In North Carolina, the first absentee ballots will be mailed out just 33 days from today (Aug.3). Have you made a request for one, as a back up to in person voting? You should do so now if you wish to avoid the coming last-minute rush. When you receive your absentee ballot after Sept 4th, you should fill it out and immediately mail it back. There is no need to wait a minute longer to vote and return the ballot. Nor should you have a problem in making a decision as to who gets your vote. Seventy-four days from today, the early voting period will start on Thursday, 10/15 and will run until Saturday, 10/31 Two Sundays will be included in this period with times of 12 Noon until 5 PM. This will be the first time that we have two Sundays for early voting in Brunswick County. Ninety-three days will bring us up to November 3 - Election Day 2020. We have a tab on our website home page titled Voting, that provides more information on the how’s and where’s of voting in Brunswick County. Our Candidates tab can give you information on all our Democratic candidates to help you determine who deserves YOUR vote. Our volunteers are doing a great job with our virtual phone banks, and we can always use more help in reaching out to voters. This is an election year when events and canvassing neighborhoods won’t happen on any scale as was done in the past, if at all. Texting and phone calls for contact is what we have. Zoom online events can keep us distanced from each other but allow connections and information to flow between us. At present we have two billboards rented for September until November 3rd. These will be issue based for us, the Brunswick County Democratic Party. If we can find a suitable location and funds become available, we may add a third billboard. We, as a party, will also mail out information on our Democratic candidates to thousands of voters, starting at the end of August. These will be targeted mailings to voters who may lean our way, but don’t vote regularly, and voters who are unaffiliated, but who vote Democratic. In addition to the above, we will endeavor to make sure that signs are available throughout the county. I placed an order for signs just the other day, working with 38 other counties to hold down our costs to purchase signs and bumper stickers. These will be available at a nominal cost to anybody who would like to display say, a Biden sign. I did this when it became apparent that we were not going to receive any signs via the state party. We will have Biden, Roy Cooper, Cheri Beasley and Cal Cunningham signs and bumper stickers soon.
There is a lot going on here at the BCDP and I am just a very small part of that. You good and generous folks are the real deal. Many of you give time and/or treasure to keep us going. But this election is the most important of my life and I suspect that will be true for decades. For my entire life, I was taught that every election was important, but now, well for goodness sakes, just look around.
So, as you knew probably how this was going to end, we really could use more in the way of treasure to get that other billboard up. To get our mailing out to voters. A billboard is approximately around 1500 bucks or so for our two-month period. These are what the industry calls a poster size which is about 10 feet by 23 Feet. The two we rented will have around 120,000 views per week total. Our mailing is going to run around 70 cents each, all inclusive, inserts, postage, envelope, etc.
You can designate where you would want your donation to go and if we can’t spend it on that, due to whatever, I will give you a call and you can decide where you want it spent. It can also be shown as anonymous on our report that we accept at our meeting every month from our treasurer, Dwight Willis.
The worst part of my job is asking for money, but on a Zoom call the other day with former Vice President Joe Biden and President Obama, the former President thanked everyone for what they had done, but told us we must do more. This is it! It will be too late very soon. As the quote below states, help us walk through a wall of hate, racism, and absolute corruption that is the Republican party of present.
Tom
“There comes a time in a man’s life when to get where he has to go - if there are no doors or windows - he walks through a wall.” --Bernard Malamud