Robocalls. The last refuge of the desperate. You don’t want to listen. They have nothing to say. And if you’re accustomed to fielding a few candidate phone calls every week, they are really awful. I’m a supervoter and a potential convention delegate, so I’m a target. I’ve received real phone calls from real people from every gubernatorial campaign. Most of the time I screen the call and don’t answer.
If I’m not busy, I’ll pick up. Last night, I wasn’t doing anything and was pleased to receive a call from a friend who is working on the Grossman campaign. I’ve received the personal touch, but I forgot to tell her: the robocalls need to stop.
My dad, who is almost 80, received a call from the Grossman campaign, and he gave them 2 or 3 minutes of hell telling them he wouldn’t vote for Grossman because he’d received 2 robocalls from the campaign. 2 robocalls. Eventually, he told them he hadn’t settled on a candidate yet. Neither have I. My friend I told that I could end up voting for Grossman. My support is strongly aligned with the Massachusetts Teachers Association.
I don’t know who is making the robocalls. I’d like to think it’s an ally and not the Grossman campaign (I didn’t listen to the whole call), but they need to stop.
At this stage in the primary, if I’m going to run off to my moribund Democratic Town Committee and vote for this or that delegate, I need much detailed, wonky documents that make the the case that I should support Grossman. Fluffy mailings with big gauzy photos are just a waste of time because they tend to contain rhetoric any candidate can say and they convey the same sentiments Democrats have been conveying for a decade.
This part of the campaign is unusual. Low information voters don’t matter at all. Why? Because they don’t even know what goes on at this stage. They’re certainly not going to vote for convention delegates. Do they even know about conventions?
So why try to convince me by treating me like a low information voter? It just wastes my time.
was inviting me to join a conference call about the campaign tomorrow night. I think I’ve gotten that twice but haven’t been able to do the conference call (though I am curious).
I thought these town halls were pretty effective at reaching a large number of people and giving people access to ask questions of the candidate. It’s probably expensive, but a cool idea.
Also… more effective than getting mailed a Juliette Kayyem DVD, since I no longer own a DVD player on any device in my home.
for Deval Patrick in 06, I did not mind recordings from the campaign to keep me in the loop about what was happening going into the convention.
I wasn’t being courted, I was being included in something into which I had expressly opted.
All other times, I do mind, thank you very much. I don’t care who you’ve got on tape (and that means YOU, Bill Clinton). Candidates who robocall me lose points at the very least.
Coakley fundraisers have Grossman beat by a mile when it comes to annoying Robo calls…every fundraiser they have gets robo-ed out across the world to anyone who ever gave her a buck in the past. As soon as you hear “hello this is Martha Coakley, ” you know what is coming next… ” I hope you are coming to my fundraiser…” Wish they had a key pad response mechanism so I could say…”Sorry, not this time around, been there, done that.”