Hometown Political Rallies for Big-Name Candidates
Hometowns are happy when the Big-Name candidates rent their local venues for political rallies. Attendance is good, even in the small cities that pretty much support anything and everything.
I am not particularly politically active when it comes to leaving the house. But I do keep up with the issues. And when there are political meet-and-greets at local, or near-local, venues, I usually attend and have done so for years.
The two hometown rallies I most recently attended were hosted in restaurants. One of these restaurants was in my actual city, and the other one was two cities down the highway. The first one went fairly well, despite the surprise that we were expected to stand all scrunched up with each other for more than two hours. The second one was apparently designed by a committee. Well, if these things are going to work via committee, I am volunteering my cheeky wisdom!
Cheeky Wisdom for the Big Names
Kudos to using restaurants! But (of course there’s a but!):
- Realize that turnout will be sufficient to fill the entire venue, especially in hotly contested campaigns. (Deadlines on ticket counts can help a lot with anticipated numbers!)
- If you’re willing to feed your attendees, make sure you have plenty, there’s food for everyone and not just the campaign team, the food is presented in more than one location in the restaurant (this helps with traffic), and there is plenty of signage indicating your candidate is feeding us! (The restaurant needs to be compensated well for this, of course!)
- Pay attention to the needs of your constituents!
* In the first meeting, a 90+-year-old Holocaust-surviving couple was left standing in the meeting for hours! No chairs! They both used canes.
* In the second one, there were several people who needed seating accommodations. One of them was a tall (Vietnam? Desert Storm?) veteran with an obviously painful leg injury. He, too, leaned heavily on a cane. Another one was a lady in a walker. In general, it appeared that most people attending were senior citizens who were sporting leg and/or back issues. - Get your promotional notices on the same page with each other. I saw promotions for the same event in different online venues that had three different times for the same event to start, and only one way to contact one person with questions – AFTER we registered for a ticket! Does the event start at 4:00 or 6:30? What does it mean that the doors open at 5:30? (The restaurant is open long before then.) Is there seating? Is there food? There are those of us who need to know these things for various reasons prior to committing!
- Test your microphones! Is your keynote speaker soft-spoken? Be ready at the soundboard to crank up the reception! (There’s oddly never a problem doing this for the unnecessarily loud music.)
- Show no partiality for local officials. Endorsing/support elected officials who will be opening for and presenting the main candidate can sit or stand behind the speaker. That’s fair. But if you’re a six-foot-four giant of a mayor or city council member who is simply attending, you, sir (or madam), need to be a servant-leader and get thee behind the constituents! Let this message clearly go to each community official prior to the event.
- Police and security presence is a good thing. There will be hecklers. What some campaign teams don’t seem to realize is that some of these hecklers are also your candidate’s supporters! Weird, huh? In this last event, I wound up channeling my inner schoolmarm and, after an hour of ineffective stink-face messaging, I finally told (yelled at) the cackling hens at the back of the room to shut up and go stand in the corner! Many of us could hear them just fine, but we could not hear the people we came to see and hear. To make matters worse, these hens were obviously enjoying their brew; on exiting the venue, there was evidence of this on the floor as well. It was very crowded, so it would be difficult for the security team to kindly step in and remind the chatterboxes to be considerate of the hundreds of other people in the room, and offer them the option of continuing their jibber jabber in the main restaurant (or outside in the case of reserving the entire venue and not just the meeting room), but it would have been nice if they had.
*Some hecklers were removed in this latest event. One was interviewed by a reporter. I was glad she left, along with her purse that kept whacking me whenever she moved.
* Many hecklers were prevented from entering the restaurant in the previous event.
* None of the hecklers caused any injury, either inside or outside the venue, although in the previous event, they did try.
Coordinating Political Events is Hard!
Kudos to those who take on this behemoth venture! Things will invariably go wrong. Traffic will cause keynote speaker delays. Everyone is worn to a frazzle before the event even begins. So I do not write this a criticism. Rather, I note the above as an encouragement to help these brave souls more easily maneuver the leviathan-infested waters of campaign rallies.
The Book of Proverbs has several references to accepting wise advice as a blessing: 1:5, 11:14, 12:15, 15:31-32; 19:20. And those who read this post might just be blessed with a little light-hearted cheeky wisdom as well.