I was on a packed bus, barreling down Interstate 78 on a recent Sunday, when, about an hour southwest of the Lincoln Tunnel, a sudden longing hit me, to ask the driver to stop. I’d disembark, I reasoned, and make my way—by foot, if necessary, through the wilds of New Jersey—back to the comforting familiarity of my apartment on the Upper West Side.
I’m an experienced traveler, writing often for magazines about sometimes far-flung destinations. So why was this entirely domestic trip making me uneasy? The answer: I had crossed a Rubicon wider than the Hudson, and was venturing into personally uncharted territory. I was en route to spend my day as a first-time political canvasser.
Earlier that week, both encouraged by my friend Polly and propelled by my dread of a second Trump presidency, I’d signed up to knock on doors in the neighboring swing state of Pennsylvania. The plan: to ask people there to vote in the coming weeks for the Democratic ticket headed by Vice President Kamala Harris and Senator Tim Waltz.
“Did I bully you into joining me?” Polly, sitting across the aisle, gently inquired. No, I assured her, she had not. The truth is, I’m pig-headed and thus resistant to bullying. But I’m also not inclined to proselytize.
Yes, I’ve been a registered Democrat for decades, but I’ve always believed in voting on the issues, rather than along strictly partisan lines. Asking strangers for whom they intend to vote is uncomfortable for me; I’d rather see them as people first, before sorting them into categories, blue or red. Finally, though I’ve spent much of my professional life as a cultural critic and reviewer, I dislike telling other people what to think. In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, I wrote an essay about how my fears for democracy—sparked by “the seeds of authoritarianism” that I’d detected back in 2016 in the behavior and rhetoric of then-presidential-candidate Donald Trump—had prompted me to train and serve as a poll worker. The essay was a paen to poll workers, those public servants whose anonymous, unsung labor helps to ensure the legality, privacy, and inviolability of each person’s vote—a foundation of the republic to which I’d long ago pledged allegiance on every childhood school morning.
That was before election officials in various states began receiving death threats. It was also before January 6, 2021, when my son and I watched on television, in horror, as a violent mob forced its way into the US Capitol Building. Now the man whose rhetoric had encouraged that mob—who had spent much of the past four years chipping away at my fellow citizens’ faith in our electoral process—was once again the Republican nominee for president, with a running mate who appears all too willing to join him in his war on truth. I don’t want this country to elect a president who is fundamentally against elections and the rule of law. These were the factors compelling me to do my small part to defeat him, I reasoned, as our bus sped ahead into the Pennsylvanian unknown.
A few nights earlier, while cooking dinner, I’d joined the mandatory, 45-minute, remote training session for canvassing. There were over 500 of us on that particular call, zooming in from up and down the East Coast. There were also a couple of trolls purporting to vote for former President Donald Trump, whose rude—some said, racist—comments had compelled the moderators to close down the call’s chat room. But I was not intimidated.
The following Sunday, I rose before seven, fed the surprised cat an early breakfast, and chose the day’s outfit: a black knee-length skirt, tall boots with a comfortable heel, a black cashmere sweater and beneath it, a silk shirt in a French blue that could pass for Democratic. I was aiming for a relatively conservative look. (Later that day, after we’d finished and were waiting to return home, another canvasser said that people in one house she’d visited had asked if she were trick or treating. “What did they think my costume was?” she queried. Her long, dark hair was gathered in a loose bun; her filigreed, vaguely Indian earrings dangled. “New York liberal?” I ventured.)
The weather was fine, but after packing a box lunch, snacks, sunscreen, extra water, and an extra phone charger, I was running late, so I took a cab down to Zabar’s. Six buses were arrayed outside that legendary Upper West Side emporium, a culinary temple to smoked fish and secular, progressive Judaism. What could go wrong? I found my friend’s bus, took a seat and we were off.
In addition to home-baked cookies, Polly had brought along a friend from her workplace, so when our bus capitain told us to find a partner, I turned to my seatmate. “Rob” was a cheerful scientist in his late thirties, married to an academic and with two young children. The bus captain explained that though we’d each canvas alone (to cover more ground) our partner would be working nearby, for safety reasons. Also to ensure our safety, we were not to enter anyone’s house, even if they invited us in.
She gave us some pointers for talking to voters. After introducing ourselves and explaining why we were there, we should ask about their concerns, and listen sympathetically. If they confirmed their intention to vote for Harris/Waltz, we should encourage them to support down-ballot Democratic candidates, and make sure they had a plan to get to the polls by November 5. If they said they were still undecided, we should speak from the heart about the issues that mattered most to us.
She told us that in 2020 Biden had won certain districts in Pennsylvania by razor-thin margins. We weren’t expected to change the minds of registered Republicans that day. But face-to-face encounters, she said, had proven to be the most effective means of getting out the vote for Democrats and swaying the undecided. Convincing even a single voter to go to the poll and cast their ballot for Harris/Waltz could be key.
At the campaign site in Allentown, Rob and I were matched with a volunteer driver and given addresses for us to visit. The following morning I would read in The New York Times that the suburban communities of Lehigh County, which surrounded Allentown, were the state’s “ultimate election battleground.” But the middle-class neighborhood where our driver soon dropped us off seemed a sleepy enclave of well-kept, mid-sized houses, their lawns and entryways dotted with Halloween decorations.
I had 38 addresses. At about half the doorbells I rang, no one answered, so I left some campaign literature, wedged into the doorframes. There were “No Solicitations” signs at a couple of houses. I was standing beside one such door, wondering if this prohibition included solicitations “for democracy,” when a West Highland Terrier mix answered that question by tearing out of the house’s garage door to growl menacingly at me.
Canvassing promised to be a long day in a suburb whose new trees didn’t offer much shade. Still, I had some memorable encounters. At one house, a gentle father of two explained that he no longer revealed the candidate he supported to anyone, because he’d “had bad experiences doing so in the past.” I told him that I was sorry for that. He smiled and accepted my campaign literature eagerly.
A few doors down, a giant American flag fluttered outside of a house where a woman in a ruffled dress assured me that she would vote for Harris. She was a nurse, with a grown daughter away at college, “studying chemistry,” she told me proudly. She was the only Black person at her church, she said; her fellow congregants were all white, and all Republicans. “But God doesn’t belong to any one political party,” she insisted.
I was a bit flustered when I finally encountered my sole undecided voter; a, white-haired man wearing a long-sleeved red T-shirt, suspenders, and jeans. He slowly ambled up to the door with a friendly air, scooping up what he called his “ferocious watchdog”—a tiny, yapping Yorkshire terrier—putting her aside, and standing behind his screen door to chat with me. “Economic issues” were his main concern, but the Republican war on women, he said, was giving him pause.
Reader, I wish I’d done a better job of convincing him. A few days later, CNN would report on a letter signed by 23 Nobel-prize winning US economists, calling Vice President Kamala Harris’s economic plan “vastly superior” to the tariffs on foreign imports and tax-cuts for big business that former President Donald Trump was proposing. But I spoke about my faith in the rule of law, and that Harris, a lawyer with many years of public service, would respect and honor it. A stable democracy, I said, was the best guarantee of a country’s economic health.
I took heart that day from a beautiful woman, about 40 years old, dressed in a saffron/pink kurta and narrow cream trousers, who stepped out of her door to speak with me. Her dark eyes shone as she told me, in a voice resonant of the Indian subcontinent, that she was excited to vote for Harris/Waltz because they supported women, and she did too. Her enthusiasm was infectious, and I found myself promising her that our victory would be sweet.
On the bus ride back to New York, I learned that volunteers departing from the Allentown campaign site on that day alone had reached over 17,500 households. But there’s another week, and still more work to do to fulfill my promise to my new friend.