The Counterpublic Papers vol. 9 no. 5

I started writing this draft from a Sonesta Select near the Philadelphia International Airport, and am finishing it early Tuesday morning, after having spent Saturday and Sunday door knocking in Philly with my friend Mike. If my son didn’t have a Muay Thai bout this upcoming Saturday I’d probably be doing the same thing this weekend too. 

Mike’s been doing this for weeks—he literally one of the first canvasser to door knock in Philly this election season. He is about as far to the left as you can get in the US, but views elections in general as harm reduction, and feels (like many though not all of us) that the best we can do given the choices we have is to keep Trump out of office. He door knocked in suburban Philly when the goal was to see where people’s heads were (and to try to change them). He door knocked in the city proper when the goal was to turnout low propensity voters. He door knocked when the goal was, as it was this weekend, to simply make sure everyone knew about the election. So he’s pretty much seen it all. I was supposed to be at the University of Malmö this past weekend but when I realized it was during election season I passed…so when Mike asked me I said what the kids say. 

“Say Less.”  

I didn’t know what I’d expect to see because I’d never done door to door canvassing before. But there were about 150 or more of us, and of this group I imagine maybe four or five were paid by the campaign (not the Harris Walz campaign but by the group we were working with). The rest of us were volunteers. The youngest I met were in undergrad. The oldest I met were in their sixties and early seventies. It was a multiracial group, and, tellingly, international. 

(Foreign nationals cannot donate money or participate in decision making in any domestic political committee but can volunteer their time in other ways.)  

Including Mike, who was our lead, our group had about five or six members. We hit six or seven neighborhoods over the course of the two days (in fact Harris herself was in Philly yesterday), and knocked on…maybe 900 doors. (As an aside Mike’s been doing this so long he brought about a dozen or so golf balls—so much better for knocking on hundreds of doors than your knuckles!) Although the vast majority of these door knocks went unanswered, maybe about 20 percent of the time someone answered the door. The bulk of these folk were fervent Harris supporters—again this last push is about getting people we already know are likely to vote for Harris to do so. There were a few exceptions. 

The white brother who answered the first door our crew knocked on spent twenty minutes telling us how scared he was of the Democratic Party, in part because of their response to the George Floyd Protests, and when January 6 was brought up, he said “that was four years ago.”  The last door we knocked on Saturday wasn’t on our list, but one of our crew members knocked on it anyway. A couple of white brothers answered the door and respectfully told him they were all Trump guys. 

And yesterday I ran into black Trump voters. In the first instance it was the husband of a family of four. From the upstairs window the wife told me she voted for Harris but that her husband (and sons) were voting for Trump. She pulled the husband to the window, and he told me he couldn’t support Harris because “she was a socialist.” I didn’t have much time (because I wanted to get to the other houses, and because he was in the middle of a movie) so I told him the story about how Trump resisted giving California FEMA money when the forest fires hit because they didn’t vote for him. The second instance was a couple of doors down—the wife supported Harris but the husband didn’t. (“You want me to talk to the old man?” I asked. She laughed. “No. It wouldn’t do any good.”) 

Perhaps the best story of the two days happened on Saturday. Near the end of our run one of the crew ran into an elderly voter who wasn’t able to get to the polls because she wasn’t mobile, and she was concerned that her mail ballot wouldn’t get to her in time. I went to talk to the sister myself and collected her information so I could help her. My plan was to talk to people at the top of the food chain because technically there was only so much we could do. Maybe we could get a ballot and bring it back to her. 

I ended up running into an election judge around the block from her. She wasn’t on our list—I think she stepped outside and saw us door knocking, and I told her what we were doing. She then told us who she was, what she did. So I took the opportunity to ask her how we could help her neighbor. She gave us permission to go back to the neighbor with her information. We told her the neighbor’s name but she didn’t recognize it.

When we went back to the neighbor, the neighbor laughed. “Oh. I know her. I taught her son!”

When we’d talked to the election judge (who was about my age), we gave the election judge the neighbor’s first name. She didn’t know the neighbor by Myrtle (not her real name). She knew the neighbor by Miss Jackson (not her real surname)!

“Oh. Miss Jackson? Who lives with her brother and just got sick? Oh YES I know her! I got her taken care of!”

Mike told me that the best thing about canvassing wasn’t the candidate but the door knocking, because of the people you’d meet. I’ve known him twenty years (in fact I met him on an old school 1-800 campaign call in 2004) and he’s never lied.   

Now I’ve said this but I don’t think I’ve written it. 

I didn’t think the 2024 polls were indicative of the election, although they are indicative of the national split. From everything I saw, I believed at least .50c out of every dollar donated to the Trump campaign was going straight in his pocket. He’s a con man, and most of his folk are in on the grift. Running a political campaign requires an apparatus, and that apparatus even in a highly technological moment like this requires folk knocking on doors. The biggest predictor of participation is contact—someone asking you to participate. You need an apparatus designed to identify and contact potential voters. Then you need a combination of paid folks and volunteers to do the mundane work of knocking on doors and tracking it.

I had an app that enabled me to download a list of voters and addresses. I could see the list spatially with a map overlay. I knew the age and gender of each voter on the list—I knew Myrtle’s name because the app told me. And if more than one person is associated with the house I know their names too. After knocking on the door and identifying myself—there’s a script telling us how to do so—I ask them whether they have a vote plan, and then if they want down ballot information. And then after I leave, I add information to the database. If I don’t get anyone—most of the doors I knocked on gave me no response—I track that too. And then after the houses in a given neighborhood are taken care of, I get another list. 

Rinse and repeat.

Something like this requires a great deal of coordination and expertise. 

There is no organized Trump ground game to speak of. 

Elon Musk—who it turns out was an illegal alien when he began work in the country—has been running an illegal lottery scam to turnout voters. He’s doing this because he tried to start a ground game from scratch and can’t. And we know Trump (and by extension the GOP) doesn’t have the capacity to do it. On the other hand the Harris campaign is staffed with experts committed to the campaign, one hundred percent of the money donated goes directly to the campaign, and at least two groups of voters are intensely committed to do volunteer work for her (people who love her and people who hate Trump/Trumpism). Further many of her volunteers have expertise—we had a script but I didn’t  need it because I spend a big chunk of my time running my mouth for a living. It’s worth recalling the 2016 campaign—Clinton lost Michigan by a sliver because if I recall correctly she didn’t have a GOTV campaign at all. 

And this is before Trump has a fascist campaign event at Madison Square Garden in which a comedian called Puerto Rico a garbage dump, another speaker’s introduction was “Sweet Home Alabama” (I think the one who made jokes about blacks and watermelon).  

Now it’s possible that this election is so critical to everyone that they don’t need extra motivation. And it’s also possible that there are a group of voters who are so self-motivated and self-organized that they can do the work an expert campaign cannot. Further it’s possible that the Trump campaign’s true plan is to turn the election to the House (which, I discovered, isn’t tactically workable). Which means GOTV isn’t as important as the polls—which can plausibly be used to claim a tight election even if the other data (the votes) say otherwise. But if either of these are really the case, then our problems are a lot worse (electorally speaking) than people have written about.

I’ve only said rather than written this, because even with a few hundred readers I wouldn’t want something like this repeated or shared for fear of people taking their foot off the gas as it were. And I’m still anxious as hell even typing this. The sheets are off and the oligarchs are already starting to bend their knee. With a week to go though, I think I can safely say that even those of us in resoundingly blue and red states have this election fully in our hands. Spend the next week or so taking this seriously.

See you soon.