January 1

We arrived in Manchester on Sunday, Dec 30. Professor McLauchlan and I picked up the vans which turned out to be a bit more comfortable than the vans in 2004. We had dinner together that night at restaurant 99, and then went to our rooms early to get a bright start the next day. Monday morning, we met downstairs for breakfast and decided that both of the vans would go to each of the campaign headquarters so that both drivers would know where everyone was at. We used our mapquest maps to get to each location, but quickly realized that some of the maps were unreliable. One of the students had a GPS system on his cell phone, which turned out to be of invaluable assistance. Eventually we got everybody dropped off for their first day at the campaign, but it was basically a short day because some campaigns closed down operations early because it was New Years Eve. That night we all met at the restaurant again to have our Road To the White House New Years Eve party. Later that night, some of the students hung out in a room and watched the celebration in Times Square.

We met for breakfast at 8:30 and had a discussion with Professor David Redlawsk from the University of Iowa via cell phone. He discussed the Iowa caucuses and explained how they worked. It was an interesting conversation and I learned a few things that I did not know about the caucuses. We headed out to our headquarters after the discussion, and had our first full day at our campaigns. I arrived at the Biden headquarters in Concord a little before 11. Julia, my supervisor, was watching CNN and noticed that reporter John King was reporting from the New Hampshire State House. She wanted three of us interns to go to where he was at to hold signs on TV, but when we got there, they were packing up and getting ready to go. A bad snowstorm was in the forecast and it had started to snow pretty bad so we went back to HQ where we phonebanked for a few hours. But the snow had continued to fall and she decided that she wanted the interns to leave before it got dark because she worried about us driving in the bad weather. After I finished my list of numbers, I returned to Manchester where I picked up the Kucinich, Obama, and Romney people, and then returned to Nashua. Tonight we were on our own for dinner, so I went to the restaurant and got a bite to eat. We have another full day tomorrow, so I will probably call it an early night again.