Mission Local is publishing a daily campaign dispatch for each of the major contenders in the mayor’s race, alternating among candidates weekly until November. This week: Aaron Peskin. Read earlier dispatches here.
Behind us, someone whacks what sounds like one of those “Ring Bell for Service” bells, made famous by motel check-in desks. “Woo!” shouts Kaitlyn Conway, communications director for the Aaron Peskin campaign. She spins in her chair, and puts a tally mark next to the name “Isabel” on a white board underneath the goal “100 VOLS”.
“Isabel! You and I are tied!” says Conway. “It’s fun to make it a competition,” Conway adds.
The bells, currently scattered around the campaign headquarters, are stored in a large plastic box marked “Phonebank Bells.” One volunteer slot filled = one ding on the bell of your choice.
This is the scene every Monday starting around 5 p.m., when a group of staff and volunteers start calling to find other volunteers from a list of people who signed up as interested in helping with the campaigns. “These are folks who want to be involved,” says Conway. “And to actually get them involved, we’ve got to call them one by one and say, ‘Hey, how can we get you involved? What do you want to do for the campaign?’ And boom, we have this really intense spreadsheet.”
Pride Week is a big week. There’s the Aaron 2024 Pride T-shirts, the Peskin campaign booth that will be set up at Civic Center for 12 hours on Saturday and Sunday, the 20-foot flatbed that needs to be turned into a parade float. “How are you at driving a truck?” says Conway, who has begun a new call. She is wearing earbuds and staring into the middle distance, at a window opening onto an air shaft. The window has “Please keep closed — pigeons try to come in,” written on it in neat cursive. The message was there when the campaign moved in several months ago, along with a not-inconsiderable quantity of pigeon feathers scattered around it.
“Is there any way we can channel that energy and get you out in the field?” another volunteer murmurs into their cell phone behind us. “Maybe to a farmer’s market?”
“Can I count on seeing you on Sunday?” says another volunteer. All told, there are about a dozen people huddled in various corners of the campaign office, making calls, their voices rising and falling and overlapping like a sound installation.
Periodically, callers drift over to a centralized snack table to help themselves to slices of Costco pizza, and look longingly at an as-yet-uncut buttercream layer cake made by Madison, a 14-year-old volunteer currently making phone calls to Vietnamese voters with her mom, Thuy, who is bringing in volunteer after volunteer, plus one spontaneous donation. “She has the voice of kindness,” says Madison, by way of explanation.
Every would-be volunteer is different, says Jamie Hughes, who manages the campaign’s volunteer list. Some just want to talk to voters and canvass all day. Others only want to talk on the phone. Others don’t want to talk to anyone, but like to walk around neighborhoods dropping off campaign fliers, on the grounds that it’s both civic engagement and getting their exercise. Some people are interested in being precinct captains; every district contains about 40 or 50 precincts, each of which is about six blocks by six blocks. Precinct captains are less common than they used to be, but a good one will assume responsibility for organizing within their six-by-six area.
Hughes’ first experience as a political campaign volunteer was when he was 15, spending his summer break canvassing District 3 in support of Peskin’s 2015 run for the Board of Supervisors with a friend from Gateway High School (that friend, Michael Redmond, is now Peskin’s field manager). Neither Redmond nor Hughes can remember if there was any student government at Gateway. They were both interested in government government, not kid stuff.
District 3, which encompasses North Beach, Chinatown, and the Financial District, was not easy to canvass. Many of its residents live in apartment buildings and SRO hotels. Hughes and Redmond were unfazed. “Jamie and I would just sit there and ring every doorbell in the call box, almost like it was a phone bank,” says Redmond.
“We were both young and innocent,” says Hughes, who is now 24 years old. In retrospect, it seems like some creepy stuff would have happened, he said, but instead people were extremely kind and gracious.
By 6:30 p.m., most of the volunteers have dispersed. Those that remain deliberate over the design of the Pride march shirt: Peskin’s campaign sign, but in rainbow colors? Peskin’s face, but with a rainbow beard? Is having every letter on the T-shirt a different color of the rainbow laying it on a bit too thick?
Redmond looks at the whiteboard appraisingly. The volunteer tally on the whiteboard is nowhere near 100. The point isn’t to get to 100, he says. The point is to have a goal that makes you want to get there. Plus, the night is still young.