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A Kamala Harris Canvasser’s Education

A Canvasser's Lament 3B

A Canvasser's Lament 3B

In October, as a novice volunteer knocking on doors in Pennsylvania for the Kamala Harris campaign, my task was to make sure that committed Democrats voted, and to persuade undecided voters that Harris was the better choice. I was told not to spend time talking with voters who were clearly supporters of Donald Trump. But there was something about the way one man snarled at me, “She’s evil,” as he was tending his front lawn on a quiet, tree-shaded street in a suburb of Allentown, that made me stop.

When I approached, he seemed to shrink back, but he recovered and told me that Harris was a moral and physical danger to children because she supported public middle schools allowing students to undergo transgender surgery without the consent of their parents. By this time, after two months of canvassing, I had heard from several Trump voters some version of this noxious innuendo. I shrugged, told him his concern was not based on any reality I was aware of, and moved on to the next door on my list.

A few minutes later, another voter on the same street opened his door to declare that he would vote enthusiastically for Harris. He was a pastor in a local Protestant church, and he expressed disbelief that Trump, after his attempt to overthrow the results of the 2020 election, his felony convictions, the court case that found him liable for sexual abuse, and his increasingly erratic and crude behavior, was even close to Harris in the polls. “How is this possible?” was the refrain I heard time and again from Democrats.

Allentown is the most populous city in the Lehigh Valley, a forty-mile stretch on the eastern edge of Pennsylvania that follows the path of the Lehigh River. The city’s suburbs have a peaceful veneer that belies the tensions on the ground. On a winding rural road, I met an older woman, a registered Democrat, who had volunteered as a poll worker in recent elections. She said that her whole family was under online siege by MAGA militants who were accusing her of preparing to subvert the upcoming count. Another volunteer I met, who had come from Brooklyn with his two pre-teen kids, had been confronted by an armed Trump supporter. The man had claimed to be in charge of security for his neighborhood and said they were barred from entering.

My own presence in Allentown, where I walked the streets with a green-and-pink shoulder bag carefully selected to convey joyfulness and filled with Harris campaign literature, had followed an abrupt life change. I’ve been a journalist for four decades, reporting on immigration and other subjects for the Washington Post, The New York Times, and, most recently, The Marshall Project. But, on June 27th, as I watched the debate between President Joe Biden and Trump, I was overcome with dismay. That night, Trump unleashed a barrage of lies about immigrants and asylum seekers. Biden failed to respond with any corrective truths or positive portrayals of immigrant families. A few days later, I resigned from The Marshall Project, as I felt I could no longer comply with its rules proscribing partisan activity. I joined a voter uprising against Biden, writing letters and making calls. My sense of relief when the President stepped aside, on July 21st, became exhilaration when Harris sprinted out of the gate the following day and assumed the Democratic mantle. Just as I was being initiated into the world of political activism, I was presented with a historic chance to help elect America’s first woman President. I started canvassing on August 11th.

My induction took place in Bensalem, a township northeast of Philadelphia, in a spare campaign office still announced by a Biden-Harris yard sign. I received training on a mobile app that would guide my steps, generating for each of my canvassing forays a street map with dots showing the households of registered voters, who were identified by name, age, gender, and party affiliation. The app meant that, when people opened their doors, I could ask to speak with them by their first names. I recorded their responses, indicating whether they were “strong” for Harris––definitely voting for her–– “strong” for Trump, or were still in some murky terrain of indecision, in which case I was on: I had a minute or two to launch my pitch to sway them. I also received my first training in campaign messaging––a short course on Project 2025 and the catastrophic perils it posed for American democracy.

Even on that first day, walking around in sultry heat, I began to sense a dissonance between the celebrity-inflected exuberance of the Harris campaign and the bleak mood and raw divisions I encountered in the streets. I canvassed a gritty apartment complex, with brown grass in the green spaces, that surrounded a small pool, where several mothers languished as their children splashed. They all scoffed when I asked if they were Harris supporters. By the end of that afternoon, the warnings about Project 2025’s plans for an “authoritarian, Christian nationalist movement with broad control over American life”—in the words of a flyer I received as part of my “lit pack”—felt too academic for a voter with gray and missing teeth who told me she could not afford dental care. By contrast, just blocks away was a curving street lined with colonial-style homes, with Volvos and S.U.V.s in the driveways, where one smiling Democrat after another opened the doors. Here was the class polarization that would later get so much attention.

As for the Trump voters who turned up on my lists, I quickly understood that we were not operating on a plane of shared facts. A retired police officer shouted me down when I asked him to explain his support for Trump, given that the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, had injured a hundred and forty law enforcement officers. “That’s a lie!” he said, even though I had, at the ready, the latest Justice Department report on the prosecutions of the rioters. Another voter insisted that all Trump had asked for after the 2020 election was “a recount” of the national vote, as if that were a remotely feasible, or legal, proposition. Others echoed Trump’s dark visions of millions of criminal migrants rampaging across the land, though there was little sign of them in northeast Pennsylvania. This is what I was up against: Trump was broadcasting on some direct wavelength with his followers, and he had drawn them into his alternate universe of looming economic disaster, menacing migrants, and outrages perpetrated by Democrats against their children, which only he was visionary enough to see and strong enough to combat.

By late August, I decided to focus my canvassing on Allentown. The city, the third most populous in Pennsylvania, was once an emblem of American steel, but deindustrialization led to its decline, several decades ago. (“Well, we’re living here in Allentown / and they’re closing all the factories down,” Billy Joel sang in 1982.) In recent years, Allentown has undergone an uneven revival spurred by the arrival of tens of thousands of Latinos, many of them exiles from New York, who now make up a majority of the city’s population. About half are Puerto Ricans, American citizens who can vote in federal elections if they are registered in the mainland U.S. Another large group are Dominicans, including longtime U.S. citizens and first-generation immigrants. Most of these voters were likely to be registered Democrats or Independents. I speak Spanish, and I concluded that my most effective contribution would be to help run up the vote in Latino neighborhoods in Allentown.

In a campaign office on Hamilton Street, in the center of the city, I found a corps of young staffers who were smart and vigorous, but perhaps not deeply experienced in the engineering of campaigns, backed up by volunteers who were union members and other stalwart Democrats. In the early days, after Harris’s choice of Governor Tim Walz as her running mate and her spectacular performance at the Democratic National Convention, the buzz was like a defibrillator bringing the campaign back from the dead. We were thrilled to think we might be witnessing something akin to the history-making excitement of Barack Obama’s first Presidential run, in 2008.

But what I encountered at the doors in Latino neighborhoods were disaffected people under severe economic stress—workers with little time to watch television and no consistent or reliable channels for political news, who received scattershot information about both Harris and Trump on their mobile phones, and were disgusted by what they perceived as the nasty and pointless name-calling they saw there. I recall the harried look of a Puerto Rican grandmother, one of three registered Democrats in a walk-up apartment crammed with boxes and randomly placed furniture. She was home with her grandchildren, a wailing toddler and a teen-ager, while their parents were juggling day and night shifts at their jobs on a Saturday. She wanted to vote for Harris, she said, if she could get to the polls on Election Day. Often, my conversations started with voters telling me they did not plan to vote because they did not see any point in it.

On September 7th, I attended a rally, organized by Latinos con Harris and headlined by her husband, Doug Emhoff, in the gym of a local high school. A d.j. from La Mega, the local Spanish-language contemporary radio station, played thumping dance tunes. The crowd cheered boisterously. Even so, the underlying distress was startling: two voters I chatted with ended up in tears. A woman named Julie, who had a disability caused by a car accident and who was living on a fixed income, said she hoped Harris would do something to increase the value of food stamps, because she was not getting enough to eat. A young Dominican mother, Melvis, carrying her infant daughter, said she saw Harris as both an example and protector for the little girl’s future. She said she deeply feared that Trump, a court-confirmed sexual predator, would only encourage the rampant, unseen sexual abuse and violence against women in her community.

Meanwhile, I sensed that Harris was struggling to break through. She had an immense hurdle to overcome: the void of communication from the White House about what, if anything, the Biden Administration had done for Allentown and the larger Lehigh Valley. Voters associated Biden with higher prices for basic needs and virtually nothing else. They seemed to think that Trump’s term had ended with the stable economy of 2019, rather than with the pandemic and the steep economic downturn that followed. With six weeks to go, Harris’s identity as the daughter of a working immigrant mother and her proposals for an “opportunity economy” were barely beginning to resonate. In all my weeks of canvassing, only one voter, a Black Latina I met by chance in the parking lot of a Supremo grocery store, raised the issue of women’s reproductive rights, a centerpiece of Harris’s campaign.

I set aside the campaign’s talking points and improvised my own. I talked about what I remembered from 2020, when friends were dying of COVID-19, millions of Americans lost their jobs, and Trump suggested we inject bleach into our bodies. (I found the bleach anecdote invariably sparked vivid memories for voters.) I made a point of saying that Joe Biden was not on the ballot. I created cards with bullet points on Harris’s child tax credit and other family-friendly proposals, which even I had a hard time understanding and explaining. I shared a video by the salsa star Marc Anthony, who said with grim intensity that he had not forgotten when Trump blocked funds for Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. I described the terrible harms of family separation that immigrants would face from Trump’s mass deportations. I connected with more than one Latina mother when I asked whether Trump, with his lying and philandering, was the example she wanted for her children.

At times, our tools seemed excessively intrusive. In addition to the door-knocking, voters were bombarded with phone-bank calls and text messages. On my turf lists, most of the voters were not home, and I would leave flyers for the Democratic candidates tucked in their doors. I wondered if they felt uncomfortable that a stranger, presuming to know their political inclinations, had been lurking at their front steps. There were times, too, when I questioned the campaign’s tactics. At one point, I was told that paid canvassers had been hired to fan out across Allentown’s Latino neighborhoods. Fired-up volunteers (including me) were prohibited from door-knocking there. A major issue seemed to be the information flow, which moved entirely in one direction: from the candidate to the voters. With such an abbreviated campaign, there was little time to collect and respond to the concerns that people were raising at their doors.

Nevertheless, by mid-October I noticed a distinct shift. On the weekend of October 19th, thousands of volunteers flocked to the Lehigh Valley, coming from all over the East Coast in convoys of buses and cars, armed with no specific battle plan but determined to answer Michelle Obama’s call to “do something.” Campaign staffers, pale from exhaustion, deployed these volunteers across the region. Harris and Walz kept up a blitz of rallies. Harris seemed to be growing into her campaign, articulating more specifics on her “to-do list” for everyday Americans.

Then came Trump’s closing rally, at Madison Square Garden, on October 27th, where the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe committed the epic unforced error of calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” When I returned to Allentown the following Wednesday, Puerto Rican flags were flying on porches. Residents suddenly realized that Trump’s demeaning rhetoric about Haitian and Venezuelan immigrants could extend to them. At one household, where my mobile app told me the family included four registered Democrats, the eldest member saw my Harris-Walz button and shouted to the street, “Fuck Trump!” The four had agreed they would go together to cast their votes for Harris on Election Day. On Monday, the last day before the election, Harris finally came to Allentown for a whistle-stop rally. Thousands of people stood in four-hour lines to attend, a more diverse crowd than I had seen at any previous event. The Puerto Rican rapper Fat Joe opened for the Vice-President, exhorting his gente: “Where’s the orgullo? Where’s the pride?”

As the vote totals rolled in during the early morning of November 6th, Lehigh County remained a patch of blue in a plain of red that spread across the state of Pennsylvania. We won a fair share of suburban voters and alienated Republicans, and we held off the flight of Latinos to Trump, revealing the fallacy of commentators who had attributed an over-all trend to voters as different as Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in Pennsylvania and Mexican Americans along the border in Texas.

But for Harris, I now see, it was never really an even fight. Trump commands a movement that he has been fuelling with dark delusions and unapologetic bigotry since he first entered politics, in 2015. Harris was a talented candidate running a modern professional campaign that was just reaching full speed by Election Day. In the middle were millions of voters who merely wanted some relief from the demoralizing strain of life on the economic edge. In all my time in Allentown, I never saw any sign of a Trump ground game like the one the Harris campaign organized. It turned out Trump did not need it.

What Democrats needed to win was a movement of their own. Harris seemed to recognize this at the end, when she gave a closing speech at her alma mater, Howard University, saying, “While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fuelled this campaign: the fight for freedom, for opportunity, for fairness, and the dignity of all people.” In the wake of a sweeping defeat, instead of vivisecting Harris’s performance as a candidate or concluding that electing a Black woman to the White House was unrealistic, Democrats should be thinking about how to channel the energies of the supporters who turned out for her, to wage the fight from the ground up.

From walking my Allentown turf, I learned that not even the most disciplined campaign could bridge, in one hundred days, the enormous disconnect between Harris and the voters who might benefit from her proposals. Door by door, with the blunt methods of a traditional campaign, canvassers were reëstablishing, very belatedly, a dialogue that had lapsed. After years of reporting on immigrants and the essential optimism of their hope to prosper in the United States, I reject the idea that, to mobilize working people, the Democrats need to imitate Trump’s demonization and demagoguery. But building a movement will require better systems for communicating with potential voters and listening, anew, to what they need to make their lives easier.

I have been thinking of the last voter I spoke to in Allentown on Election Day. Charles is a Black man and a Democrat who worked for most of his life as a tile layer. I had met him a few weeks earlier, while canvassing. He suffers from debilitating arthritis and, when I knocked, he had limped to the door with a cane and a pillow under a sore arm. He told me he needed home health care, affordable medications, and confidence that his social-security benefits would sustain him. I followed up with him, because he had told me he needed a ride to the polls. I picked him up in my car. At one point, while waiting in line, he bent over and began to weep in pain, but he was determined to cast a vote for Harris as the first woman President. I’m sorry he did not see her win, but I’ll be keeping his tenacity in mind. 

Author: Julia Preston

Source: The New Yorker

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