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Before Hill Harper was an award-winning actor on CSI: New York, he was Barack Obama's classmate and basketball buddy at Harvard Law. Harper joined the Gotta Vote bus tour in Madison, Wisconsin, today, to fire up University of Wisconsin students and tell them about the man he knew 20 years ago.

Death Cab for Cutie's Chris Walla says he got got drawn into the Obama grassroots movement "the same way everyone else did" in 2008. "I was ready for a change, ready for some optimism, ready to get out of the slump that we had been dragged into by the previous president." Walla was on tour with his band that year, but even on the road, he spent his days knocking on doors in cities like St. Louis and Minneapolis between shows.

This year is just as critical, he says, and he's making calls and canvassing once again. He's also stopping at college campuses as the Gotta Vote bus tour rolls through Wisconsin to make sure students know that by making their voices heard on the issues they care about, they can affect the outcome of this election. For Walla, that issue is Obamacare.

"Having grown up in an indie band, we all quit our jobs and/or dropped out of school at 22 to promote our record," says Walla. "We didn't realize it at the time, but we were starting a business. We were planting a seed in a place where I couldn't have predicted that 15 years later we'd be employing dozens of people. One of the things that we struggled with at different points was health insurance. It hits so close to home for me. It often feels like that one thing you can't afford to do. You've paid your car insurance, tuition, rent, whatever bills you have to keep up on.

"It's such a huge step in the right direction for this nation in terms of strengthening the social contract—the idea that we take care of each other as a nation. I believe it's vital that as the richest nation in the world that we don't let one another go personally bankrupt because something unforeseen happens. That's why I'm out here—to remind people that this president has done a lot of great things."

If you want to see four more years of great things from President Obama, then you gotta vote.

During a Gotta Vote bus tour stop at the Schofield Oriental Market, a grocery store and gathering place for the Hmong community in Wausau, Thomas, OFA's Hmong vote director, says his community—more than 50,000 strong in Wisconsin—stands with President Obama.

"We are very supportive of the President," says Thomas. "We are the middle class and the lower class, and what the President has done for the last four years has greatly benefited the community. We need him to continue."

Like so many others we've met on the Gotta Vote bus, Lee says the Affordable Care Act has had a major impact on his family. "I have three kids who have graduated from high school and went on to college, and now my health insurance does cover my children. That has been very good for my family."

So Lee has been doing his part to get out the vote across the state, educating Hmong Americans about voter registration and early voting and recruiting members of the community to volunteer at the local field office—whatever it takes for Wisconsin to be blue on November 6.

Gotta Vote