American Legion South Portland added to Q&A Tour, Strategy Update, Invitation to Volunteer

As noted yesterday, I will be at the American Legion Stewart P Morrill Post on Broadway on Monday the 18th. I’ll be heading there after work, and speaking and taking questions from 6-7:30 (see the flyer at the bottom for details, and reread my platform to prepare!).

Today was a day of very little progress. Partly this is because of other obligations, partly this is because the City of South Portland chose yesterday and today, specifically, to get up in arms about a non-campaign event that I have planned for this coming Sunday morning (some of you have heard about the time in 2024 when they made me remove a bunch of benches I’d left by bus stops…suffice it to say it’s related to that). I was also pondering our progress so far, and it’s time for a strategy update.

Starting as soon as I get back to Maine on Saturday I will be shifting my focus back towards getting out directly in our communities. Placing petition circulators in public areas and hoping people find their way to them is not working for us. We simply do not have the size of audience required. Further, while I have time and energy to be in all the towns on the Q&A tour on schedule, I do not have the time needed to hunt and book venues. I also don’t have money to pay for ones that aren’t low-cost or free. All the events for which I already have a venue booked (Hi Fidelity, South Portland American Legion, Brunswick Curtis Memorial Library, Panacea, Fernald’s) will remain on the calendar. The remaining session times and towns remain available, but only if someone else can find a venue and do some publicity; just let me know and I’ll be there.

Aside from that, the path to 2,000 signatures is now more complicated. I estimate it will take a group of 20 of us ten hours of canvassing apiece in order to get there; I myself will be one of them, and will be in all the towns on my schedule to knock on doors if I don’t have a venue to speak. I know one other person who will be doing this for me so that means we only need 18 more volunteers. Our final deadline is in 12 days. I can provide training, papers, pens, and generally everything except actual people. Unfortunately everyone I know is either already involved or too busy to be, if not both, so to the folks finding us for the first time: welcome. If this is your first blog post, then congratulations, you picked the perfect time to come aboard. The promise of our country is that you can always vote for what you believe in, and the caveat is that that’s only true if what you believe in is on the ballot. Email me at tristramforcongress@gmail.com to arrange if your Memorial Day weekend is otherwise looking boring.

The other thing anybody can do to directly help me is to share information on events and the campaign to their social media. My social media is limited in scope and every time I try to add a new platform I have to spend an entire day convincing it I’m not a robot, battling for storage space on my phone, and figuring out how it works, and I don’t have that in me anymore until June. You can find me here, on Facebook, and on Instagram, and that’s my whole bandwidth.

The volunteers already working for me: I know some of you get these emails and I am not asking more of you. I truly could not have gotten even this far without your support. It means the stars to me that you have seen my platform, thought to yourselves “actually I do want cheaper healthcare and the government to prepare my taxes for me,” and then gone and done everything you could to make it real. Thank you from my entire heart.