Page 7 of See You Next Tuesday

“Damn it,” Gabe swore.

“We’d better get in there,” Dawn said.

“So some suit from DC can tell us how to run this race? Let’s skip it.”

“Extremely unbiased opinion given your current situation, but I’d like to keep my job, so.” Dawn zipped him up a little too fast—he gasped in surprise.

She sauntered out of the office, and he followed in her wake, glancing at his phone to see if he’d missed any other messages. There was one from his organizer out in Piqua letting him know the afternoon phone bank was up and running and asking him to grab more donuts—he fired off a response that he couldn’t be there until closer to five so he’d bring pizza instead. A slew of notifications about birthday messages on his Facebook wall, nothing from his parents (big surprise). Maybe they’d call later—not that he’d have time to talk even if they did.

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.”