Canvassing in Burlington

Mary and I hit the streets of Burlington today for Ricky Hurtado of NC District 63. Ricky's a good public servant and a very nice guy (he gave me a free T-shirt so I could fly the flag properly instead of wearing a Biden/Harris shirt).

We made our way through a working-class, mostly African-American neighborhood and got the typical range of responses, from "of course we will get out and support Democrats" and "we appreciate y'all for coming out" to "I'm really not sure who I'm going to vote for, I'm still studying on it" and "I don't know, things really haven't been going that well." I get it. It's not like anyone has solved all their problems. Nor will they ever, though as Democrats we often fall prey to overpromising what government can do. 

There was one guy who came out on the porch to smoke a cigarette and explain to us how Congress should be restructured to work better. One of his ideas was that each county should have its own representative in DC so that a small county like Alamance wouldn't be represented by someone who also had to represent a bigger county like Guilford. The problem of having a Congress with 5,000 members didn't phase him. More seasoned politicians than the two of us probably have better rhetorical strategies of channeling the energies of such front stoop philosophers. We had to keep going.  

One older guy was deeply disappointed because he had gone in to get a license to get a gun and they wouldn't give it to him because of some misdemeanor he had from back in South Carolina where he was from. He told us he was going to go down the the jailhouse to get it sorted out. We assured him that we didn't have the solution to that one.

One woman came to the door clutching what looked like a baby in a blanket, but it was so small that it didn't seem plausible. Then I saw the tiniest red foot poking out from the blanket and Mary was like, "oh my god, that must be a newborn." The woman was like, "yeah, I just had him Wednesday." We apologized for disturbing her and she was like "nah, y'all are alright."

One Hispanic woman was absolutely not voting for Ricky, thought she was going to be supporting other Democrats. There was a backstory there of some sort, some local gossip. It happens.

In general we did a good job of advocating for early voting and just voting a straight ticket so we don't end up with narrow losses where people didn't vote in races they didn't know about (like Cheri Beasley, who missed reelection to the NC Supreme Court by 400 votes due to this kind of thing).  What we did a bad job of was asking questions and hearing about specific issues people had on their minds. Maybe next week.