Editor’s Note: This article is part of U.S. Democracy Day, a nationwide collaborative on Sept. 15, the International Day of Democracy, in which news organizations cover how democracy works and the threats it faces. To learn more, visit usdemocracyday.org.
I couldn’t sell cookies when I was a Girl Scout. No one wanted to approach the sullen little girl who didn’t smile at potential customers. I’ve never been described as enthusiastic or persuasive, in other words.
But I signed up to do something out of character this election season. I volunteered to knock on doors for a local state senate candidate, Frank Patton Hughes, who lives in Avery County, North Carolina, a rural town in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Hughes joined the state senate race to defeat incumbent Ralph Hise, a Republican who supported legislation to expand opportunity scholarships, a program that essentially rerouted public funding away from public schools into private institutions. As a teacher, Frank witnessed how defunding public education hurts rural communities like Avery County.
I signed up to canvas because I saw it as an important part of my responsibility as the First Vice Chair of the Mitchell County Democratic Party (MCDP). Mitchell County is a rural county of about 15,000 residents that borders Avery County to the south.
I did not intentionally seek out the position of First Vice Chair of the MCDP. It was a role I was persuaded to accept after I attended a public MCDP meeting and dropped the average age of the group down by about three decades. They needed me. Well, not me specifically, but they needed another person. And they preferred a young person.
I agreed to volunteer because I wanted to sit behind my computer, send emails, and look at political data – not talk to voters (God, the horror!). But I found myself assuming more responsibilities as election season approached.
I dreaded canvassing the moment I signed up to do it. And it wasn’t for the normal reasons that a left-leaning person like myself might feel nervous about promoting a Democratic candidate in a county that overwhelmingly voted for Trump.
Political differences aside, I was terrified that I might panic. I imagined myself knocking on a door, forgetting my own name and why I was there, and running away out of humiliation, playing a shameful version of ding dong ditch.
Canvassing Is about listening, not tribalism
On a Sunday afternoon in August, I arrived in front of the courthouse in downtown Newland, North Carolina, the seat of Avery County. Hughes greeted me beneath a portico where he had set up a table with a few campaign materials, snacks, and bottles of water for the volunteer canvassers.
Before the other volunteers and I received our list of houses to visit, we smeared on sunscreen and engaged in small talk. I attached a Frank Patton Hughes pin to my t-shirt.
I first met Hughes at a Democratic event in Mitchell County the year before he decided to run for state senate. He introduced himself to me then as Judge Hughes, instead of his legal name, Frank.
When he was an infant, his grandfather said he looked fat and serious, like a judge. And the name just stuck.
“I’ve grown out of both of those characteristics since then,” Hughes told me. Hughes is slender now and all smiles.
Because canvassing is about listening to neighbors, not about reinforcing tribalism, Hughes encouraged the volunteers to redirect comments about national politics down to the local level, especially if a conversation with a respondent started to turn divisive.
Hughes demonstrated how to use an app called MiniVAN, which canvassers use to record survey data on their phones. Every time we talked to a voter, we were to enter their answers into the app from a series of multiple choice responses, which were then aggregated in the county’s voter database.
The other volunteers and I split up into groups of two or three. Each group received a list of addresses that contained either Democratic or unaffiliated voters in the county.
“Aren’t we preaching to the choir?” my partner, Becky asked, concerned that we were going to miss an important group of persuadable voters—Republicans who were tired of Trump.
But Hughes explained that many Democrats and unaffiliated voters don’t actually show up to the ballots on election day, according to the county’s voter turnout data. It’s important that we reach out and listen to those voters, too, because increasing turnout among existing Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters can sway elections.
Voters worry about the economy
The first house of the day belonged to a woman in her late 90s. She had her front door propped open, so I knocked on the screen door. She hollered at us to come in and take a seat. We’ll call this voter Sherry to protect her privacy.
Becky and I sat on wooden chairs at Sherry’s kitchen table where she had been playing a game of solitaire. The cards were in neat rows on one of her placemats.
“What issues are motivating you to vote this year?” I asked. I paused to give her a moment to think.
Sherry told me that she was worried about the economy.
“What are people your age going to do?” Sherry turned to look at me, the youngest of the three of us.
Sherry said she didn’t think that younger people could afford to raise families with inflation this high. I told her that it was definitely something people my age were worried about.
When Becky asked Sherry what she thought of our state level candidates, she said she didn’t know yet who she was going to support. She apologized about not being more informed. Sherry had macular degeneration, a progressive disease that causes deteriorating eyesight, and it had made it hard for her to read the news.
I looked down at her solitaire game and realized the numbers were larger than they were on a standard deck of cards. She drew her finger across the cards as if she were thinking about where to place the next one.
Becky and I reassured Sherry that we would answer any questions she had about the election. We also offered to provide assistance if she needed help reading about the candidates or obtaining an absentee ballot. We recorded her phone number in MiniVAN so that we could follow up later.
Visiting Sherry’s house gave me a boost of confidence because it made me feel like Becky and I were doing important work. I left feeling energetic, like I could give a TED Talk.
But persuasion wasn’t the goal of canvassing, according to Hughes. People just want to be listened to, and it’s important to remind our community that we care.
Later that day we knocked on the door of a Vietnam vet who had voted Republican for most of his life. We’ll call this voter Bobby.
Bobby answered the door in jean shorts and a white T-shirt tucked into a black belt. He greeted us on the porch as two small terriers growled at the screen door.
Bobby wasn’t sure where he landed on some of the Democratic Party’s policies. But he sure didn’t like Trump. And he was vocal about that.
Most respondents that day were running on residual energy from the Democratic National Convention earlier that week, and Bobby was no exception. He was pleased to see the positivity and the hope on display at the DNC, even though he thought a lot of it was fluffy fanfare.
As a voter, Bobby was more interested in practical economic legislation than he was in feel-good messaging. He would have preferred Kamala Harris to have a more detailed policy platform.
When asked what he thought about the healthcare system, Bobby vented about some of his own hardship, like how difficult it has been to receive quality care at overcrowded VA hospitals. He felt he deserved to be treated better, especially after all the sacrifices he made for his country.
Bobby apologized a few times for rambling, but Becky and I were all ears. He was one of our last stops for the day, and we had time to kill before we met up with the rest of the volunteers at a bar in town.
It turned out that Hughes was right. People really do just want to be listened to. It seemed to me that some respondents had never been asked what they think, that their opinions hadn’t even been considered important enough to inquire about.
I was worried that my lack of charisma would impede my voter outreach, but it actually appeared to be the opposite. The value of canvassing was humanistic, not political.
As Becky and I said our goodbyes and stepped off his porch, Bobby thanked us several times for stopping by. We hopped back into my car and cranked up the AC. Sunlight filtered through the hardwood canopy, scattering golden patches across the pavement.
This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Sarah Melotte is a reporting fellow for The Daily Yonder, a nonprofit
newsroom that provides news, commentary and analysis about and for rural
America. She lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
