Hoosier candidate?
It’s
11:30am on a mid-October Saturday in a crumbling,
medieval-castle–themed apartment complex in South Bend, Indiana, and no
one’s home. That is, no one is answering when my boyfriend and I, armed
with flyers touting Obama’s health-care plan and reminders about early
voting, give the doors a chipper knock—even though we often can hear
the TV blaring inside. When people do answer, we’re met with annoyed
sighs as they tell us campaign workers have come by already. Such are
the hurdles of canvassing, especially in a swing state where people are
inundated with mail, TV commercials and canvassers. After security
kicks us out of the apartment complex, we’re reassigned to a
working-class neighborhood. There, we get a warmer response: Obama
supporters are happy to find out where they can vote early; the
requisite crazies are at least cordial when ranting (“You know what’s
the next oil? Water! We’re shipping water to China right now!”); and
the undecided are more willing to talk. Claudia, a middle-aged woman
who often winces due to a back injury, tells us she and her
self-employed husband can’t afford health insurance, and the $5,000 she
owed the IRS has now escalated to $25,000. “The mafia wouldn’t charge
that much interest,” she says. We commiserate and explain how Obama’s
health-care plan can help. She appears to be warming to the idea of
voting for Obama, but her distrust of government is strong. “I’m just
going to have to pray on it,” she says. —Laura Baginski

Poll vaulting
While
Barack Obama and John McCain debate how their tax plans will affect Joe
the Plumber’s ambitions to buy his company, William Klee has other
things on his mind. The 51-year-old has been homeless for three and a
half years and spends his days selling StreetWise around
DePaul University’s campus. On Tuesday 4, Klee will cast his ballot
(for the first time) after a rep for the Chicago Coalition for the
Homeless (CCH) outside of DePaul registered him. Although he doesn’t
have a permanent address, Klee is able to vote thanks to a 1992 law
that allows homeless people in Illinois to use an address they often
frequent, such as a shelter, for registration. This September, the CCH
and Cook County Clerk David Orr pushed for recognition of the law by
holding a training session for shelter representatives to become deputy
registrars. Though numbers are still coming in, the CCH’s Mimi Chubb
says those who attended the training registered more than 550 homeless
people. An excited Klee says he’s voting Obama on election day. “Obama
will probably try to change things around a little bit for the middle-
or lower-class people,” he says. “Whether he’s successful or not, I
don’t know, but I think he’ll give it a try.” —Sheila Burt

A step in the right direction
The
headquarters of Chicago’s Grand Old Party isn’t grand at all—it’s
merely a spare, one-room office in Wicker Park. Standing in the center
of the room the night after the final presidential debate, Shawn Healy
is explaining that, despite what a passerby just yelled through the
building’s open door, John McCain doesn’t suck. “People say he doesn’t
know economics. What? He chaired the Senate Commerce
Committee,” says Healy, the 33-year-old cochair of the Illinois Young
Professionals for McCain (YPs) and a poli-sci Ph.D. student at UIC.
“What does Barack know about economics? He’s never run anything. He
hasn’t even run a Dairy Queen.” That line gets a big laugh out of the
eight twentysomethings—all either members of the YPs or the Chicago
Young Republicans (YRs)—sitting at desks with phones glued to their
ears, making calls to Wisconsin voters. Barn burners in the 2000 and
2004 elections saw President Bush lose Wisconsin by a very slim margin,
and Healy and his troops—recruited through Facebook and a series of pub
crawls—are out to make sure that won’t happen again. Two days from now,
says Jeremy Rose, the political director of the Chicago YRs, a large
group of YRs from red states such as Texas, Tennessee, Kentucky and
Louisiana will fly into O’Hare and be bused up to Wisconsin to canvass.
“Here in Illinois, people react like [Young Republicans] are some kind
of endangered species, like we’re that lone cougar,” Healy says. “We’ve
been pushed around and kicked out of booths at neighborhood festivals
that we paid for. But then you come here and realize there’s a whole
den of cougars.” —Jake Malooley