Our Next Steps

Literally - our next STEPS will be walking our neighborhoods, knocking on doors, telling our neighbors about Bernie and his campaign, signing up new volunteers, identifying solid and potential Bernie voters and taking this campaign to the next level. These are our MARCHING orders from the national campaign.

Normally, campaigns themselves organize and pay for canvassing. But, this is not a normal campaign! As Bernie has said over and over, "It's not about me. It's about you. It will take nothing less than a political revolution for our campaign to succeed, which is why we need a powerful grassroots movement of Americans standing up and saying 'Enough is enough.'"

Here's a very good article describing what is expected of us volunteers in this campaign. 

Each community should plan its own canvassing. If you live in Onalaska, La Crescent, Holmen, Sparta, Viroqua, etc. you should put together your own team.

For La Crosse, I am hoping to find a team of at least two or three other people to set up canvassing to begin in September and become the CANVASSING team. It would be even more incredible if we could find one organizer for each district within the city, though (see the map at: http://cityoflacrosse.org/DocumentView.aspx?DID=3806) I am in AD 15  (red 26). I actually think these districts have changed recently, but that city website is very poorly designed to find anything useful, so this will work for our purposes.

What we will do.

* Using google maps, other maps, and our knowledge of the city, we will develop routes for door knocking.

* We will prepare canvassing kits - maps, scripts, flyers

* We will conduct canvassing at least weekly - the campaign suggests every Saturday - including a brief training, support for canvassers, collection of canvassing data

* We will coordinate collection, organization, and storage of data

* We will add volunteer trainers, supervisors, data entry, etc. as they become available.

Some of this can be done on our own - especially preparing maps once we set up the criteria. Then we will need at least one person to supervise - hand out maps, provide training, answer questions, collect data - each canvassing session.

Many of us have done this before and once we get it organized, we can advertise it as an event on the berniesanders.com website picking up (we hope) some new area people who may not be on our list.

So, if you are interested in helping to set this up, please email me by this Saturday, August 23.  This is super important. As the article referenced above notes, Bernie's success in the fall and winter, whether he's a "summer fling" or "the real thing" will depend on how much we Bernie supporters are willing to actually do to get his name out there, give people a positive picture or him, get others excited about and interested in his campaign, identify potential new volunteers and voters, make sure people know how to register and when and where to vote, and all that other stuff.