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Huffington PostWorking America, Labor Group, To Mobilize Unemployed Voters
First Posted: 08-18-10 08:29 AM | Updated: 08-18-10 08:29 AM
A labor-allied group is hoping to tilt the November elections toward Democrats not by playing to voters' dissatisfaction with the economy but by motivating the actual victims of the recession.
Working America, a community-organizing affiliate of the AFL-CIO, launched a campaign on Wednesday to organize and motivate hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers to head to the polls in the November elections.
The organization is starting with 100,000 of its own members who are currently out of work. But the list of contacts could wind up being "several hundred thousand" of the nearly 15 million unemployed, said Karen Nussbaum, director of Working America. In Ohio alone, Nussbaum said, Working America has a list of 38,000 unemployed workers who are registered to vote -- a major bloc that could tip the scale of the governor's race as well as elections to the House or the Senate.
"In an election year that is incredibly volatile where we have no idea, really, what turnout's going to look like, where we have no idea what the real appeal of right-wing candidates is going to be, and where we're not sure what kind of information people are going to get about the key issue, which is jobs, this becomes a more influential group," said Nussbaum.
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