For every new voter a canvasser enlists, one must endure an untold number of scowls, stares, and slammed doors. And like most organizing newbies, Lolita Roberts received her fair share of rejection during her first seven weeks pounding the cement in Illinois' 11th Congressional District. But the Chicagoan didn’t quit, and her hard work is starting to show results.
It’s late in the afternoon and Roberts has her sights set on a two-story house in the middle of Joliet’s 2nd Ave. Four twenty-somethings are relaxing on the porch, smoking cigarettes, and enjoying some late summer sun. Roberts dodges a few potholes, pulls her car onto the curb, and jumps onto the lot. “Hi everybody, I’m Lolita Roberts from Local 1,” she exclaims. “Are you all registered to vote?” Two men step down to greet her. The first says he’d visited the DMV a month before and was now waiting to receive his voter card in the mail. The second, a gregarious guy sporting a big lime-green t-shirt, can’t remember the last time he voted. Roberts gets to work, whipping out her clipboard, explaining how easy the process was, and showing him where to start.
Meanwhile, a car pulls in front of the house -- two women in front and three kids stuffed in the back. The driver kindly asks if she can register on the spot. Not one to miss an opportunity, Roberts shifts into high gear, gravitating confidently between the two registrants, asking all the right questions without hesitation. Once they both finish, she makes the rounds, poking her head around the corner and into nearby cars, double-checking that she didn’t miss anyone. “Now remember, Election Day is November 4,” she reminds them before we drive away. “Make sure you get out and vote!"
Although her mom was a long-time precinct captain on Chicago’s South Side, Roberts isn’t a political veteran herself. In fact, the 47-year old mother of four has worked for nine years as an inspector at a Chicago glass company. But seven weeks ago, she was thrown headfirst into a voter registration drive run by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), of which she is a member.
Like Barack Obama nationally and a small cadre of progressive organizations locally, the SEIU Illinois State Council (which sponsors this website) thinks expanding the franchise in hotly-contested congressional districts is a strategy that will pay both immediate and long-term dividends. By targeting underrepresented communities, the theory goes that these labor intensive and costly registration campaigns will simultaneously broaden the Democratic base and amplify the voices of the marginalized. While their goals are ambitious, the electoral organizers seem up to the challenge, and their efforts could provide the difference in races with national significance.
New Leaders, New Voters
The area’s most comprehensive registration drive is housed in a cluttered, makeshift office on the second floor of a community center in Joliet. Hidden among computers, maps, and registration cards sits SEIU member Daisy Navar, who is in charge of dispatching electoral organizers throughout the gerrymandered 11th District. Under Lavar’s purview, between eight and 12 organizers from three SEIU unions (Locals 20, 73, and 1) hit the streets every day in search of the unregistered, knocking on doors and posting themselves outside colleges, grocery stores, public aid offices, and other high-traffic venues.
Unlike some other drives, these organizers aren’t volunteers. SEIU Local 1 political director Dino Martino is utilizing a “loss time program,” meaning that rank-and-file members recommended by their union stewards were pulled off their job sites, given six hours of training, and hired by the union as “member political organizers” (MPOs) for a paid, short-term project. “The drive does two things simultaneously,” says Martino. “We’re able to get a lot of voters registered while we’re able to develop a team of our members … as organizers and union leaders.”
One of those emerging leaders is Eula Hermon. A middle-aged Calumet City resident with a welcoming face and deep laugh, Hermon works at Boeing’s Chicago headquarters as a nighttime custodian. A self-described “people person,” she took to the new gig immediately. Working in front of the Will County Court House from the early morning through the evening, Hermon signed up 39 people on the day I visited, well over her 22-per-day quota. By educating people about their voting rights, Hermon feels fulfilled. “I like this, I really do,” she says. “I get up in the morning, I get showered, and I take my baby to school and I’m out there. I’m excited!”
SEIU’s army of MPOs is making its presence felt. Between July 28 and early September, the union had registered 5,305 primarily low-income voters in Joliet and Kankakee, along with another 5,200 in Illinois’ 10th Congressional District, focused in Waukegan and other parts of Lake County. They're aiming to sign up 10,000 new voters in each district by the October 7 registration deadline. Lavar and Martino were confident that their crew would reach this goal, thanks in large part to the skill of their organizers. “Our members got their feet wet in the beginning,” said Martino, “and now they are just so good at it.”
A Coordinated Effort
SEIU isn’t the only progressive organization on the prowl for prospective suburban Chicago voters. In collaboration with over 20 of its local partners, the Illinois Campaign for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR) has spent the summer preparing and executing the New America Democracy Project: a massive immigrant-oriented registration drive in Joliet, Aurora, and other towns throughout Chicagoland’s so-called "collar counties."
Similar to SEIU’s MPO program, ICIRR has hired a set of Democracy Project Fellows, immigrants or children of immigrants interested in running an electoral campaign in their own communities. Juan Jose Gonzalez, field coordinator for the project, says his organizers are targeting infrequent immigrant voters, people he says “the parties never go after.” A major barrier to immigrant participation is language, one ICIRR organizers allay by working in as many as eight foreign tongues – from Spanish to Mandarin to Urdu. Through last week, almost a month before the registration deadline, ICIRR was just short of its election cycle goal of 20,000 new registrants.
While Citizen Action/Illinois -- the state’s largest public interest organization -- isn’t explicitly seeking out immigrant voters, their focus on reaching people of color has led them to similar suburban locations. “With the population shifts that Illinois has seen, these are areas [that] have been on the brink of becoming more progressive,” says political director Claire Serdiuk. “We see them as areas where people are living or have just moved that haven't been part of the process.” In collaboration with local partners -- such as the NAACP in Peoria and Northern Illinois University students in Dekalb -- paid civic engagement directors and volunteers are aiming to add 8,500 names to the voter rolls. And Serdiuk is confident they will meet this goal.
Deepening The Base
So why are Illinois progressives spending their valuable resources on voter registration in communities of color? In short, expanding participation among minority voters could swing a few key elections in their favor.
Demographics are certainly on their side. For one, Illinois’ electorate is whiter than the state’s population as a whole, this because registration rates for African-Americans (65.7 percent), Hispanics (53.2 percent), and Asians (44.9 percent) all trailed that of non-Hispanic whites (72.0 percent) in November 2006. Indeed, 78 percent of the state’s registered voters are non-Hispanic white, even though they only constitute 65.3 percent of the state’s population.
Considering that polls show voters of color favoring Democratic politicians, a big pool of untapped supporters is ripe for the picking. By broadening their base, Democratic candidates become less reliant on swing voters and independents.
As 2006 showed, it doesn’t take many votes to tip tight congressional races in Illinois either. Last cycle, Rep Jerry Weller outdistanced John Pavich by 20,196 votes, Rep. Mark Kirk beat Dan Seals by 12,624 votes, and Peter Roskam upended Tammy Duckworth by a mere 4,810 votes. Add in the substantial shifts in party identification since 2004 (Democratic voters outnumbered Republicans during the presidential primary by 6,000 in Kane County, 2,210 in McHenry County, and a 23,500 in DuPage County), excitement over Barack Obama (a February SurveyUSA poll shows Collar County residents favor him over John McCain by 20 points), and a few thousand new voters, and you might have a recipe for Democratic success.
What’s better, if a legislator is elected on the backs of a deeper Democratic base, the lawmaker will necessarily be more responsive to that constituency’s demands. For ICIRR, that’s comprehensive immigration reform. For SEIU, it’s policies benefiting working families. “We want to increase the voice for low-income communities,” says Martino. “We’re interested in helping people that fall within these demographics to have a stronger voice in civic life.” Given the amount of effort Republican operatives have put into suppressing minority turnout, expanding the franchise should be a moral obligation for the left, too, one these organizers take seriously.
Minutes before Roberts and I registered those two voters in Joliet, we stepped into a women's beauty parlor tucked in a small strip mall. Roberts walked to the door and offered a jovial greeting to the owner, a middle-aged woman she had met before. "Two of your team just left," the owner told us, "and they registered everybody in here." Roberts was quick to apologize for interrupting, but the beautician would have none of it. "Keep coming back!" she yelled as we returned to the car. "We need 400,000 more!"
An audacious goal, no doubt. But you can be sure progressives will work their hardest through October 7 to get us closer.
Images used under a Creative Commons license by Flickr users Brande Jackson, Barack Obama, and Korean Resource Center.
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