Knocking on doors

Went canvassing in Roxboro yesterday. Knocked on 46 doors, all of them in an almost exclusively African-American neighborhood just up the road to Hurdles Mill from the off-site build housing community that we built in 1989. I say almost exclusively, because there was one white guy moving in, a guy wearing a cowboy hat and with a handgun in a holster on his belt. He was driving -- oddly enough -- a Mitsubishi hatchback with a sticker on the back that said something like "It's not the violence you are willing to commit that matters -- it's the distance you are willing to travel." Maybe that's why he had a smaller car instead of the regulation issue F-180, he needed better gas mileage so he could go get violent in places further away. I'm not sure how long he's going to enjoy his current neighborhood.

Other than that it was a good day of knocking on doors. A mix of conversations. I was working with a woman who was down from Brooklyn for a couple of weeks. She had worked as an editor at The New Yorker for a couple of decades under all the regimes -- Shawn, Gottlieb, Brown, Remnick -- and we knew a bunch of people in common. And she liked to travel to canvass, which is cool. She was a little shy about physically knocking on peoples' doors, not always best when you are calling on octagenarians and/or people who are watching TV in the afternoon, as many often are.

But we had the full range of conversations. There was the super-thoughtful guy who was taking a break from replanting a Japanese maple and said that he liked to vote the candidate and that he didn't like all the divisiveness of today's atmosphere. But then he said that Trump was an unbelievable asshole who was dragging us through the mire. There was the guy who was sitting alone watching a black and white TV in an incredibly overheated room eating something from a can, who had some sort of an intellectual challenge, perhaps from birth, perhaps from protracted subtance abuse. On his wall were magazine cutouts of the Obamas, but also Beyonce and women in bikinis. But he was deeply disaffected, talking about basic suspicions that all politicians were corrupt and how this guy would come in there and tell that guy to do this...  I talked to him about somebody sending a bomb to Obama's house last week and how I grew up next to Josh and he was straight, but I don't know if I got through. It was hot as fuck in there and I needed to get out and keep moving. There was the 60ish woman who was clearly a little tipsy at 4:30 and said "I done already went up there and voted, straight Democrat. That young man Quincy been coming by here looking to give people rides" (actually it's Quinton, Darryl Moss's campaign manager)

Most people didn't know much about the 6 amendments on the ballot. It was hard to present a cohesive case in the short time we had, and it felt manipulative to just say "the party says vote no," but in the end that's the nature of it, and that's the gamble the Republicans are making, that people are just so caught up in watching whatever the fuck it is that is on TV that their people will vote for the amendments while less-informed Democrats will be intimidated and say to themselves "well that doesn't sound so bad" and either vote yes or not vote at all.