Knock-Knock-Knocking To Save Democracy

What It's Like Out There

Standing in front of a closed door, preparing to knock, I pause and take a second to visualize the person on the other side being glad to see me. It’s easy, when knocking on doors during an election in a swing state, to start anticipating the hostility that might come your way. But I find that the hostility is less likely to come if I don’t gird myself against it, if I tell myself that I am there to answer a need they might not even know they have.

I’m in Arizona. It’s 96 degrees out. I have a clipboard; a canvassing app called minivan on my phone; and a canvas bag slung over my shoulder that contains election flyers, a bottle of water, and a spare charger. I’m here with Seed The Vote, which is affiliated with unions and community groups, and that makes my job a little easier in a state where fully one-third of voters don’t belong to either party. I don’t represent the Democratic Party; I represent working people.

I will knock on somewhere around 50 doors today and walk five or six miles. If I’m lucky, I’ll have conversations with about a dozen people. If the person I’m there to see supports Kamala Harris for president, I’ll try to get them to vote today. If they have a mail-in ballot, I want them to find it, fill it out, and mail it, right now. If they plan to vote in person, I want them to get in their car and drive to a polling place.

If, on the other hand, they don’t support Harris, I want to change their mind. And if they don’t want to vote, I want to persuade them that it’s worth doing and that Harris is the one to back.

To do all that, I’m going to lead with my own personal story and invite them to tell theirs. I’m going to make a connection the same way I do as a reporter: by asking questions and listening to the answer. The faster I can get the conversation going, the less likely it is that they will be rude. The longer we talk, the more likely it is that I can figure out how I can be helpful. Maybe they need information. Maybe they need empathy. Maybe they need hope. Maybe they need a sense of purpose. Maybe they need a sense of connection.

But often what they think they need, at the moment they open the door, is for me to go away. That’s the first obstacle to overcome.

On Monday, my first door of the day was a man named Anthony. He stepped outside to talk to me and as he did, he made the kind of eye contact you don’t normally get in the initial moments of an interaction. Handsome, bespectacled, and possibly high, he wanted to talk about what was missing in the world, about being human, about finding out what people really cared about and transcending all the partisan noise.

Whoa, I said. Welcome to the inside of my head.

Anthony was a deep thinker. We talked about human connection for a while before I brought the conversation around to voting. He supported Harris and planned to vote in person, probably on election day.

Not good enough. I want strong Harris supporters voting early so we can focus our resources on the low-propensity voters and undecideds. So, I tried to pin down the details of where and when he was going to vote. I talked about getting his vote in before things got crowded and crazy. He said he had transportation issues. We talked about when his car would be fixed and whether he might use one of the free ride options for voters. When I still couldn’t get him to agree to a specific vote plan, I got his number and said I’d be texting to check in.

After he shut the door, I sat down on the curb and wrote Anthony’s information on the sheet I use to track the people I’ve spoken to. Then I texted him my first follow-up message.

In the 2020 election, Seed the Vote brought in 10,000 votes in Arizona, which is the margin Biden won by. The organization knows how many votes to take credit for because canvassers ask the voters we turn out to text a picture of themselves mailing their ballot or wearing their I Voted sticker. When I text Anthony, I ask him to send me that selfie as soon as he votes and I send him an example of other ones I’ve received.

On to the next unit. Stand in front of the door. Visualize the person on the other side of the door being glad I came by. And then: knock, loudly and firmly enough for them to hear me, but not so loud and firm that I sound like a cop. Wait 30 to 45 seconds and then knock again. As a woman, each of these steps requires me to overcome a small bit of resistance. I don’t want to bother people. I don’t want to start their dogs barking. I don’t want to be a nuisance. On the other hand, I don’t want to live under fascism. I wait another 45 seconds and knock a third time, ignoring the dog yipping and growling on the other side of the door.

Most people think they don’t want to talk to me. They think they don’t want to talk to anyone. Some of them have posted signs that say “No Soliciting” (I ignore them because I’m not soliciting). One door has a sign that says “Kindly Fuck Off” (I ignore that one, too). A lot of people have disconnected doorbells and metal exterior doors you can’t even knock on but instead can only rattle, like you’re in a cage. Many of the places we go are gated communities with no trespassing signs, but the courts have held that political canvassing is protected speech. In one, a woman called the police and then handed my fellow canvasser a menacing notice she had clearly just printed out on a printer that was low on toner. Then she followed us through her entire subdivision to make sure we left (we’d already hit every door on our list so we were ready to go anyway).

And yet, if I can evade these obstacles, the people on the other side of the door often wind up being happy I came by. Because despite how much people believe they want to be left alone, what they actually want is to feel hopeful. A guy came out to tell me I was crazy and stupid for supporting Harris, because she’s going to ruin this country, just ruin it. I wasn’t there to talk to him; I was there for his wife, who hadn’t yet voted. (He had.) Still, I lingered long enough to turn the interaction from a hostile one to something more cordial. I emphasized our shared patriotism, our shared commitment to improving the lives of working families, and our shared rights to exercise our vote. I listened to his rant about the economy and then told a personal story about why affordable health care was so important to me. By the end, he agreed that we had more in common than he'd thought. I wasn’t going to change his vote, but I hope I made him feel a little less like we live in a country of unbridgeable divides.

Canvassing reveals how complicated voters actually are.  I met a pair of young Trump voters who were also voting in favor of Arizona’s Prop 139, which protects abortion access. They thanked me for doing what I do, offered me some water, and when I admired their gray kitty, held him up so I could pet him. I met a middle-aged Trump supporter whose wife is voting for Harris. They’d agreed to cancel out each other’s votes, but he was voting for Dems the rest of the way down the ticket and supporting abortion access too. I’m a man, he told me. I should have no say in any of this stuff.

I admit that I square my shoulders a bit when my canvassing app tells me that the voter I’m there to speak to is a man over 50. Older men are more likely to be hostile, more likely to support Trump, and more likely to want to lecture me rather than to engage in the kind of conversation I’m after, the one that’s more personal. Seed the Vote trains us to talk about our own experiences and encourage voters to talk about theirs: “What matters to you? What are you worried about right now?” But older men are harder to budge from an Us vs. Them mindset, more certain that they really, really don’t want to talk to me, and more resistant to talking about their own lives.

Women are easier. No matter what age they are, the vast majority of the women I talk with are focused on reproductive freedom. It’s not hard to connect the dots for them. They’re supporting Harris all the way.

Young men are more complicated. They’re more likely to be disengaged, to tell me that they’re not going to vote at all. One day I spent a long time talking with a young guy who didn’t know if he was going to vote because he didn’t like either candidate. He was sitting in his car when I approached him, and I could see a toy AK-47 hanging from his rearview mirror. He had lots of facts he wanted to tell me. Facts about secret armies in Ukraine. Facts about people voting illegally in Ohio. These were podcast facts, social media facts, not actual facts, but he was sure that he had the inside scoop. It wasn’t just that he’s been sucked into a disinformation loop, it was that the disinformation loop made him miserable. Everyone is corrupt. The democracy has already been subverted. Nothing is ever going to change. It’s just all about money.

We talked for about 20 minutes before I gave up and wished him a good rest of his day. That night, I lay awake thinking about what I might have said that would have pulled him out of his paralysis and despair. Maybe something like this:

If your neighbor’s house was on fire, and you had one bucket of water, would you use it? If other people were throwing their buckets on the fire, would you add yours? Wouldn’t you want to see if you could put out the fire before it spreads?

One day, the young man who opened the door said he was going to vote but didn’t know where his mail-in ballot was. It’s probably in the pile of mail in the kitchen somewhere, he said. Why don’t you get it, I replied. I’ll wait here. Then you can fill it out and get it over with.

He did. He got his ballot and filled it out. It was pretty clear he’d never voted before. He was nervous about filling in the bubbles all the way. He was surprised how long the ballot was. (It’s ridiculously long.) I talked him through every step and when he’d sealed and signed the envelope, I said, Let’s go mail it.

We walked to the curb and he got in his car and drove to the mailbox. Then he texted me a picture of his ballot going into the slot. In fact, he drove down the street looking for me, so he could show me the picture. He was elated because he did it; he did this important thing. We both knew it might not have happened if I hadn’t knocked. Too much unopened mail. Too many questions about the ballot. Too many things he wasn’t sure he was doing right.

He's the one I think about when I think about being useful to the person on the other side of the door.

We have a text thread going where canvassers can post their wins. All day, I see a stream of successes, the photos of ballots going into the mail slot or of people wearing their “I Voted” stickers. Sometimes people post stories. The Jill Stein voter who was persuaded to vote for Harris. The Trump voter who was persuaded to vote for Harris. The person who finally sent an “I Voted” selfie after ignoring texts for a week. Each one reminds me of what’s possible. Each one reminds me that someone on the other side of the door might need something I can offer.

I troubleshoot for a voter who hasn’t received their ballot yet. I offer recommendations to someone mystified by down-ballot races like water board and school board. I tell someone who didn’t know they could vote early where their closest polling place is. I get a worried Harris supporter fired up to win this thing. I pet dogs and chat with kids and admire people’s Halloween displays and do whatever I can to persuade people that the world is a good place, that they’re not alone, that other humans wish them well.

Whenever I do this work, I wish it didn’t just happen during election season. What if we knocked on doors to answer questions about government services? What if we went door to door to ask questions about people’s worries and concerns? What if people were used to feeling that their experiences mattered, that someone was listening, that help was available, that politics was more than just the negative ads airing back-to-back-to-back on every local channel?

Seven hours after I spoke with Anthony, my first door of the day, I was back at my car, scrolling through my app to make sure I didn’t miss anyone. It was dark out now and I’d been using a flashlight to read apartment numbers in a complex with an absurdly hard-to-decipher numbering system. Then I saw one address that was still gray, indicating that it hadn’t been canvassed. It was 7:30 pm, and we were supposed to be back at HQ to turn in our literature and our clipboards. But I couldn’t leave this last door, particularly since the voter was a registered Democrat. I got out of the car, grabbed my flashlight, and walked back through the meandering paths of the complex until I found the unit I had missed.

She had three dogs. They barked like crazy. It took three knocks to get her to answer. But when I suggested she get her ballot and fill it out, she did. We sat at a table outside her front door, and I used the flashlight on my phone to help her see. Her nine-year-old daughter kept us company. It took thirty minutes to talk through every proposition and every candidate, but, in the end, she sealed the envelope and signed it and promised to text me a photo when she put it in the mail the next day.

Which she did.

I’m still texting Anthony. He hasn’t voted yet, but I’ll keep trying.

With a sigh,

Dashka

P.S. If you want to help fund Seed the Vote canvassers in Swing States, click here. And if you want to canvass yourself, click here.