GOTV, Iowa Style

Corrections worker Mindy Kemper won't take no for an answer when she advises members to vote — for union-friendly candidates.

By Roger M. Williams

DONNELLSON, IOWA —Appropriately for a small farming town in southeast Iowa, when political super-activist Mindy Kemper tells her fellow state workers to vote and keep voting, she puts the message right down where even the hogs could get it. "I say, 'You have to understand that you're voting for your bosses," says Kemper, a mem–ber of Local 2989 (Council 61), "and that we need union-friendly people at the top."

To Kemper, "the top" means virtually all elected officials who have some degree of influence over public employees' jobs, especially those in the Iowa State Peniten–tiary, where she works as a clerk specialist. Although she naturally expends the most energy on Presidential primaries and gubernatorial races, she also works hard on cam–paigns ranging from U.S. representative to state legislator to county treasurer — "anything that affects our district."

Among the politically minded in Council 61, and indeed throughout southeastern Iowa, Kemper is known as the lady who really gets out the vote — that is, the vote favorable to working families and their interests. "Mindy has the best local-voter programs I've ever seen run by a member," declares Paula Bentley, an AFSCME area organizing director who has seen plenty of such programs. "Her folks vote for the union-endorsed candidate a high percentage of the time."

'SIGN RIGHT HERE!'

Referring to Iowa's system of voting by mail, which starts with a signed form requesting a ballot, Bentley adds: "When members of Mindy's unit see her coming, they automatically get out their pens, ready to sign." She is, in a word, relentless.

Kemper has entered every one of her local's 430-odd members into a database. Many of the entries list "no party," but that doesn't deter Kemper when elections roll around: "I go after them [and Republicans] anyway. I try to educate them on why, whatever their party, they should vote for the candidate who supports workers and unions." Kemper began honing her get-out-the-vote skills in the late '90s, when she and her husband John (who's president of the local) rounded up "a few of the members" to work for current Gov. Tom Vilsack in the Democratic gubernatorial primary. In the course of that campaign, the few became a few hundred, transforming a politically sleepy local into a powerhouse.

This election year, Kemper's beating the drums for Mike Blouin, a Democrat running to succeed Vilsack. Blouin, she says, has repeatedly supported the prison and its workers. Council 61, which has often put her on lost-time status during campaigns, is about to do so in his behalf. Lucky Mike!