While Governor Romney and President Obama temporarily call off the race to the White House due to hurricane Sandy, one Brooklyn school teacher, unable to return to school with her students is hitting the phones for Obama.
A maths teacher at Brooklyn's High School of Telecommunication Arts and Technology, Ellie Terry, remained home instead of evacuating as many of her students did.
“The subways were closed and I don't have a car, so there was no real way to evacuate for me,” she said.
“People started to tape up their windows, no one in this neighbourhood has really experienced a hurricane before.”
Eighteen fatalities have been confirmed in the New York area so far, with up to 30 across the east coast.
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“The schools are being used as shelters; FDR High School is being used to house students and their families who were evacuated from their homes and apartments,” she said.
As millions across the northeast remain without power like her parents in Cape Cod, which bore the brunt of the storm, she is in relatively unscathed Brooklyn, with the lights still on.
Unable to go to work and with nothing else to do, she using her time to call undecided voters in swing-state Pennsylvania.
She is using a Facebook plug-in app called the Obama for America Call Tool, which allows “supporters to connect with voters on issues important to them”.
“They mostly don't answer. But when they do, I just tell them why I am voting for Obama,”
It widely predicted that President Obama will receive a bump in the polls during the emergency, as he flies to New Jersey to see the damage first hand.
But with potential disruptions to the votes in heartland states, the benefit to the Democrat campaign for re-election is still difficult to measure in a time when literal damage, not just political damage, is still being assessed.
