs to put up at the polling places before they opened. Usually these were in rough neighborhoods, but given that it was 4:30 in the morning and 35 degrees out, no one really bothered me. (In nicer areas that were a bit more Republican, we could do this the night before.)

Once that was complete I would run home and get ready. Normally I would dress in layers anyway, but there were two essentials: the shirt of the candidate I was supporting, and a jacket. The reason for the jacket was simple: Ohio, like most states, had an electioneering law that within x number of feet from the entrance to the polling place you couldn’t wear a shirt, button, or hat promoting a candidate. So in order to walk into the polling place, I would need to don the jacket.

And there were reasons I needed to go into the polling place: first and foremost, in 13 hours you will have to go to the bathroom. (This is where having neighbors you knew well as poll judges came in handy.) The second was seeing how turnout was going; at the time they would post the roll of voters who had voted at 1:00 and 4:00. I learned that if you took the 1:00 count and tripled it, you would have a good idea what the turnout would eventually be.

So at 6:30 in the morning I would be one of the first to vote at my polling place, which was a small reception hall at Highland Park in South Toledo. (Back in the day, like before my time, they had sock hop dances there.) Once I did that, I would go outside, take off my jacket, and give out my palm cards to voters if I had some.

Perhaps the best memories I have were dealing with the occasional union thugs and their candidates who came by, such as the time the opponent of the lady for whom I was stumping (he was a Democrat, of course) came out with a box of coffee mugs for the workers, cups bearing his name. My Republican neighbors in the polling place thwarted that approach really quick, and the mugs were set in the back room where no one could see them. Heck, they may still be there. (Unfortunately, he won anyway, which was typical in union-dominated Toledo. Just a few blocks down the street was the one Republican district, but we were in with the working-class stiffs of East Toledo and the Old South End, where we lived for a couple years prior to buying our house.)

The other fun memory came a couple years later, when Carty Finkbeiner, who I think was running for re-election as Mayor as an enemy of deaf people, showed up at our polling place. Here I am in his opponent’s shirt, sitting on an empty trash barrel I turned on its side. (I think I was about 10 hours into a 13-hour day.) Carty was his usual inauthentic self, but he probably forgot he and I had a bit of history.

Back in 1993, when he first ran for Mayor, he and a crew of volunteers were doing door-to-door down my street as we got the mail. In my mail was one of those official-looking manila envelopes you get from the state; inside was the results of the architect’s exam I had taken weeks before. Obviously my ex-wife and I opened that sucker right away and read with a triumphant yell that I had passed all the written portions. (A year later I went back and passed the drawing part, which I didn’t quite get through the first time.) Of course, he came rushing over to see why we were so excited and was so insincere-sounding we just knew we had to vote for his opponent.

I have a few other tales from that era, like getting pneumonia in late October after an all-day lit drop on a chilly Saturday and spending the weekend before the 1996 election in the hospital (no dawn patrol or working the polls that year!) or the good people I met who carried the GOP banner under hopeless odds in the city of Toledo. One of those was John Garcia, for whom I spent a winter Saturday trudging through the snow up in north Toledo to entice Republican voters to sign the petitions to get him back on the ballot and in office before the filing deadline - this must have been 1996 because the deadline was really early thanks to the Presidential race. (Rep. Garcia was one of our few Republican success stories, and I’ll always remember him with his Mexican accent saying, “I don’t mind those orange barrels at all - them orange barrels mean monies.”)

Overall, once in awhile we would pull upsets, but most times we would lose on principle since we weren’t yet in the Trump era where the working class seems now to tilt Republican.

Once I moved to Maryland, my all-day excursions at the voting place were about over. I realized there were points I could run home and take a break (right after lunchtime was a good stopping point) and not miss a whole lot. And knowing that partisan elections here were every two years made things a bit easier as well, combined with my elected duty as a party official. It was a lot different here, so I got out of that Election Day game about the time I met my wife. (Still enjoyed the after-parties, though.)

So I can’t say I’ve had the most successful run, but then again it would be too easy living in a solid GOP area like South Carolina or Florida. At least I tried to meet the challenge.

Until next time, remember you can Buy Me a Coffee since I have a page there.