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ELECTION 2024 - The Democratic Party has been joining with thousands of allied groups working feverishly to hold off TFG’s fever-dream. I’ve long felt the world growing increasingly topsy turvy, with ‘up’ becoming ‘down’, with Truth literally becoming hard to decipher. I did not formerly appreciate how vertiginous this all could grow, but I’ve learned to feel a lot of sympathy for people who hold their hands over their ears, 🙉, and plead for it just to stop, who say variously they cannot tell what is true or what matters. And I have a lot of sympathy for people who hold their hands over their mouths, 🙊, and insist they don’t want to talk any more about any of it, yet hang on, making small talk and dancing about the elephant in the room (often war spending and/or policy), swaying to and fro, pleading nonverbally for some small patch of comfort. I have great sympathy for the people whose hands are clapped over their eyes, 🙈, refusing to see the bigger, looming picture for the forest of fury focused especially around the war machine and its atrocities.
I’ve encountered a lot of messages “at the doorstep” and on the phone these past few weeks, knocking, calling, listening, sympathizing. Encouraging folks in taking that last step to vote, supporting those for whom voting has morphed into a daunting burden, who feel a responsibility to vote, but are fed up with all the attention and gas lighting, sometimes harboring even residual confusion.
Election day-eve has dawned with a whisper of cautious optimism, the faint signal that the People have gotten that memo about severe jeopardy to our individual Rights, and collective democracy. Following are some of the stories I absorbed when deployed effectively to targeted doors first by LUCHA, Living United for Change in Arizona – a social justice nonprofit in Phoenix, in partnership with LA’s Stonewall Democratic Club (SW). Logistically supported by Seed The Vote, a grantee of the Movement Voter Project, which works nationally to optimize get out the vote efforts – our pod of eleven volunteers led by SW President Emeritus Mohajer, knocked 1200 doors in two days. Personally, I felt that approximately 60%-80% of my conversations were functional in the sense that my presence increased the likelihood of a ballot being cast from that household compared with had that household not been visited.
Working with Seed The Vote felt more efficient than I have experienced previously, and part of that feeling reflects being well-supported as a volunteer, as well as Seed The Vote’s essential modus operandi, which is itself to be supportive – of volunteer and voter alike. Seed The Vote exhorts volunteers to listen closely to the voters we encounter and connect with them personally. I had permission to share of myself with these people, to exchange personal conversation, information and even contacts, to follow up and engage with them subsequently, to do what it takes to support them in their decision to vote, which for some is overwhelming. With real-time chat support to answer questions we cannot address, solve or parry, I felt confidant I was approaching each door with a basket of offerings that brought value to the exchange.
I met a DACA recipient unable to vote in a household of voters that included his sister. We discussed his role encouraging those who can vote to do so for him. And I had the unique experience of hearing this man thank me for expressing my own feelings of embarrassment around what this country has put him and his peers through. He will be volunteering with LUCHA and he texted me in Spanish that everyone had voted.
I met several moms similarly represented by their voting children. We discussed the “MOM” method of voting, corralling the children, grandchildren; nephews, nieces and cousins, sitting and discussing the candidates, and several of these texted me photos of the MOM-plan in action, with a fistful of ballots going into the drop box.
I spent a long while with the quietest of young voters, intensely focused on cleaning up her life for her adorable toddler, keenly interested in each and every single candidate and office. She was committed, but inhibited from submitting her ballot, right through to the “comedic” refrain at the MSG rally about Puerto Rico. She texted me a proud picture of having voted, to oppose the wake of that garbage. In ten years I fully expect that powerful interest to have morphed into academic prowess.
Reflecting on my experience in Phoenix, I decided to sign on to more such smart, supportive, effective organizing, and flew with Seed The Vote to the state of Pennsylvania for more doorknocking. Their volunteers are still on the move, still needing monetary resources, so if you would like to contribute to Seed The Votein support of my efforts with them, I’d be thrilled for your donation here.
Partnering with Unite Here, the culinary and hospitality worker’s union in Philadelphia introduced value-added at the doorstep. Students at UH’s free Academy Training Program graduate with a guaranteed union job. Beyond imploring the engagement of fellow citizens at the ballot box, was a component of giving back information valuable to the community. I handed out dozens of these fliers to decidedly-interested folks.
I just received a phone call from a disabled 75 year old gentleman I met in Phila, caring for his 99 year old mother. He called to say they both voted. Because Seed The Vote sent support to their doorstep. Their organizing enabled me to request absentee ballots for the pair on the last day of availability, which arrived via mail and a helper dropped them into the drop box.
I conducted a polite conversation with a skeptic of all politicians, dispirited by the war machine, unwilling to engage. He promised to “consider my arguments” to make a plan for November 6, to get engaged in pressuring politics be conducted more ethically.
We canvassed two high-rise Housing Authority projects for seniors, filled with people who have never not voted Blue and have no intentions of not doing so now… but need assistance to the polls: support. It is arranged.
Seed The Vote conducts its business supporting people supporting voters, and retains record of these successful encounters. I have well over a thousand such texts, pictures and stories like my own, repeated in infinite variety, over and over and over. You can hear a faithful example of their brand of canvassing here. It is a biased sample of course, so the feeling is not broadly reliable; I am quietly hopeful all the same.
PLEASE VOTE – my thoughts are here. We all need you to. All of us. Even “California”, scorned as “so blue,” despite hijacked school boards, intimidation and election threats.
Vote for Proposition 33, mere permission for downstream governance and regulation around shelter, a basic human necessity. Vote against Measure G, a gratuitous power play that evades good governance and deliberative legislation. Vote for true supporters, of actually public, education: Schmerelson (LAUSD3), Hendy Newbill (LAUSD1), Griego (LAUSD5). Vote to preserve reproductive freedom for women, economic relief for the many, and democracy for all. Vote Harris-Walz today, Tuesday 11/5/24.
(Sara Roos is a biostatistician from northern New England living in West LA. Raising children from private to charter to public schools provides a front-row seat to the microcosm of electoral politics that is education politics. She started blogging this experience at redqueeninla.com, eventually co-publishing the LA Education Examiner. Sara is an elected delegate to the LA County and state Democratic Party Committees since 2020. Her monthly constituent newsletter and essays can be found at redqueeninla.com.)
