I got the e-mail about a month ago. “Come to Oregon for Barack,” it urged. I’d gotten a similar one in February, asking me to come to Texas. It sounded fun, and warmer than Seattle, so I went to Texas. Oregon sounded good, too. It’s not hard to convince me to skip classes with a month left until graduation.

I’ve now been in three states for three very different Democratic nominating processes. First, Washington, where our February caucus meant everything and our primary nothing – as far as November’s election, anyway.

In March, I was in San Antonio for the “Texas Two-Step.” Both the primary and the caucus counted for electing delegates, meaning our primary job for the campaign was convincing people to stick around for the caucus after the polls closed.

I didn’t encounter a single person who’d ever participated in a caucus in four days of campaigning in Texas. At around 8 p.m. on March 4, I called the Democratic caucus for precinct 2054 to order. And proceeded to run the entire thing. I was the only one there who’d actually seen a caucus happen, so I became the automatic expert.

In Texas, everything we did felt absolutely crucial to the election. It didn’t matter whether the person who answered the door was supporting Sen. Barack Obama, Sen. Hillary Clinton, or, bizarrely, John Edwards, who had dropped out of the race a month prior. Chances were they had no idea they got to vote twice.

The grassroots campaign style served Obama well in Texas. Though Clinton won the primary, the caucuses were filled with people we’d met over the weekend, and who came together for an Obama victory.

In Portland this past weekend, campaigning was a different story.

Though Oregon has a primary, it doesn’t actually have any polls. All voting has been done by mail since 1981. We still went door-to-door like we did in Texas, but instead of imploring voters to come caucus in support of Obama, we reminded them that all ballots had to be in by 8 p.m. on Tuesday. On Monday and Tuesday, when it was too late to mail them, we passed out fliers with ballot drop-box locations or offered to turn ballots in ourselves.

Also different from San Antonio to Portland: Obama has been slated to win Oregon since before I arrived. Sweltering in a crowd of 72,000 during what the Obama campaign said was their largest rally yet and the serenity of mail-in-voting are a far cry from the chaos and sense of urgency we felt in Texas.

For Oregon voters, there was nothing new about this election. Canvassing after Sunday’s rally I asked a voter whether he needed information on where to find drop-boxes. He laughed.

“I’ve been doing this for 20 years. I think I can handle it,” he said.

I didn’t actually expect anyone to hand me his or her sealed and signed ballot. No one expected that, really, and canvassers who came back to headquarters at the end of the day with even one ballot were praised and envied.

Monday though, people were running out of time to turn in their votes. By the time Mebinchi Flulcer, an innkeeper from San Francisco, and I finished canvassing the area South of Reed College, we’d collected five.

Mebinchi took a 16-hour train ride from San Francisco to help canvass. He said his inspiration to campaign for Obama comes from a woman he sees often around San Francisco. She’s always alone, always holding a petition to legalize prostitution. One day, he said, he wished her good luck as he passed by.

“Luck has nothing to do with it honey,” she told him. “It’s hard work.”

Since then, he says, he’s felt a sense of responsibility to work for the change he wants to see in the country.

Halley Griffin is a UW journalism student and a reporter for The Daily. She wrote this article as a personal narrative. The views expressed herein do not represent the collective political stance of The Daily.