They must cut through the defensive force field on the other end, earn some trust, start with a folksy line that will hook the voting fish.

Otherwise, the phone can be a lonely place.

"Hi, I work for . . . "

Click.

"Hello?"

"I don't do very well with the script," said Jennifer Parker, a 31-year-old nurse and volunteer for John Edwards's presidential campaign. "I kind of improvise a little. You get a feel if someone is going to hang up on you and how to engage them in a conversation right away. You want to show them that you're not just reading from a script, that you actually want to talk to them, or else you can just sound like a recording."

Parker and other volunteers want to avoid what she calls the "hang up." The term speaks for itself.

That's one of the goals, perhaps the No. 1 goal, of those working anonymously downtown, promoting their candidates by phoning, canvassing, mailing postcards.

"I wouldn't say people are mean," Parker said. "I would say that some are not necessarily interested in talking at the time. I've had some people say, 'I don't vote.' I had one tonight. People are funny. When you get someone who's interested, it's kind of nice to have a little dialogue."

The Edwards office, near the intersection of Main and Pleasant streets, was busy on this raw, rainy night. Five desks and two long tables filled up one big room. There were four volunteers and six staff members, with more to follow as the night wore on.

The objective was to spread the word about Edwards's upcoming town meeting in Bow.

Kelly Drake, 27, is an outsider. She works for a political consulting firm in Seattle, where, she says, the presidential buzz is nearly nonexistent. Not like here, where it's equal to a hive of hornets.

She came here to attend the Young Democrats of America's quarterly meeting in Manchester. She went to the University of Iowa, located in the state of the first caucus. She's a political junky, so there she was during her free time, far from home, working the phone for Edwards.

"I wanted to come out a couple of days early, and I'm staying a couple of days later to get my political fix," Drake said. "In Washington state, there are no offices for any campaign. You hear about this on the news, Iowa and New Hampshire."

She's undecided, torn between Edwards and Barack Obama. "When I have a break, I'm going to a campaign office," she said. ". . . I may bop down there and see what's going on."

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