In mid-October I arrived in Monroe County, Pennsylvania, to canvass voters for the Kamala Harris campaign. The fall colors were in riot: it was a magnificent display of the kind I hadn’t seen in years. Against the cloudless sky the reds and yellows were heightened by golden sunlight. Then one night a strong wind blew all the color away, leaving only the brown oak leaves that hang on stubbornly through the winter. A few weeks later, Donald Trump painted the county—and the state—red again.
According to the Harris campaign’s database, between October 15 and election day I knocked on the doors of more than eight hundred voters and spoke to more than two hundred of them. Eventually I was assigned to train other canvassers. The eastern edge of Monroe County, on the Delaware River, is just an hour’s drive from the Holland Tunnel. Waves of volunteers poured in from New York (where I live), New Jersey, and other nearby states. Some came from as far as California, Oregon, and Hawaii. Such was the urgency to stop the return of Trump.
Polls suggested that Pennsylvania was a toss-up. On the ground, however, we were incontestably outworking the competition. Their ground game was almost nonexistent: the few Trump canvassers we spotted appeared to be paid leafleters. Indeed, his campaign had contracted out canvassing operations across the country. News outlets reported that, in some states, canvassers for hire falsified door-knock totals to qualify for their paychecks.
In the end Trump won Monroe County by 673 votes. Four years earlier, Biden had won there by 5,334. This was the largest percentage point shift in any Pennsylvania county—from an advantage of 6.4 percent for Biden to a deficit of 0.8 percent for Harris.
I told the canvassers I trained that knocking on doors was an opportunity to break through the isolation and polarization that have become ingrained in our social and political life. Many returned to the campaign office in Stroudsburg exhilarated by the conversations they’d had—with undecided voters and partisans alike. But the outcome here suggested a different lesson: face-to-face contact and front porch conversations were no match for social media, online influencers, and Fox News.
The corrosive effects of disinformation were plain to see: many people told me that all politicians lied and that it was impossible to know the truth about any candidate or issue. This is precisely the goal of right-wing demagogues. As the historian Timothy Snyder has argued, when the veracity of facts is denied, political adversaries no longer have common ground to discuss issues and reach agreement.
Some people viewed the very possibility of dialogue as a threat. Many Harris supporters said their MAGA neighbors had stolen or knocked down their lawn signs. Two women who canvassed together told me they were menaced by men in pickup trucks: one parked in the middle of the street and watched them go door to door and another raced up behind their small car, frightening them into leaving the neighborhood. Besides demonstrating the bullying that is essential to Trumpism, these men were protecting their neighbors from dangerous ideas.
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Vignettes from the front doors of Monroe County:
A lifelong Democrat in her seventies told me that she would like for a woman to be president but that Harris, whom she called “the lady,” did not seem genuine. What really got her going, however, was her hatred for Trump—his coarse behavior, his insults, his disdain for women. After several minutes of this, she conceded, “Yeah, I’ll probably vote for the lady.”
An immigrant couple, the wife from Haiti and the husband from Poland: she was for Harris and he for Trump. I reminded him that Trump had claimed that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were stealing and eating people’s pets, and that he’d vowed to deport Haitians if elected. The husband, who owned a construction company, allowed that he didn’t agree with everything Trump said. But his main concern was the economy: Trump, as a businessman, would manage it better than Harris. I pointed out that Trump’s companies had gone bankrupt many times. Businessmen may fail, he replied, but they learned from their experiences. For their part, the Democrats were career politicians who didn’t understand how the real world worked and simply leached off the public. I asked if he employed any undocumented migrants. Yes, he did. I said that if Trump followed through on his threat to deport millions, labor might become scarcer and more expensive. He waved it off. I said that Trump’s tariffs would raise prices. He waved that off too.
It was a good-natured conversation; we each poked fun at the other’s dug-in positions. The couple seemed to get along well, despite their political differences. She liked my camouflage-patterned Harris-Walz cap, which I gave her. She joked that she would wear it to annoy her husband. “Get inside and clean the house!” he roared, in mocking imitation of a male chauvinist. “Good luck with that,” I said. We all laughed.
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Some women would come outside and close the door behind them. Their husbands were Trump supporters, they’d confess in a low voice, but they were voting for Harris. They didn’t seem intimidated; they simply wanted to avoid friction at home.
A few voters feigned indecision to avoid confrontation or out of politeness. Two people told me the Trump signs in their yards were a joke, part of the Halloween decorations. One woman defiantly said the only thing she knew for certain was that the media couldn’t be trusted. “How will you choose a candidate?” I asked. “I’ll pray,” she said.
On five separate occasions I helped elderly women obtain and return absentee ballots. Each had a different circumstance that would have otherwise prevented them from voting. One did not own a computer and lived in a cell phone dead zone; there was no way for her to go online to request a ballot. Another lived in a nursing home whose staff had stopped taking residents to vote during the pandemic and never resumed; they did not get them absentee ballots either. Her mother had been a Democratic committee chair in a nearby town and she was keen to vote against Trump. Voting seemed a way for these women to connect with a world that had largely left them behind. As a campaign volunteer, my role was to get votes for Harris, but there was a greater satisfaction in helping them break out of their isolation.
A canvasser I trained told me a story. At a trailer park, he met an elderly woman sitting in front of her home, surrounded by cats, smoking a cigarette. She hadn’t decided whom to vote for. He asked her what issue she considered most important. “Well,” she said, “I don’t want to lose my Social Security.” He assured her that Harris was committed to protecting Social Security and noted that Trump’s policies would threaten the program. “And Medicare,” the woman said, “I need my health care benefits.” He talked her through the candidates’ significant differences on health care. Then the clincher: “You know what they’ve been saying about women and cats, don’t you?” The woman hadn’t heard. He pulled up a clip of J.D. Vance insulting “childless cat ladies.” The woman exploded. He had won another Harris voter.
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Some progressive critics, such as the political analyst Micah L. Sifry, warned that Harris’s Pennsylvania effort was poorly managed, driven by outsiders, and overly reliant on questionable data models—much as Hillary Clinton’s campaign had been. During the weeks I was in Monroe the focus was entirely on canvassing, and volunteers from elsewhere greatly outnumbered locals. Out-of-state progressive networks dominated; there was little outreach to local churches and community groups (then again, time was short).
Campaign headquarters—known as “Wilmington”—seemed obsessed with numbers, regardless of their utility and accuracy. The bigger the better. At one point we were told that two thousand doors were being knocked per minute in Pennsylvania. At the end of their day trip to Monroe County a campaign manager excitedly informed a busload of canvassers from New York City that they’d knocked 2,400 doors. I checked with another volunteer: the actual total was almost five hundred fewer.
Several commentators have underscored the political fallout of the pandemic and surging inflation, which has led to an anti-incumbent wave around the world. But the pandemic also further isolated Americans from each other. Increasingly we shop online, work remotely, order delivery. Online algorithms push news and information at us, reinforcing our views and insulating us from contrary ideas. As I canvassed, video doorbells, like Ring, were a common sight—a new gadget that makes it easier for people to avoid direct contact.
Trump has benefited from this accelerating social atomization. He needs to isolate people from each other, to keep them from bridging their differences. Earlier this year, when he coerced GOP lawmakers into killing a bipartisan border bill, it wasn’t only to keep the issue of immigration front and center during the campaign; the very prospect of a compromise worked out through dialogue is antithetical to Trumpism.
At dusk on election day, another canvasser and I entered a complex of small apartment buildings near downtown Stroudsburg, hoping to rouse stragglers. The doors to each building were locked; we had to call apartments through an intercom. Nine attempts, one response: a woman had already voted and declined to buzz us in.
Outside the next building a young man approached us, having retrieved his own Amazon package from a drop box. He told us that tenants were prohibited from buzzing in unknown visitors, including delivery workers and political canvassers. Weeks earlier, someone he presumed was a canvasser had gotten into the building and knocked on his door, sending his sister into a panic attack. It’s too bad, I told him, that something once so ordinary could have provoked such an extreme reaction. “That’s the world we live in now,” he said.
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