Chapter 2 #2
Gabe shoved his phone in his pocket and strode into the “conference room,” aka the room with the Xerox machine, where the whole of the Salditch for Congress senior staff was crowded around a couple of card tables with folding chairs.
The consultant woman was giving her presentation on a laptop stacked on some cardboard boxes full of flyers.
She’d probably assumed they had a projector, which made Gabe snicker.
She was woefully overdressed in slacks and a button-down, with dark curly hair pulled back in a neat bun.
She wore tall black heels, but she was obviously petite, and every part of her was curvy: her figure, her sloped nose, her lips.
She was definitely attractive; if Gabe wasn’t already seeing Dawn (and if he wasn’t so annoyed about the consultant being here in the first place), he’d be scheming excuses to take her out after work.
And was he crazy, or did she look familiar? He wasn’t sure—he couldn’t place her.
“People like Coach Salditch, but they don’t know what she stands for,” she was saying.
“They know she’s a Democrat though, right?” Gabe joked as he took his seat.
The woman shot him a look. She seemed startled for a moment, but regained her composure almost immediately.
“Actually, they don’t. Well, twenty-one percent of registered voters don’t, and that’s a big problem.”
God, she was smug. Fucking consultants.
“That’s a very big problem,” Toby agreed.
Toby was the campaign manager and Gabe’s boss.
He was short, excitable, and way too kind to be working in politics.
But he was a hard worker and old friends with the candidate, and he inspired a great deal of loyalty from the staff. “What do you suggest, Anya?”
Anya. Gabe knew her for sure, he just didn’t know how.
Had they hooked up? Is that why she looked so surprised to see him?
He knew he hadn’t slept with her, but maybe they’d made out in a bar or something?
He tried to conjure the memory of his tongue in her mouth, her hips in his hands, but came up blank.
No. There was no way he’d kissed this girl and forgotten.
“You’re tight on time, but there’s a lot we can do to move message on policy: earned media, op-eds.
” Anya pressed a button on her laptop to display her next slide.
“And I saw you have three town halls scheduled in the next two weeks. What if we theme those by issue area? One on jobs, one on healthcare, one on education.”
“I like that.” Toby nodded.
“Hold up. Shouldn’t we let voters talk about the issues that matter to them?” Gabe was skeptical. “Isn’t the whole point of a town hall to make them feel heard?”
“These issues do matter to them,” Anya insisted.
“And if we theme the events, we’ll draw the people who want to talk about our best issues.
More important, we’ll get the media to focus on those issues, move coverage of the race onto our turf.
We have to get our numbers up with drop-off Dems and independents, and they want to hear about middle-class tax cuts, better healthcare, keeping good jobs on American soil.
For the next two weeks, anytime Coach Salditch is in public, I don’t care what the question is, the answer needs to be ‘keeping good jobs on American soil.’ ”
“Op-eds, earned media, town halls, bread-and-butter messaging.” Toby ticked them off on his fingers. “Good. What else?”
“You’re doing great on voter contacts—”
“Thank you,” Gabe said sarcastically.
“—but you’ve got room to do more. Your canvasses and phone banks are both dark on Saturdays.”
“Have you ever tried knocking doors on Ohio game day?” Gabe scoffed. “We’d lose more voters than we’d gain.”
“That’s true,” Toby confirmed. Gabe felt a small flare of victory in his chest, but Anya smiled.
“That’s why I went to the trouble of creating a non-football voter universe.”
She extracted a thick ream of paper from her bag and dropped it on the table. It landed with a thunk.
“Non-football universe?” Gabe peered at her.
“The VAN has dozens of data points for each voter—sometimes hundreds,” Anya said.
“Van?” Dawn asked.
“Voter access network,” Gabe explained.
“So I eliminated anyone who subscribes to Sports Illustrated, anyone who’s ever bought a ticket to an NFL game, anyone who went to a Big Ten school, anyone who’s a fan of any football team on Facebook, anyone who lives at the same address as any of those people.
And all men—just to be safe.” Anya grinned, and the others laughed.
“What’s left is a beautiful universe of women Democrats who don’t care about football and have turned out in at least one midterm.
You only have two Saturdays left. Might as well not waste them. ”
“That is a great idea.” Toby turned to Gabe. “Why didn’t you think of it?”
Gabe flushed red. It was a good idea, and he should have thought of it, but that didn’t mean he needed to sit here and listen while Anya watched him with a self-satisfied little smirk.
“Speaking of voter contacts, I have a phone bank out in Piqua I promised to stop by,” he said as he stood up. “I should head over before the traffic gets bad.”
“Oh! Piqua!” Anya started shuffling through her papers again. “If it’s not too late to adjust those call scripts—”
“It is,” Gabe gritted.
“Well, for next time—”
“Why don’t you email it to me?” Gabe tried to make his face and voice seem as friendly as possible, but he wasn’t sure how well he was hiding that this woman got on his last nerve.
Toby glanced at his watch, then made meaningful eye contact with Dawn. “Actually, it’s almost three-thirty. So we should probably all take a break?”
Anya looked confused. “I still have a lot to get through?”
“That’s okay, this will only take a second.” Dawn smiled a touch too brightly, leaving no doubt in Gabe’s mind that she and Toby were up to something.
Gabe opened the door onto the HQ bullpen—a big space that might be a phone bank, a sign-making pizza party, or a staging location for a canvass, depending on the day—and was immediately met with crowds of staff and volunteers holding balloons, wearing dumb paper hats, and blowing on noisemakers.
“Happy birthday!” they screamed, and Gabe broke into a wide smile as his favorite cadre of older ladies (super vols from a nearby retirement community, every one of whom had tried to fix up Gabe with a daughter or granddaughter) approached with a big homemade sheet cake festooned with lit candles.
The whole group started singing, and Gabe’s bad mood melted away.
He saw that Anya was smiling bigger than anyone—she even looked a little misty-eyed? Okay, that was weird, but maybe sweet?
Until the group sang “Happy birthday, dear Gabe,” and her expression changed completely. Her face fell, and her cheeks flushed with color as she cast her eyes downward and clasped her hands together. Which is when Gabe remembered exactly how he knew her—and that today was her birthday too.
He was hit with a sudden wave of guilt. She might be an overbearing outsider who thought she could do his job better than he could, but that didn’t mean he’d needed to be a jerk to her on her damn birthday.
“Gabe?” Dawn prodded him.
“Yeah?” He turned to her, dazed.
“Aren’t you going to blow out your candles?”
“Right, duh,” he laughed. “Had to think of a really good wish.”
He winked at his favorite volunteers, then blew out all the candles.
Everyone cheered and applauded, and the retirees went to slice up the cake and hand it out on paper plates.
Gabe turned to find Anya; if an apology wasn’t entirely necessary, at the very least he wanted to wish her a happy birthday.
But he didn’t see her anywhere, and she didn’t turn up the whole time they were chatting and eating cake.
By the time they finished, it was almost four, and Gabe really did need to hit the road.
There were hungry phone-bankers in Piqua.