24 Confessions Of A First-Time Canvasser
A game of inches that beats free-floating anxiety, helps at the margin, and is illuminating.


(7.0/10) ⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑⭒⭒⭒ (1)
On Sunday, I broke my life-long streak of free-riding off of politically engaged election volunteers. In fairness to me, for almost half my life I was literally a child. Even if I’d been a politically engaged adolescent, I lived in an uncompetitive congressional district (Republican Jerry Lewis was my congressman the whole time) in the generally uncompetitive state of California. I caught my first glimpse of political activism in middle school when many of my Latino classmates staged a walkout in protest of Proposition 187.
Then for most of my adulthood, I worked as an employed journalist.
Now I’m a solo practitioner, and deeply invested on a civic and personal level in not living through another Donald Trump presidency. I wouldn’t enjoy covering his second term, even though it would almost certainly be in my financial interest for him to win the election. The Trump era has been mentally unhealthy for everyone I know who cares about strangers, and horrible for the kind of writing I got into journalism to do. Under Trump, reason has fallen out of political persuasion, replaced by whatever crude lies and demagoguery can propel a meme through the viral internet. Careful argument has become a tiny niche. Some journalists and news outlets made a lot of money in Trump’s first term, but journalism in general deteriorated badly, in both prestige and reach as a craft. In a second term, the profession would erode further, and there’d likely be a government crackdown on non-right-wing propaganda.
And that’s all before we get to higher minded values like truth, ethics, knowledge, and pursuit of the common good.
So on Sunday morning, my wife and I hopped a charter bus to the Democratic Party’s campaign headquarters in Ephrata, PA, a small town in red-but-blue-trending Lancaster County. To give you a sense of the lean, Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Lancaster County by almost 20 points in 2016, but “only” beat Joe Biden by about 16 points in 2020. We arrived around 11 a.m. and were on the pavement ringing doorbells about a mile from down town before noon, for almost four hours.
I figured I should log my thoughts on the experience for the benefit of readers who’ve never gone door knocking before or for anyone who wants a partially converted skeptic's read on the merits of what campaign professionals call “field.”
As a matter of stereotyping on first impression and yard-sign counting, I was struck by how evenly divided our assigned neighborhood seemed. If anything it seemed to lean Democrat. A Democratic activist and former candidate saw us toting campaign literature and a clipboard and stopped her car to say thanks. She told us Democrats had barely any presence in Ephrata until just a few years ago. As someone who grew up in what was once Goldwater territory and who’s traveled to cover campaigns, it resembled so many deep-red residential neighborhoods I’ve walked and driven through in my life. Except, telltale signs suggest it wasn’t exactly like those anymore.
That doesn’t mean Kamala Harris has Pennsylvania locked. It could be a wash or worse if she gains in counties like Lancaster, but hemorrhages votes in even redder parts of the state, or if Trump makes even small inroads, percentage wise, in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. Still, I took the visible organizing delta as a good omen.
Mostly I’d never canvased before because I’ve been a journalist my whole career. Even when I worked at Crooked Media, where this kind of volunteering was encouraged, I created a firewall. Direct political action conflicted with my learned view of how news writers and outlets earn trust. If you’re doing a lot of political giving, or campaign volunteering, new readers may have a hard time accepting that the information they’re getting is reliable, or reflective of a full picture. Would someone who works in his spare time to elect a particular candidate report information that might hurt that candidate? (In my case the answer is yes, but people who don’t know me would have good reason to assume I’d bury it.)
Disclosure is the alternative to this kind of narrow neutrality, where it’s fair game to write all day about how liberalism is better than conservatism, but not to get directly involved in elections. So this is my disclosure.
Pavement-pounding activism still isn’t my most natural inclination. My strong bias is that political discourse is best when it’s opt-in rather than opt-out, and when you knock on someone’s door, you’re making them opt out.
I also like the old ideal. If, after Trump, the United States somehow gets back to more normal elections, where the stakes are bound by the dimensions of the federal budget and regulatory apparatus, rather than whether U.S. troops should round up and shoot liberals, I will once again limit my political activity to writing for an engaged audience.
But part of what made this a good experience was the psychic value of taking direct action against bad actors. Fascists like Trump thrive on you giving in to feelings of helplessness. Canvassing against fascism, authoritarianism, even Nazism—rather than out of rote red v. blue tribalism—will feed your agency and deny them the satisfaction of demoralizing you.
This isn’t a rationalization; it’s what Republicans say about themselves. In his new biography of Mitch McConnell, AP’s Michael Tackett reports that McConnell privately described Trump as “stupid as well as being ill-tempered,” a “despicable human being” and a “narcissist.” McConnell’s public response to this revelation was to confess against himself and other prominent Republicans: “Whatever I may have said about President Trump pales in comparison to what JD Vance, Lindsey Graham, and others have said about him,” McConnell said in a statement last week, “but we are all on the same team now.” To be specific, Vance said Trump might be America’s “Hitler,” and Graham called him a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.” That’s the team they chose to join.
Based on walking a single shift, I feel strongly as though canvassing in bad weather would be terrible. (Thankfully we caught good weather, but good weather starts to become scarce in northern swing states in October.)
Even in good weather, I think you’ll find that it’s worth having reasonable expectations.