Door-to-Door with Carl Sciortino
New England Blade
Sep 3, 2008
On Whitmore Street in South Medford Rep. Carl Sciortino, (D-Medford), walks from house to house. The sun has already started to set. Illuminated inside houses are flickering televisions, families eating dinner, tableaus of domesticity.
Sciortino walks with a clipboard on which are lists of people who support him and a pile of campaign materials. When we stop at a two-family home, he has to shift the campaign materials to his other hand so he can ring the bell. He's already been at this house once before but there was no one home. No one answers this time either, so he leaves behind one of his campaign brochures with a note: "Sorry I missed you."
We walk to the next house and again, no one answers.
The third house we try, the identified supporter resides in the second-floor apartment. Sciortino rings the bell but no one answers. Instead, a man sticks his head out a second-floor window and asks what Sciortino wants.
"I'm Carl Sciortino, the state representative from this district," says Sciortino, "I wanted to see if there was anything I could do for you or anything you wanted to talk about."
The man has nothing to say and doesn't come downstairs. Sciortino leaves behind a brochure and we keep going.
"Its a balance," said the two-term openly gay state rep. "If you go out too early, nobody will be home from work. But you don't want to seem like you're intruding by being out too late." Sciortino has already been canvassing for nearly two hours by the time he reaches Whitmore Street. We're going through the first major cluster of identified supporters, the second time Sciortino has done list this since May -- even during the height of the legislative session -- after the alleged theft of his election papers left him short the necessary certified signatures to have his name listed on the state party primary ballot. To retain his seat, he has mounted an aggressive write-in sticker campaign, the likes of which he hasn't had to do since he first ran for office in 2004.
But to win this way, voters have to either write in his name or use one of the pre-printed stickers he's handing out to anyone who's willing to take one, like a woman we encounter later in the evening. She answers the door to her yellow Victorian wearing a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. She recognizes Sciortino and tells him almost immediately that he has her vote in September. "Do you know about the problem with my name not being on the ballot," he asks her. She doesn't, so he explains. It's clear that he's given this part of his door-knocking speech several times. He takes responsibility for the loss of the election papers. "Leaving the election papers in an unsecured location was an error in judgement," he says, and he gives her one of the his pre-printed stickers. He has to hope that she'll remember to either bring it with her to the election or that she'll write in his name.
"This part of Medford," Sciortino explained to me, "will typically either vote for the Italian guy, or the guy from Medford." Sciortino is both. But he's openly gay, which in some races might mean an automatic vote for whoever is running against the gay, Italian guy from Medford. Not so, here. Sciortino's district is split about evenly between Medford and Somerville. In the West Somerville neighborhood around Sciortino's campaign office, there are signs for Sciortino's opponent, Somerville Alderman Robert Trane, in at least a dozen places. In the same area, there aren't many signs for Sciortino, which he doesn't comment on when explaining that in this neighborhood, "Trane and his supporters have put up a lot of signs."
Signs or not, Sciortino is hopeful that voters will remember why it is they voted him in to office in the first place in 2004. This time around, he says, is very much like that campaign, when he, a 26-year-old Tufts graduate, unseated veteran legislator Vincent Ciampa by 93 votes in the primary, and facing no Republican challenger, again defeated Ciampa (who decided to run a write-in campaign) by 117 votes in the general election. Two years later, his race was uncontested. Instead of campaigning for himself, he campaigned for the election of Gov. Deval Patrick, who has returned the favor this year.
"Carl's service is demanded on Beacon Hill," Patrick said at a July fund-raiser for Sciortino in Somerville. "There is a kindness about him, a thoughtfulness, and a sense of where policy touches the lives of people."
By visiting some of the people in his district more than one time, not only is he counting on them remembering him, but he's also getting an opportunity to learn first-hand what it is his constituents want from the person who represents their interests legislatively. A middle-aged man answers the door at a house, keeping inside two large dogs. Sciortino has been to this house before, but that time, he spent most of his time talking to this man's wife. She is concerned about the Green Line extension to Medford.
Her husband is a different story. He doesn't outright tell Sciortino that he has his vote, but he does want to talk. And Sciortino, like any good politician, listens. The man opposes casinos (so does Sciortino), doesn't know what he will do if the cost of fuel continues to skyrocket ("[this will be] one of the most critical issues this fall," says Sciortino) and isn't sure who to support in the national election. Sciortino says he's voting for Sen. Barack Obama, but the man is undecided. The two talk about their Italian heritage. The man asks Sciortino what part of Italy his family is from. Sicily, says Sciortino. There's even town named Sciortino there. You can see it on Google maps, he says.
As the exchanged stretches longer than five minutes, Sciortino gracefully tries to pull himself away, conscious that there are more addresses on his list than there is daylight left. It's clear, though, that this is what Sciortino likes doing, talking with constituents, about issues, sure, but sometimes not talking about issues is fine, too.
"I love it. This is one of the best experiences of my career. I know that's something a lot of politicians would say about canvassing. But I really believe it. And that's not something I would have said the first time I ran for office," Sciortino tells me this after we've finished for the night. We've returned to his campaign office, a nondescript storefront on a residential street, where a radio broadcast from the Democratic Party Convention is playing. Sciortino checks in with his campaign volunteer coordinator, Erin O'Leary, who was also out canvassing tonight. Most nights, says Sciortino, he knocks on doors alone, but there are others out there doing the same on his behalf.
O'Leary is dogged in her efforts to recruit volunteers. Over the past few months, she's asked me repeatedly to volunteer for the campaign, even though I tell her it's a conflict of interest and that however much I like Sciortino as a person, I can't stump on his behalf. But she's had better luck with other people. Most nights, the campaign has 15 volunteers going door to door. On this night, the last volunteer returns to the office at a little after 9 p.m. She's identified eight previously unidentified Sciortino supporters and talked to even more than that.
And while Sciortino says it's a good day when a volunteer has better luck than the candidate and I'm preparing to leave, I'm reminded of one of the conversations he had with someone who was home. We were on Main Street, at a three-decker. Sciortino rung the doorbell of an upstairs apartment. Someone else living in the multi-unit house, a woman, came to the door. Sciortino asked her who she's supporting in the election.
She's not even registered to vote, she told him, and regardless, she wouldn't vote anyway. She "hasn't found anyone I can believe in," she said.
It's honest, this woman, carrying her dinner of take-out, telling a candidate there is no one in whom she can believe. And Sciortino responded in turn, equally honest.
"I hope to be that someone you can believe in."
She smiled at him and took his campaign materials when he offered them to her. She wished him good luck and went back inside, closing the door behind her. Sciortino looked for a few seconds at the closed door, then again at his clipboard, and we walked away, onward to the next house on the list.