Obama for America's Gallup Pol

Nadine Padilla, 25, had been doing get-out-the-vote work for the Native American Voters Alliance for two years when she was recruited by the Obama campaign, which was looking for Navajo organizers in New Mexico. She'd been an Obama fan since his 2004 DNC speech, and in August 2008 she took a position as field organizer for McKinley County, a rural area an hour from where she grew up.

"I showed up at headquarters, and the state director said, 'You need to open an office.... This is what you're gonna do. Go do it,'" Padilla recalls. She drove to Gallup, a town of some 20,000 whites, Native Americans and Latinos. At a coffee shop she fundraised from local Democratic donors to pay the deposit on an office, and opened up shop in a space with big glass windows on Main Street.

For a while, Padilla was lonely in there--locals were skeptical about participating. "Some people would say, 'Why should I even vote? I have my own government,'" she recounts. (The Navajo nation has its own sovereign government.) But gradually, by conducting one-on-one meetings, Padilla developed a team of 130 volunteers. She says that the vast majority were working on a campaign for the first time, and most were under 30. Gallup has a small University of New Mexico campus, which turned out some college-age volunteers, and local high school students also signed up.

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