Canvassing Day 4

Canvassing started up again today. A third person joined us, and we continued back into a blighted area. I didn't register any voters today, whereas I think we have registered about 25 people earlier in the week. Today I got slowed down because one of the residents decided to argue about issues for 45 minutes. He spoke from experience, which has to count for something--but he seemed to have a fairly limited field of social networks, from the middle-class as opposed to the poor. While I was arguing about Democrats in City-Council who have been voting like Republicans, failing to support the poor, he adamantly denied that the city-council's and mayor's policies were disenfranchising the poor. Considering his surroundings, an extremely poor community, it was difficulty to understand his motivation or his reasoning. I thought perhaps he had a personal connection to his city-councilor, Jackie Nytes (who is leaving), but he hadn't even heard of her. He also had several misconceptions about charter schools, and was FIRM in his (wrong) beliefs, like the belief that most charter schools around the nation are doing better than public schools (only 3% are doing better than public schools), and that Peterson didn't put any special guidelines on charter schools (which he did, making them follow the same restrictions as public schools, guidelines that Daniels' plan wants to rescind).