On the ground with Kamala Harris’s campaign in Pennsylvania, I found reason for hope

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Nauseously optimistic. I’ve just spent three weeks volunteering for Kamala Harris in the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania – some of the most contested turf in this most contested U.S. presidential election – and that’s the campaign joke about how many of us are feeling. Woof, it’s close here. Northampton County, where I’m from, routinely swings by 1,000 votes. In each local precinct, victory comes down to two or three votes. And all prognosticators suggest that whoever wins Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes wins the White House.

Canvassers have been pouring in from out of state, something like 600 busloads to our area alone, plus countless carloads, from the blue states that surround us: New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts. (Who knew so many Brooklynites owned cars?) I met two people who flew in from Los Angeles, and another two who flew from Amsterdam. I myself drove down from Toronto, where I now live – a trip I also made ahead of the 2020 and 2022 elections. On Nov. 2 and 3, the Harris campaign knocked on 1.6 million Pennsylvania doors, and sent two million texts. But will it be enough? How much is enough?

For my first two weeks here, I worked in the Easton office, bundling flyers and calling voters. The campaign staffers were three young geniuses: one, a former Broadway dancer who went to Columbia business school; one whose heritage is Egyptian, who lives in Florida and works in government; and one who grew up in Puerto Rico and now works as a geopolitical security consultant. The volunteers, meanwhile, were almost all 55-plus, mainly white, mainly women. There were a lot of retired teachers. It was like watching the past finally catch up to the present.

One afternoon we talked to a 75-year-old woman who said she was voting for the first time, and was thrilled it was for Ms. Harris. “Why haven’t you voted before?” we asked. Her late husband, she said, wouldn’t let her. While canvassing in Hellertown, I talked to a woman who pointed across the street to her neighbour’s yard. He’s been flying his American flag upside-down – the signal for Americans in distress – since the day Joe Biden took office, she whispered, but she still grocery shops for him.

It’s these stories from women that are gutting me most. We’re getting so many reports from our canvassers of husbands who don’t permit their wives to talk to us. A friend just texted me a photo of a Post-it she spotted in the women’s room in the Philadelphia train station: “Woman to woman: Your vote is private. Our health care is at stake.” But there’s internalized misogyny among the women, too. In Hellertown, I talked to a retired nurse in her early 70s. She didn’t like Donald Trump, but she wasn’t planning to vote because she wasn’t sure if Ms. Harris could handle the job. “You were a nurse!” I said. “You know women can do anything.” She said she’d think about it.

I heard more stories like that during my current assignment, staffing the canvassing office in tiny Slatington, population 4,300-ish. The town grew up in the 1800s around a slate mine. There are lovely historic buildings on Main Street, and a Mediterranean food stall at the Farmers’ Market, but the economy isn’t exactly booming. Traditionally, the area has been solid Republican, and the Democratic campaigns haven’t even tried to canvass here. The roads are long and looping; the houses are far apart; the lawns are festooned with Trump signs. For two nights in a row, someone spray-painted the word “Liar” in black over our Kamala signs.

But lately, Democrats have been moving into the region, and the Harris campaign is reaching out to them. As we are knocking these doors – most for the very first time – people are actually lowering their voices to speak to us. They support Ms. Harris, they say, but they’re afraid to put up a sign, because they don’t know how their neighbours will react. Driving around, I keep hearing radio interviews with therapists who say their patients are calling around the clock, terrified: about impending violence, about losing their health care, about the threat to democracy.

But these canvassers are giving me hope. OG hippies from Vermont who just hopped in their cars and drove down. A laughing group of 20 from Minnesota, who watched the news for months, zeroing in on precisely where in PA they could do the most good, then flew in for three days of solid door-knocking. A mother and daughter from New York – the mom is a filmmaker who just made a documentary about librarians in Texas who are being harassed for keeping queer content on their shelves. The daughter survived a school shooting in Florida. I might be living in a blue bubble, but I’m convinced there are more kind, sane people here than not.

I’ve been sleeping fitfully, though. I keep thinking about the woman who pounced on me as I hung a “Sign in Here” placard outside the Slatington office on Friday. Shaking with anger, she repeated Republican talking points verbatim: What did I have to say about abortions at nine months? That’s not legal in any state, I replied. What about illegal immigrants? Ms. Harris wants to fix immigration, I said, not end it. She kept accusing me of not answering her questions; I finally said, “I am answering them – you just don’t like my answers.” Eventually I told her I had to go.

I keep thinking about a woman I canvassed in Easton, who told me she wasn’t voting. She didn’t like Mr. Trump, but her big issue was “the border,” and Ms. Harris wasn’t fixing that. I asked why the border was her priority, since PA is far from it, and eventually we got to it: Her son died two years ago, from a fentanyl overdose, and she was convinced illegal immigrants sold him the drugs. I told her how sorry I was, then urged her to think about her own health care. Like the nurse, she promised to think about it.

That’s all we’re doing here, vote by vote, drip by drip. That’s all we can do. And all we should do, really, because every vote is one vote: mine, Beyoncé’s, Elon Musk’s. The voting booth is the one place in the U.S. where every person is literally equal. I’ve had some success with that line, and also with this one: How will you feel if something great happens and you weren’t part of it? How will you feel if something terrible happens, and you did nothing to stop it?

The encounter that really haunts me, though, was with a man in Hellertown. Late 40s, beard, tattoos. He was smoking a cigarette on his front stoop as I approached. His 20-something daughter was listed as a Democrat on my MiniVan canvassing app. She wasn’t home, but he was sure she was voting for Ms. Harris.

He wasn’t voting, he said. Politics doesn’t affect his life. “Well, it’s 89 degrees F on Oct. 28,” I said (this was before I realized that climate change is not a factor at all in Pennsylvania politics). “That affects you.” He snorted and said, sure, but milk prices are up. I started my spiel about the economy. He held his hand up. He really did not want to talk to me, he said. I thanked him and left.

Later, I realized what I should have said to him. I wish I’d said, “Why don’t you go to the polls with your daughter? Why don’t you vote for her sake?” This vote is so close. That’s one I missed.

Special to The Globe and Mail