Shhhh! Democratic volunteers work harder than Republican paid staff. From The Washington Post, by Georgetown University Prof. Dana Milbank:
Opinion So, what did you think of Harris’s October surprise?
Across the country, the vice president’s field operation dwarfs Trump’s.
A volunteer installs a yard sign to support Vice President Kamala Harris in front of the Buncombe County Democratic Party office in Asheville, North Carolina on Monday. (Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images)
Forty thousand volunteers have signed up since Harris became the candidate, on top of those who were already volunteering for Biden. The Harris campaign has been running four shifts of daily canvassing here — at 9 a.m., noon, 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. — in which hundreds of volunteers knock on thousands of doors. Last week, campaign volunteers knocked on more than 100,000 doors and made more than 1.8 million phone calls in North Carolina alone. Comparable efforts are underway in every swing state.
And the Trump campaign?
It’s all a reminder of the timeless maxim: Campaigns matter. Many Harris supporters are biting their nails as polls show a dead heat just a week from Election Day. But one thing the polls can’t reflect is that the Harris campaign has a field operation that is beyond anything seen before in presidential elections, while the Trump effort is subpar. This is no guarantee of victory, but in a close election, it can make the difference.
Nowhere is that more important than in North Carolina, which is on the cusp of turning blue. Trump won it by 3.6 points in 2016 and just 1.3 points in 2020, or 75,000 votes. Over the last four years, the state’s population has grown by 4 percent, and most of the newly registered voters are young and in the solidly Democratic Charlotte area and in the Research Triangle around Raleigh.
“Demographically, we’re there,” Scott Falmlen, senior adviser to the Harris campaign in the state, told me. “That’s where field ought to produce the slimmest of margins.”
The field operation is sprawling and precisely coordinated. Half the field offices are in rural counties, where volunteers are knocking on doors to reduce Trump’s margin of victory. With essentially unlimited funds and lots of volunteers, the campaign has been doing not just get-out-the-vote canvassing among Democratic voters but also persuasion canvassing aimed at undecided voters, which typically isn’t done this late in a campaign.
Nearly 100 Harris staffers are organizing four canvasses per day on each of 32 college campuses in the state. Last weekend saw a “Souls to the Polls” effort with more than 100 Black churches getting parishioners to the polls to vote early. Campaign surrogates have flooded historically Black colleges and universities. The campaign coordinates with civic organizations to offer voters rides to voting places.
The field effort is coordinated with paid advertising, of course. The Harris campaign has been on the airwaves here for a year; for Trump, it has been the last few months. Black radio stations have been saturated with ads. Low-propensity Democratic voters will have gotten on average eight pieces of mail this cycle — low-propensity Black voters will have received 10 to 12 — and each will have received between two and six phone calls from volunteers and at least one in-person visit.
In the Democratic stronghold of Asheville in western North Carolina, I spent a couple of hours last week following Democratic volunteer Bess McDavid as she went door to door. She downloaded her assigned “turf” from the coordinated campaign (a joint operation of the Harris campaign and the state Democratic Party) into her canvassing app, “MiniVAN,” which identified those on her route who had not yet voted. She gets a call before her scheduled canvassing time from a campaign staffer to make sure she hasn’t forgotten, she walks the route ranking each voter as “Strong Harris” or something less, and at the end of the day, she gets another call from a Harris staffer to debrief her.
McDavid stopped at about 35 homes (in a neighborhood largely unscathed by the recent hurricane) during my time with her, handing out information about early voting and urging neighbors to get to the nearest polling place. Of all those who answered the door, only one said she wouldn’t be voting, and another was a Republican who had recently moved in. But the rest required no pushing:
“I’m trying to get my husband to come with me.”
Got my ballot on the counter.”
“Of course!”
“On it! One-hundred percent.”
“I already voted by mail.”
One woman, recovering from surgery, came out on her porch in her bathrobe to thank McDavid; she had already voted and her husband was about to go. “Thank you for your service to our party,” she told the canvasser.
“It’s more enthusiasm than I’ve ever seen,” said McDavid, who has been doing this for years.
McDavid has been knocking doors three or four times a week for the last several months, and she said eight or 10 others have been doing the same just in her precinct — one of 80 in the county.
The next day, I visited a canvassing kickoff at a home in suburban Raleigh, where Doug Emhoff greeted 125 volunteers.
The speaking program was cut short because one of the volunteers required an ambulance, and after a delay, the second gentleman came to the driveway to send the canvassers on their way: “We’re not going to get any more votes if we’re all just standing here.” They marched off with their MiniVAN turfs and stacks of campaign literature.
The day after that, I watched another canvass launch at the basement field office in downtown Raleigh, decorated by a life-size cutout of Harris, a “Make Pregnancy Safe Again” poster and a Ted Lasso “BELIEVE” sign over the door. This time, 10 of Harris’s friends from around the country came to join 30 local volunteers, one of whom brought her dog. A few minutes later, Maya Harris, the candidate’s sister, joined them, hugging and posing for photos with the volunteers. “You’re going to have a lot of fun with this crew,” Harris said of her sister’s friends. “I want to go canvassing!”
A campaign staffer urged the canvassers to send him even more volunteers — “Tell your friends. Bring your family. … We need everybody” — then sent them on their way. “All gas, no brakes,” he remarked.
Will it all be enough to propel Harris to a narrow victory? No one knows. But I agree with Democratic Rep. Wiley Nickel’s forecast. As he put it to me: “If we win, the field operation could be the story.”
In other North Carolina races, it doesn’t actually matter how the election turns out. Republicans here have gerrymandered the state legislature and the state’s congressional map to such an obscene degree that the will of the voters is now utterly irrelevant in those races.
The presidential vote will likely be close to 50-50 in North Carolina. And yet at least 10, and possibly 11, of the state’s 14 congressional seats will go to Republicans, and Republicans will maintain a supermajority in the state legislature. This is because GOP state legislators, in addition to insulating themselves from electoral challenges, redrew the congressional map after the 2022 election, which sent seven Democrats and seven Republicans to Congress.
Democrat Josh Stein will almost certainly win the governor’s race, and Democrats will likely take a couple more statewide races. But the congressional delegation “will either be 71 percent Republican or 79 percent, in a state Kamala Harris may very well win,” Nickel said.
Nickel decided not to run for reelection after Republicans redrew his district into a crazy shape to remove enough Democratic voters to make the seat “tsunami proof” for Republicans. “I have to give them credit for how surgically they went about it,” Nickel marvels. Instead, he’ll run for the U.S. Senate in 2026, because “it’s the only thing they can’t gerrymander.”
Nickel introduced the Fair Maps bill, a plan for nationwide, independent redistricting. A Duke University study said it would make about 40 more House seats competitive, which is roughly double the current number. It would correct Democratic gerrymandering in places such as Maryland, but most of the gerrymandering has been done by Republicans — which is why Republicans won’t allow Nickel’s bill to go anywhere.
The U.S. Supreme Court has blessed partisan gerrymandering, no matter how extreme. The Roberts Court also gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, making it much easier for Southern states to redraw maps to diminish Black voting power, as North Carolina clearly has done.
At the time, civil rights icon and Georgia congressman John Lewis warned that the decision would be “a dagger in the heart of the Voting Rights Act,” as the historian David Greenberg recounts in his new biography, “John Lewis: A Life.” Now, four years after Lewis’s death, North Carolina is again proving him prescient.
2 comments:
It was better than Trump's lies and scams. Four years ago, he was telling people to send him money to "stop the steal." That was a bogus claim and a scam. People died because of his lies!
The sheer volume of votes for Trump in this county tells a story of intellectual devastation and cultural squalor. The right wing propaganda, irrational ideology, and false information has turned people's brains into peanut butter.
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