I attended the rally for Mike McGavick at Bellevue High School last night (10-23). It was well-attended. There were the usual small crowd of rabid lefties outside with opposition signs, but they did not enter the building.

I arrived some 15 minutes late, so I missed some of the speeches, but Dino Rossi stood on the platform with my Congressman, Dave Reichert. After McGavick spoke, Senator John Thune--the guy who beat out Tom Daschle--from South Dakota got up and spoke. His speech was interesting. Before he ever ran for U.S. Senate, he was a three-term congressman, and didn't run for a fourth term because he promised to limit himself to three terms. He then spoke about his first senate race and how he lost by 800-odd votes and didn't figure he'd run again.

But others wanted him to run again; so after getting the okay from his family, he decided to jump back into politics by running against Daschle. People kept saying during the race that beating Daschle "couldn't be done", etc. Interestingly, he said that he never led in the polls at all before election day. He said that what made the difference was that the republicans just did a better job of turning out the vote than Daschle's people. That was a real eye-opener for me. It tells me that anything you or I do to get word out to people is more than worth it.

You might help with making calls, or with mailing efforts. Or you might do what I typically do, which is dropping campaign literature on porches, or even stuffing newspaper tubes along the road as I do out here in my area, with various election info. Most campaigns have smallish pieces of literature that fit well into newspaper tubes. You can even just photocopy a good newspaper endorsement and use that to distribute. Believe me, this kind of thing helps.

Why? Well, back in the 80's, when I was a very uninformed voter living in N. Seattle, I got a brochure on my driveway from the John Miller congressional campaign. I'd never heard of him before, but I liked what I read. I never got anything from his opponent, so guess who I voted for in the election? Yep, Miller. He won, too. So you see, this stuff does make a difference.

Another thing i do is carry around a hammer in my car during campaign season. When I'm out and about and I see a republican sign that has fallen down, I park and go put the sign back up. These are small things, but they can help. My aunt (a staunch republican nowadays) told me that back when she was a know-nothing voter, she once voted for a guy because he had more signs than the other guy, so she figured he had more support. That was all she had to go on! See? The littlest things can help.

So learn from Thune's speech and do whatever you can to help get the vote out and know that it CAN swing an election.