Knocking on doors in PA 6

I spent most of Sunday knocking on doors in Pennsylvania’s 6th Congressional District, getting out the vote for President Barack Obama and Dr. Manan Trivedi.

For the past month, my oldest daughter has been an intern with the Trivedi campaign. She turned 18 at the end of October, so this will be her first election as a voter. She found out about this internship on her own, applied, and has been working tirelessly after school and on weekends ever since. I canvassed with her one day in Phoenixville and was impressed by her ability to answer voters’ questions on the issues and where Trivedi stands on them.

I’m enormously proud of her.

Trivedi is a good guy — a former combat surgeon in Iraq. He faces an uphill battle against incumbent Jim Gerlach. It’s not that Gerlach is popular, or that he has an impressive record in Congress. But he’s running for re-election in a Gerlach-mandered district, redrawn to give him a lopsided advantage in registered voters.

Seriously, just look at the 6th, 7th and 16th districts on this map. The 7th has a longer external boundary than Texas. It’s a corruptagon. This is what gerrymandering looks like when its done by people who are both: A) incapable of subtly; and B) unconcerned with hiding what they’re doing.

So tomorrow I’m working for my daughter and Dr. Trivedi, driving voters to the polls and doing whatever else it is she/he needs me to do.

One fun side effect of my daughter’s campaign work: yesterday she ran into BooMan, who was also out volunteering for GOTV. I knew he lived nearby, but I’ve never met him myself because we have nothing in common — he’s a liberal blogger who grew up in Jersey, and … oh, wait.

Anyway, the point there is that if a couple of introverted bloggers can go out to knock on doors and GOTV, then you can maybe do it too.