Personal Connection Key to Campaigns

Elections turn on many things: campaign promises, policy decisions, advertising–it runs the gamut.

But at the local level, it may come down to one thing more than anything else:

The personal touch.

And so the four Republicans vying for two nominations for West Deptford committee on the November ballot have been out on the streets, maps in hand, clipboards jammed with spreadsheets listing likely voters, looking for that connection wherever they go.

On the quiet, Saturday afternoon streets of Verga, Sam Cianfarini and Ray Chintall came armed with bundles of campaign literature as they strolled the neighborhoods from a base of Chintall’s black Volvo.

Sometimes they rang doorbells, sometimes they stopped to talk to folks mowing their lawns, but their initial pitch was nearly always the same, with Cianfarini launching into a speech honed on the campaign trail and Chintall filling in the grace notes along the way.

They said that it’s important to get out to meet voters face-to-face, so they can show themselves as trustworthy, likeable people, and in turn, have those voters they meet spread the word through their circles of family and friends.

“That also gives (voters) hope that there’s someone with a real plan here,” Cianfarini said.

For Matt Mahon and Loran Oglesby, the other team on the ballot, the one-to-one connection was paramount, more important than campaign signs or literature.

Mahon, speaking after just having wrapped up an impromptu 30-minute session in one prospective voter’s living room Monday night, said he initially didn’t know realize how valuable that personal connection could be, after being wary of politicians knocking on his own door as a voter.

“I was a little unsure about going door-to-door at first,” he said.

But that lengthy chat was more often than not representative of their time on the trail, Mahon said, figuring that he and Oglesby had spent countless hours on couches and deck chairs, pitching their campaign to voters.

In all, they met with more than 600 people and made about 2,000 phone calls through the course of the primary race.

“It was really surprising, the people who opened up their doors and their homes to us,” Mahon said.