A
Kamala Harris Canvasser’s Education
Even on my first day, I
sensed dissonance between the campaign’s celebrity-inflected exuberance and the
raw divisions I saw in the streets.
November 30, 2024
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. ♦
