The Case for Mike McGinn: Part 4

It had been a long two days for the McGinn
for Mayor campaign. On Monday, October 19, McGinn announced that,
contrary to previous statements, he would abide by the will of the city
council and not try to stop the deep-bore tunnel, instead turning his
attention to making sure Seattle taxpayers wouldn’t be saddled with
paying cost overruns. Within 24 hours, opponent Joe Mallahan had
released a campaign ad accusing McGinn of “lying” to voters—of
being, essentially, a flip-flopper. After which KING 5 had released a
poll showing Mallahan widening his gap over McGinn, 43 to 36
percent.

At McGinn HQ on Aurora Avenue North that evening, Ainsley Close was
doing yoga. Close, 27, has been volunteering full-time for the campaign
since before the primary. (One of the surprises along the way, McGinn
said in a separate interview, was when “I discovered Ainsley was
without my knowledge running my campaign. So I put her in charge. I
called her up to ask her how she was doing on something and then asked
her, ‘By the way, how’s Derek doing on the maps?’ And she told me.
‘How’s Elliott doing?’ And she said Elliott had been up all night
working. And so I tested her and asked about other people [working on
the campaign], and I realized she knew what everyone was doing. She was
running the campaign. So I put her in charge.”) McGinn and Close struck
a deal that she would defer her fall quarter of graduate school, for a
master’s in environmental science and management, if McGinn made it
through the primary. And he did. So she did.

She was on her back on the carpet, her legs stretching up over her,
her feet touching the floor just past her head. Derek Farmer and
Elliott Day, two other full-time staffers since before the primary,
were sitting nearby. These three were among the core volunteer staffers
labeled “jobless skoolkids” by a supporter of Jan Drago in an anonymous
blog comment during the primary—a label they’ve worn proudly ever
since.

“Crazy day,” Close said, standing up again.

“It was a crazy day,” Day echoed.

Close had been with McGinn all morning. “I was Mike’s bike escort
today,” she said, cracking a grin. “Which is, like, come on buddy, go a
little faster.”

Day, who is 25, made a whirring electrical
sound—”Eeeehhhnn!“—and they all cracked up.
Farmer, 30, who deferred law school at UW for the campaign, flashed a
look of worry and imagined the political repercussions: “The
Stranger says, ‘Even McGinn’s Supporters Make Fun of His Electric
Bike.'”

I asked about the new Mallahan ad. “We knew that was going to come,”
Close said, and then, referring to Mallahan: “He doesn’t have anything
else.”

I asked about the KING 5 poll. “All I can say is, that same poll
said we’d lose the primary, by not a small margin,” Day said.

“As one of our campaign stalwarts said, it would be off-brand for us
to be up in the polls,” Farmer said.

We’d gathered to discuss how the campaign had made it this
far—winning first in the primary after polling had them in fifth
place four weeks prior, going head-to-head in the general with a
candidate with four times the money, amassing a volunteer army that
phone banks nightly in three locations around the city and that can be
deployed quickly on special projects. “After Mike won the primary, we
honestly were inundated with volunteers. We went from doing things to
making sure things got done,” Farmer said.

“Another way of putting it would be, we went from being the
only people phone banking to…” Day said, his voice trailing
off to the sound of a volunteer phone banking in the background. As of
October 20, the campaign had dialed 43,060 voters (not including
robocalls), left 18,087 voice-mail messages, and had 9,788
conversations with voters. Day joined the campaign in May. He has a
degree in geography but hadn’t been able to find work. “I had no idea
what to expect and was totally comfortable with the notion that we were
just a ‘message’ campaign rather than a real contender,” he said. “My
first week, I was given some phone numbers and told to call them and
convince them to phone bank. And I was like, ‘Okay, I guess I
know what a phone bank is. And it was really, really hard to convince
anyone. It was June and impossible to make anyone give a shit. Mike
just kept saying, ‘Keep calling.’ Which really frustrated me, because I
felt like he didn’t understand.”

Day paused. “You’re given a certain amount of trust to make
something happen,” he said, “and then when it actually happens—it
was an eye-opener.”

The campaign credits phone banking above all else for their success
so far—they’re aiming for 12,000 conversations with voters before
Election Day. According to Farmer’s records, the campaign logged 8,040
volunteer hours during the primary, 330 hours of that phone banking and
420 hours on lit drops (taking campaign literature to voters’ houses,
precinct by precinct). Since the end of primary-election voting on
August 18, the campaign had logged, as of October 20, something like
19,528 volunteer hours (phone banking, lit drops, the 18 town halls
McGinn has held, the 14 policy meetings he’s had with his staff,
community events, fundraising, debate prep, etc.).

This is rough math, but if you figure the average person burns 65
calories an hour (about 75 watts of energy) talking on the phone or
doing clerical work, and 315 calories an hour (about 366 watts of
energy) walking door-to-door up and down the city’s residential hills
delivering campaign literature, as of last week McGinn volunteers had
expended an impressive 1.6 megawatt hours of energy in the general
election alone. For comparison’s sake, 1.6 megawatt hours of energy is
equivalent to 180 gallons of gas, or enough energy to power a
four-bedroom house for a month. And that’s not including the thousands
of volunteer hours in the primary or the last two weeks of campaigning
before November 3.

Mallahan likes to say that he’s proud to run a “professional”
campaign—a dig at McGinn’s full-time volunteer staff, which also
includes Nate Merrill (McGinn’s scheduler), April Thomas (office
manager), Jen Nance (who organized the town halls and donates
photography to the campaign), Sol Villarreal (an Obama organizer who
now runs the phone banks), and Aaron Pickus (communications). Other
central volunteers: Becky Stanley (volunteer recruiter), Thao Tran (“We
needed a Southeast Seattle office, and he scored one in, like, 24
hours,” McGinn says), and Christi Stapleton (who oversaw the
Democratic-district endorsement process and then took up running the
Southeast Seattle office). Asked whether any other campaign for Seattle
mayor has relied so entirely on a volunteer grassroots effort, McGinn
said he didn’t know, but added, “My understanding is that Norm Rice put
on a really powerful grassroots campaign on short notice and surprised
people.”

“We use the word ‘staff.’ We definitely work here, but we don’t get
a paycheck,” Close said. “I think there’s a stigma that because we’re
volunteers we’re somehow less qualified or less intelligent. We just
care more.”

“There are people working for campaigns who just think of it as a
job,” Farmer said. “We all believe.”

Farmer and Day took me into a room with six maps on the wall. “So
what you’re looking at is the six legislative districts in Seattle,”
Farmer said. “We basically crunched the data from the primary results,
precinct by precinct.”

“Those are the colors you’re seeing on the map,” Day said. “The blue
is where we won. Blue with striped lines are precincts where we won a
lot. The green is where Mallahan won. So pretty much anywhere with a
view, Mallahan won—and his numbers are up among Republicans. And
the orangey pink areas are where Nickels won.”

“Look at Ballard,” Farmer said, pointing to the map of the 36th
Legislative District. “On one side of Holman Road, you probably voted
for Mike. On the other side of Holman Road, you probably voted for
Joe.” Likewise, McGinn did very well in Columbia City—”where the
urban liberals live,” Farmer said—but Mallahan took the wealthier
nearby neighborhoods of Mount Baker and Seward Park. Given Day’s degree
in geography and the fact that Farmer is a former military intelligence
officer, these maps send them into full-on geek mode. “In the military,
we call this ‘intel preparation of the battle space,'” Farmer said.
“You figure out where your opponent is, you figure out where you are,
you figure out the lay of the land, and you plan accordingly.”

Most of the precincts had either red or black Sharpie hash marks on
them. “The black hash marks are where we’ve phone banked, and the red
hash marks are where we lit dropped,” Day said. “You can see there on
Capitol Hill, for example.” He pointed to the 43rd District map, nearly
black with hash marks. “We’ve basically called every landline on
Capitol Hill.”

Looking around the room, the floor crammed with donated tote bags
stuffed with McGinn’s latest large-format, multipage campaign pamphlet,
Farmer said, “I like to think we have a pretty sophisticated operation
here. I mean, not bad for a bunch of jobless skoolkids.”

“There you go,” Day said, “bringing it back.”