Heidi Johnson, Citizen Co-Chair and Jamaica Plain resident:
News from my JP voting spot (9:30)
19 out of 23 reported voting for AK on exiting.
Allyce Najjimy, Citizen Co-Chair and South Boston resident
I was the only one standing at my VOTING site holding a sign!
People were so impressed I got 10 sympathy votes – they told me they voted for AK because I looked so coooold.
VERY Positive response to Alan – many said they were there just to make sure to vote for Alan.
Turn out really LOW from 7am – 930am
No Coakley signs – NO Pags signs – One Capuano sign
10 AK signs and me! One voter told me he walked across Southie and AK people were the only sign holders he saw.
Yeah!
From Lucy McQuilken, Citizen Co-Chair in Harvard, MA:
—-300 voters so far in harvard (9:15 a.m.). Only one coakley sign, three khazei sign holders. No other campaigns represented. Lots of enthusiastic thumbs ups for Khazei.
—-Harvard update: 800 voters by 2PM with plenty of time to go. Coakley signs are gone but team Khazei remains strong! 25 percent turnout already.
As a former journalist (Patriot Ledger in the late 1980s) it saddens me that the press is so eager to call an election before the voters vote. They should realize that early polls — particularly in an election like this with a reported 79% undecided just two weeks before election day — do not measure passion. They do nothing to measure the passion of volunteers like Haskell Werlin, a Khazei volunteer who shared this story with me yesterday.
My 92 year dad was worried that it might snow on Election day so he arranged last Thursday for the Belmont election commissioner to come to his house at 8 am today and bring him and my mom absentee ballots. Unfortunately my mom, also 92, was rushed to the ER at Mt. Auburn on Friday night and is still in the hospital today. When the election commissioner showed up at my Dad’s house this morning, they drove together to the hospital and couldn’t find my mother in her room as she was having an Xray taken in radiology so they went into the xray room and found her there and she voted from the gurney…2 more votes for Alan!!!
There are three hours until the polls close at 8. The election is wide open. Get out and vote and tell your networks to vote. Go Khazei!
Undecideds (who numbered 76% a week ago) are breaking for Khazei by over 50%. The whole race could be won in the final stretch! Go Seabiscuit!
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p>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…
hope springs eternal stories. I’m sure all four campaigns are in “We’re coming on strong and are going to win” mode. Three of them will be wrong this evening…or perhaps tomorrow morning if it’s really tight.
Someone from the Khazei campaign planted 4 lawn signs this morning on public property, very near the town hall. I saw them on my way to drop my son off at school. No people standing with them, just the signs. If I thought it was legal, I would have done the same thing.
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p>Illegal Khazei signs the only ones at town hall today. NO signs for other candidates because those who might legally hold signs for their candidate were at work.
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But it is always illegal to post signs on private property without the owners permission, and folks on my street have been removing illegal Capuano signs weekly from a common private backyard fence and telephone posts in our neighborhood that run along a busy street.
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p>We’ve even complained to the Capuano campaign, but their people continued –even last night. NO other candidates have done this. Totally rude people…
As a Capuano volunteer, I’d like to apologize both for the sign placing and for my compatriots failing the civility test. We all do these elections on a regular basis — you’d think we’d learn.
On behalf of the campaign. I am only a volunteer and have no authority but I deplore unfair tactics. They poison the process.
If Khazei is the “Holier-than-thou” candidate, the Cap supporters have definitely proven themselves as the “Holier-than-thou” supporters.
What are you trying to accomplish here? Bait the Capuano supporters into a spitting contest? No thanks!
As, for instance, Woburn
Given the low turnout, Khazei’s strategy of looking to new voters (particularly young voters) doesn’t seem to be working.
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p>Coakley’s ahead on pure name recognition, and “name recognition” voters are the ones who don’t appear if turnout is light.
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p>I think a low turnout is probably good for Capuano, moderate turnout is good for Coakley, heavy turnout means Khazei’s in play.
I like Alan Khazei a lot, but to me the fact that his campaign is still phoning undecided voters on election day means that they didn’t identify enough of them before today.
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p>I’m not sure, because we often screen calls, but Khazei’s campaign is probably the only one we never got a call from now that I think about it.
and I am not sure if I got one from Pagliuca either, which is kind of surprising given how much money he threw at this race. I have gotten lots of calls from Coakley and Capuano including three calls from Coakley volunteers yesterday morning, which tells me that Coakley does not have good call tracking software.
There was a time when we were getting about one robocall a day from Pagliuca….
Definitely Coakley robocalls…like practically every day we got home in the last week, there was one waiting on our VM. I was ready to scream. Got another one from her today (we hit delete as soon as we heard the first sentence). A few Capuano robos in the last couple weeks. Personal calls from Caps people (one from his son! talk about blogger outreach) but not as many as you’d think seeing as our household is DEFinitely listed as super voters (voted in the last MA-05 special, all local elections for six years, primaries, etc). I suspect we’ve been listed as strong Capuano for weeks, so therefore they didn’t ID call us. No Khazei calls, a Pags robo or two, that’s about it.
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p>NO voter ID calls at all really, barring calls to me personally as a blogger. I know the Capuano people were doing trad ID calls, but I don’t get the sense that there was much of that from other campaigns. I would have thought Khazei at least would have employed more of it. Honestly you can’t get much more “target voter” than the Mr. and I.
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p>Capuano can win this on ID/turnout so I think this could be a very interesting night of surprises. At least I hope so.
It will be because of that. We got GOTV calls from both Capuano and Coakley (from the SEIU on her behalf, actually).
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p>Looks like Capuano’s people are even going door to door in Somerville.
That without the SEIU, Coakley’s footprint on the ground as it were would have been pretty small. She lucked out with that endorsement.
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p>Not that you have to answer, but were you ID’ed as something or other with, say, the Caps campaign, as a supporter? It’s weird that you’d get a GOTV from two campaigns – someone either IDed you wrong or wasn’t IDing, which is not smart. Since I sort of (sideways) know the Capuano campaign is actually doing ID/GOTV, it makes me wonder about the Coakley campaign…they could be turning out Khazei or Capuano leaners/strong voters! Not good.
Because we have two voters in the household đŸ˜‰
I forget those are out there. đŸ˜‰
Kkazei is the only one I didn’t get a robocall from. Daily calls from Pags for the last week, multiple Coakley and Capuano, a Brown, and even a Jack Robinson.
I vote in every election too.