Over the summer I moved from deep-blue California to Erie, PA, a swingy town in a swingy state. Naturally one of my first priorities was registering to vote. Fortunately here in PA, you can check the box on your driver’s license application and register to vote at the same time. I got my license, but my voter registration card never arrived in the mail. I didn’t think much of it until a friend suggested I double-check, and when I did, there was no record for me on the voter rolls.
Immediately I filled out the online application. A week and a half went by, and I still hadn’t gotten my voter registration card, so I finally called the registrar’s office and explained the situation.
“Oh my gosh,” said the person who answered the phone, sounding completely overwhelmed. “There’s so many…”
I was ready to apologize and let her get back to work, but since I’d bothered to call she insisted on checking, and in the end she cleared my application as we spoke. (Wow! That’s customer service!) As she searched for my name she repeated a couple more times, “there’s so many…there’s so many…”
Before we hung up I thanked her, and commented on how great it is to have so many people registering to vote. That seemed to bring her head up from the morass of her to-do list for a moment, and she agreed, and we wished each other a good day and disconnected.
Now, Trump’s been to Erie multiple times over the past several years. The Harris campaign, represented by Walz, came by for the first time last week. My guess is that this pile of new registrations is probably not Trump voters suddenly deciding that right now is the time they’re going to register and vote.
I’m feeling a bit more hope today than I was before.
