I spent last weekend canvassing for Kamala Harris in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, a city situated beautifully in the Wyoming Valley and Pocono Mountains.
The Harris campaign has 50 coordinated offices in PA and over 400 staff on the ground. And I was at a canvassing operation that is not even part of the Harris campaign. It is run by Pennsylvania Democrats and based in the local office of the Laborers International Union of North America. LIUNA has 500,000 members and represents many immigrants who are in their first job in the U.S. and Canada, workers who are often the victims of wage theft unless they have union support.
The canvass directors are two Colorado guys in their 70’s who are spending October in W-B to do this work. I very much doubt that the Trump canvassing effort, which has been outsourced to Elon Musk, has voluntary organizers like these guys.
The primary purpose of a canvass this close to the election is turnout, not conversion. On Saturday my friend Jon and I downloaded to our phones a list of Dem leaning voters. We then headed out to Plains, a small town bordering W-B to the north. On Sunday our list was in W-B.
It was a sunny, warm weekend and a lot of people weren’t home, but here are the highlights of those we managed to reach.
Our first neighborhood was apparently low-income with some battered housing. We door knocked a 63 yr. old white registered Dem who had already voted for Trump. He also voted for incumbent Dem senator Bob Casey but not for incumbent Dem representative Matt Cartwright. Why Trump? “He’s a jerk and a loudmouth but I think he’d be a better president than Harris.” Oh-oh, the kind of ticket-splitter we feared.
We stopped on the same street at a house with two 14-15 yr. old white girls sitting on the sagging porch. I asked who they would vote for. Trump, but one added “it’s not that I think a girl can’t be president, but I just don’t think she’s the right one.” One point for feminism, minus one for candidate evaluation.
Across the street a disheveled middle-aged man on a front porch was smoking a butt and holding the leash of a fat pit bull who was snarling on the lawn. He was not on our list but I called up, “Hey, you votin’. Decidedly not. “They’re all a bunch of fuckin’ thieves trying to fuck you over. I never vote.”
There are a LOT of dogs in W-B and Plains, many of the guard dog persuasion.
When we moved to a more middle-class neighborhood we met Connie, a 55 yr. old black woman, an Army veteran (I think the full 20 years) who had just graduated from nursing school. We wisely made no assumptions about how she would vote. She volunteered that she was undecided but was leaning towards a third-party candidate, probably Green Party candidate Jill Stein (cough, cough, Putin).
Connie was extremely well-informed, particularly on the housing shortage – in Wilkes-Barre and nationally. She liked that Harris was promoting a ($40 billion) housing innovation fund and support for 3 million new housing units but thought the implementation was too vague. She said she had been promoting the conversion of abandoned and underutilized military bases for new housing, as with Fort Devens in Massachusetts. We spent 15 minutes with Connie, focusing on Harris’s intentions and the dangers of malignant narcissism. She ultimately agreed and said we’d won her over.
We found a second ticket-splitter in a middle-class neighborhood. We knocked for a woman, 25, who was registered as a Dem. She opened the door, we thought. I asked if she was Ann M., our designated contact. She replied, “No, I’m the Republican sister” I asked if she was voting that way this time. “Ah, no!” Why not? “Because he’s insane!!”
So, there you have it. An older white, working-class Democratic man voting for Trump; a young suburban Republican woman voting for Harris.
We knocked on 155 doors over the weekend. We didn’t switch more than one vote. But we reminded some folks of the importance of voting and made sure they knew when and by what method they would. We were in Pennsylvania. Oh, yeah. They knew about the election and yes, they did have a plan to vote. But most (remember they are Dem or Dem-leaning) thanked us for being out there. Many were very enthusiastic about Harris and eager to have their vote count. And it will because they are in one of the 7 states where it will.
At headquarters we connected with other highly motivated folks who were all-in on Harris-Walz and other Dem candidates. The mood was upbeat and determined for now and for the long haul.
Was it worth the effort - 10 hrs by car roundtrip and seven hours walking the streets of the W-B? Absolutely. We got a feel for this hard-times industrial city that’s trying to make a comeback. We shared the energy of resistance and hope and we reminded each other by our presence that we’re part of a community that has been together for a long time and isn’t gonna fade away. We will get by, we will survive.
In my next post I’ll provide a brief biography of nonviolent warrior/canvass director Michael Z., one of the Colorado guys. I’ll try then or in another post to report a brief history of W-B and Luzerne County and consider how that history explains why so many white working-class people have moved from the Democratic Party into the grinning embrace of the malignant narcissist.
More at jimhannon.substack.com