If you live in Virginia and have ever been involved in a campaign here, you’ve undoubtedly been inundated with emails, texts and phone calls for the purpose of getting your money and your time devoted to the gubernatorial campaign. I’ve been knocking doors for Democrats for a month now, and this diary focuses on yesterday’s GOTV canvass.
Except that we aren’t really doing (traditional) GOTV. For example, in Burke, I knocked on a door of a Youngkin family. “You can take her off your list.” It was the only lowlight of the day.
I knocked on doors in 3 different campaign regions, in Arlington and Fairfax counties. While I live in Arlington now, I still have connections to Fairfax having led the GOTV canvass in the 2020 presidential primary. And even though we didn’t emphasize this at the time, one reason why we wanted to push out the vote in the 2020 primary was so that we would have better data to build a better voter model for this election. Tuesday, we will have a good idea if that worked.
I started yesterday at the staging location closest to me at 9 (way too early afaic). Since I’ve been complaining (vociferously!) about them cutting really small turfs (I have yet to be given a piece of turf that would fill 3 hours), they sent me out with two (good for them!). But in a continuation of my contention that I lead a charmed life, it was at the northern edge of this staging location’s boundary, so that it took me longer to reach my first door from that staging location than it would take me to reach the next staging location at noon! So I start the day knowing the campaign gods of war were on my side!
The canvassing director (not a real title, these were all volunteers for the Arlington Democrats which I would argue is more a social organization, but she was the one dealing with the data) had said that she figured I’d talk to more voters who had already voted than hadn’t — and she was right! The last segment of the first turf I walked, though, was right around one of the Early Vote centers in Arlington and in that neighborhood, I talked to one person who had just returned from voting (and proudly showed me her sticker), one person who was just about to go vote and one person who would be voting on Tuesday. The latter was an African-American man and represented the traditional resistance among especially older Black voters who are determined that his vote counted.
I ran into this again latter on in the day, when I knocked on the door of a 75 year old Black man who took his time to give me a history lesson of voter suppression towards the African-American community in the South.
In this first turf, I found two young me (both in their 30s) who were feeding their children breakfast. Interestingly, I also came across two women on my list who were still asleep (at different households and without any indication of children in the house). There is a reason why I don’t like knocking on doors before 10! But on GOTV weekend, you throw all the rules out the window.
They sent me out with two pieces of turf, one large turf paired with what every turf cutter calls trash or junk turf — doors that didn’t fit nicely in all the other pieces of turf they had cut. So not only was it half the size of the first piece of turf but also wasn’t easily walked. Which was fine by me, as I was driving door to door anyway. All the rules out the window, BABY! Just the way I like it.
There were a lot of apartment buildings in my first turf, but only one in the second. It was primarily single family housing. And while you can’t easily predict if someone is home in apartment buildings (if you get through the front door), with single family units, you basically know. So one of the things I always try to teach when I am training canvassers is that you should have a prediction whether there is someone coming to the door before you even knock. Are there cars in the driveway (not always a reliable indicator in our multicar family universe now)? Do you hear sounds? Is there evidence of children (or pets) who would be triggered by a knock at the door? That kind of thing. Because when I predict if someone is not home, I knock, drop and start to move on.
This isn’t perfect. At one door I knocked on Saturday, I thought there would be no one home, and they opened the door just as I was closing their fence. But I’ve never had anyone be offended by that and it means I can cover more turf just because I am not waiting the same length of time at every door. And the older woman who opened the door seemed delighted that I was asking her about her voting intentions!
The first turf I walked was mostly young people/families. The second (and fourth) turf was more POC voters. So I talked to several Latinos (including one woman who had just returned from voting and one man who was probably an infrequent voter but who promised to vote on Tuesday. While they were theorizing at the staging location that these turfs were populated by people with a history of early voting, it was pretty obvious as I was knocking that this was a first pass at these doors, and it was not segmented by Early Voting history.
As I mentioned above this segment was around an Early Vote center, and so I passed the center several times. Cars streaming in, the parking lot full, a line out the door. But people, lots of people, walking on the sidewalks, either to or from the EV center. Made you proud. Just like in Georgia, late news about Trump was energizing Democrats! (Trump said he’d come to Arlington because the Trumpies interrupted President Biden’s appearance in Arlington with the chant “We love Trump!”)
Having completed my two south Arlington turfs, I drove to the Adams staging location and pretty much arrived on time for my next shift. Even before I got there I could see volunteers walking and driving to it. So while I only saw a couple of volunteers at the 26th staging location, this one was full. And full of younger people. Very different kind of volunteer.
I got pretty much the last piece of first pass turf
they had. And I know this because I asked if they had a bigger piece of turf for me to walk. “If you want to take out second pass turf,” they replied. Nope. And this turf was really fun!
It wasn’t even 10 minutes from staging location to turf. And the very first person I talked to was not a voter. With a thick South African accent, he told me the person on his list had moved! But his wife was voting and I should update the records. They had just moved from South Africa and I asked him if he had surfed because his t-shirt was a pretty famous surfing location. He had, and we found other sports/hobbies we had in common. While we were doing the male bonding thing, his wife appeared. She asked me where her voting location was, which would have been at the top of every page of a paper walk packet. But miniVan doesn’t tell you this (afaik). When I told her I didn’t know, but that the Early Vote center was the courthouse a couple of minutes away, she told me that this was her first election in the States in 20 years and she was going to savor the experience of voting at the polls. I definitely understood and gave her a website to check it out (actually, I think it was two urls). “It’s on my voter registration, right?” Indeed. Fun family. The kinds of things you will never find in a phone call (not that there’s anything wrong with that — just not my thing).
The second to last voter I talked to on the Roslyn turf was listed as a 99 yo man. Realizing this was a first pass — and having already found someone who had moved — I am thinking I was going to have to mark him as deceased. But as I was thinking this, he opened the door! I asked if he was my voter and he said, Yes! Imagine my surprise. He tells me he will be voting on Tuesday and then I say, “the list says you are 99. Wow!” He tells me proudly he will be 100 in February. Double wow!
I return my map and drive down to Burke. Burke was the area where my wife’s friend from Chicago had been a field organizer for the Obama campaign back in 2012. My and the kid walked this area every weekend in Sept and Oct of that year. I remember these neighborhoods and the memories Charlie and I created there. It was almost like a homecoming.
I arrive an hour early for my shift and so the staging location was empty. The two volunteers there actually had to come out to check me in. Arlington and Fairfax had different check in procedures but they immediately recognized I had been walking because I had the Terry sticker still on (I had forgotten). They ask me if I can come back on today or Tuesday, that they are still begging for volunteers. I tell them I can’t return on Tuesday because I am closing a precinct here in Arlington but I will try today.
But one reason why I like Fairfax is that they cut bigger turfs! YAY! This turf had 75 doors and over 100 voters. So even though I find miniVan harder to map out correctly (I use the map feature to guide me even though they train you to use the voter feature (I think the map feature requires more clicks), which means I invariably miss a house because I think it’s on a different road and always seem to have to go back (which would really suck if I was walking it).
The first 10 or so doors had no one home even though I hadn’t seen people outside. But that changed quickly. At some point, I would talk to 3 different Latino households at the end of a street. The second house of the three, I met the voter who was out working on his yard. He really engaged me, acting a little suspicious. He never told me who he’d be voting for, and probably was truly undecided before yesterday. But eventually he told me that a Latino for Youngkin supporter had knocked on his door earlier, “and she was really pushy.” In a sense, I wasn’t surprised, it was GOTV weekend. You never want to report someone you talked to was undecided. That means you failed. But if he was undecided when the day started, he didn’t seem undecided after we talked. Just because I came with a smile and was letting him talk through it, I marked him as a 2, a likely McAuliffe voter who was definitely voting on election day.
You see a few Youngkin signs in people’s yards in Arlington. And there are definitely more Youngkin signs on the highways in Arlington than in the Fairfax area where I was, but there were definitely signs in the yards of these neighborhoods. The education debate was real here. This was a purplish area, where Democrats and Republicans lived right next to each other, and avoided interaction now like the plague.
Got to go. GOTV Baby! This is how we win...