Connecting with Strangers

Finding relationship through phone banking

This election season, I signed up to do something that introverts hate to do. I signed up to make phone calls. I support a local candidate and I wanted to help them with their campaign. It was something I felt strongly about, but I never would intentionally make a period of my day all about making phone calls to strangers. It’s certainly not my idea of fun. I see it as self-flagellation as an offering to the universe.

At first I thought phone banking would be about the power of the things in the script. I thought it would be about the key points I say to convince people to back my candidate. If I just read the correct talking points, I would be able to hit the voters with what they needed to know or wanted to hear so they would put my candidate on their yes list. The first few calling sessions were like that. I tried to refine my presentation to the listener so it came off as smooth and natural. Once I got beyond a general comfort with the calling script, I realized that it’s not about what I say. It’s about what kind of a conversation I can get the listener to have with me.

In the modern age of information, anyone can google a candidate’s website. Voters get flyers in the mail every day. The point of modern phone banking is to make voters who may not vote to care enough about the election to get out and vote. It’s to get a swing voter to care about your candidate and remember their name. Any auto dialer can read someone a script. A phone banker needs to start a conversation. The conversations are what voters will remember.

I made my phone banking routine into a mediation. Before I called a number, I imagined the voter in my mind and wished them my best. When a voter engaged with me over the phone, the point for me was to make a connection. The point was to show that I wasn’t just a robocaller. I was a neighbor who cared enough to call about this. Hopefully, I through my caring and contact, I could show that the candidate also cared about them and wanted to make a connection with them.

I learned a lot talking to voters over the phone. I talked to people who had phone banked for Feinstein on her mayoral campaign 40 years ago. I talked to truck drivers who wanted reform on the regulations that keep them away from home more nights than they want to be. I was educated on racial justice reform by someone who wanted more policy change than photo ops.

I still hate phone banking. To be honest, I’m not really into talking with strangers anywhere about anything, but I do feel like these interactions were almost a mindfulness practice. How can I engage someone I don’t know and don’t see over this phone line? How can I show love to my neighbor when I’m pretty sure I would hang up on me?

I met so many young phone bankers and I think about how much better I would have been as a teacher if I had this social skill practice when I was in college. When I start going out in public again, I know I will take some of these skills of interactions into how I meet and great people in my regular life. I hate cocktail party conversation, but I love connection and people. Deep connection with real people is definitely a way to add color to life.