Rita Hart, the Democratic candidate in Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District, arrived at the Pedestrian Mall Saturday morning wearing a “Team Hart” face mask and carrying a box of donuts. Her stop in Iowa City was the first of 14 Get Out The Vote events her campaign is holding in these final days until the election.

Hart is running against Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Hart served in the state Senate from 2013 to 2019, representing District 49. Miller-Meeks is currently serving her first term in the state Senate, representing District 41. 

Hart spoke to nine people involved with the University of Iowa Democrats and Iowa Democrats on Saturday about voter engagement and voting early.

Hart said a silver lining to the pandemic is that there are more early voting options, giving organizers a chance to engage with reluctant voters. 

“It’s so important you know that we get people there early,” she said. “… I think there’s a lot of people that have never voted before, or maybe have had a bad experience voting before, or they have personal stuff that’s going on where if they just had somebody reach out to them, have a good conversation, take them by the hand, then they’ll be able to use their right to vote in a way that will keep them voting.”

Many students have already voted, many of them utilizing early in-person voting at the Iowa Memorial Union. 

Hart went on to give her stump speech and answer a few questions from the group before thanking the volunteers and heading out. 

“Each one of us has got a role to play that’s so important in getting the result that we want in just a couple of days,” Hart said. 

Spencer Cooper-Ohn, a volunteer with the UI Democrats, said it was a cool opportunity to meet with the candidate he had been talking to voters about for the last several months. He said UI Democrats will be tabling and text banking in the next few days to make sure college students are voting. 

“It’s definitely different,” Cooper-Ohn said of voter engagement this year. “I’m used to things like, canvassing, going door to door talking to people, which is great and super fun, but it’s impossible now. So, calling people, texting people, is definitely weird, but I think we’re really making the best of it and we’re going to be trying to engage voters with what we have right now, which is distance engagement, trying to get to talk to people even if we can’t hunt them down at their houses.” 

UI freshman Avery Fair has been involved with Iowa Democrats since the summer of 2019 and said the election cycle has been a marathon. 

“I think meeting Rita right before is a nice final push to get us to Election Day to keep working hard,” she said.

She said relational organizing has been key to engaging voters during the pandemic. Her sorority sisters have been encouraging other sorority members to text their friends and family to remind them to vote.

“We’ve been doing a lot of like friend banks where we’re just texting our friends and trying to see what their voting plan is, making sure they’re registered,” Fair said. 

Hart said she already voted early at the Clinton County auditor’s office. Across Iowa, 924,533 absentee ballots have been returned as of Saturday, according to data from the Iowa Secretary of State’s office.

“A lot of people have voted already and this has been kind of a funny year for how we campaign. So, the important thing to me is that we are talking to as many people as we can, no matter what,” she said in an interview with The Daily Iowan. “But it’s also important to do what I did here today, which is to thank the volunteers who have been putting in the hours and the work and the time, and are really dedicated people who really want to see some good results on Tuesday.”