All have made sacrifices to get here. Mumu Xu ’07 shelled out $100 for airfare in addition to the cost of daily meals, all so that she could to give up her intersession break to work for Edwards. Matthew and Nathan Ray, two brothers who worked alongside the Harvard volunteers, drove down here from Ohio—a 10 and a half hour drive. Each brother is taking time off from school. Nathan, 23, is in his last quarter at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio; Matthew, 15, is a high school freshman playing hooky for a few days.

The streets they walk have names like Morning Dove Road and Summer Leaves Court. The neighborhood looks and feels like a recent development. The area of Canterbury Woods turns into the upscale Lake Myrtle Village, a block of pleasant suburban homes with manicured lawns and screened-in porches.

Xu clutches a list of voters as she trudges door to door. Stepping up to the porch, she knocks gingerly, waits a few seconds, then knocks again.

“I’m from the Edwards For President Campaign, and I was wondering if we could count on your support on Tuesday,” Xu says, in a prepossessing but shy voice.

She is a bit nervous at first—a bit too quick with her words. She may rush through her script, but in the end, the flyers are handed out, and the word has been spread.

The majority of homes she stops by this Friday afternoon are empty. Xu drops a flyer in the door and checks off the house from her list. Those who actually make it to the door are pleasant, but don’t say much. Maybe they’re undecided, maybe they’re already Edwards supporters; in the worst-case scenario, they’re Republicans.

After a full afternoon traipsing from one corner of the neighborhood to another, Xu is rundown by this tedious process.

“It’s pretty tiring,” she admits.

Young Blood

Motivated college students make up the bulk of the campaign workforce here in South Carolina.

“We relied heavily on volunteers, and a lot of those volunteers were college kids, with endless energy,” says Cate Edwards, daughter of Sen. Edwards and a senior at Princeton. “[They] don’t need to sleep because they don’t sleep anyway.”

Many of the Harvard volunteers here have more experience than their peers in the campaigns, and they took charge early.

Whether coordinating campaign events or after-hours drinking games, Brittani Head is one of the Edwards camp’s most resourceful members.

In the Charleston campaign office, she deals directly with the campaign directors. On the streets outside, she wields a video camera to capture the volunteers’ interactions with voters for an IOP television program.

Head’s take-charge attitude is matched by Jessica R. Rosenfeld ’07, who mans the front desk of the Edwards office just 24 hours after walking through the door for the first time.