electioneering with mr. gimpy

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.

Two different things completely.Yet a surprising number of people have claimed, with straight faces, that they haven’t made up their minds even going into today, Election Day, between the smart nice lady and the vengeful orange blubber monkey. So, months, weeks, days, hours before the election, obsessives like me call such undecideds, or knock on their doors, to try to sway them, as part of a broader effort to help get out the vote. Specifically, in my case, the Democratic vote.

Now, on this Election Day, in what I feel is the most consequential election of my lifetime, I thought I’d share a few stray observations you didn’t ask for, from my last week or two canvassing and making phone calls.

Yet by the time you get to read this – assuming you can even stand another blessed word about this impossibly exhausting election cycle – voting may be done. It may be all over but the shouting, though the shouting is sure to go on for days, especially from the Trump camp should he, glory be, come out behind.

If you’ve never canvassed in an election, understand that most of what you’re doing is knocking on doors that never open, with people not home or having moved since the last election, or simply not opening the door for you, since you can hear them moving about inside. Phone calls go the same, few actual answers, and with so many numbers disconnected since the previous election; when you talk at all, it’s typically to leave messages that will likely never be listened to. And when an actual live person does pick up, it can be a little jarring.

I should note that my canvassing assignments have taken in two historically “bad” local neighborhoods, economically disadvantaged places with their fair share of drug-related crime, and yet with a number of older residents still hanging on in their tidy little houses that stand out dramatically against the pervasive street litter, the overgrown empty lots and the many boarded-up properties, while a depressing number of skittish stray cats dart everywhere around.

These are largely African-American neighborhoods, and along comes a gimpy old white dude, hobbling with a purple paisley cane, arthritis screaming in one foot, and a briefcase-bag of Kamala Harris pamphlets slung over one shoulder.

Also, for a couple of days earlier this week I found myself navigating several stretches of rural homes in the one-stoplight town of Belvoir, where I expected to find far more Trump signs than I actually encountered (there were still quite a few, of course, and often garishly huge ones). I would so much rather canvass in neighborhoods, even so-called rough ones, because even with GPS in rural eastern North Carolina, it’s often a maddening hunt-and-peck experience to find the right house due to old or fallen-off mailbox numbers and homes set so far back from roads. You can spend as much time looking as you do ever knocking on doors.

Anyway, let’s get to it, a few snippets of my own electioneering fun:

• Last weekend, canvassing: A little kid behind the door, after I had just rung the bell, the window blinds cracking briefly, then falling back: “It’s a white person!” Next the sound of retreating feet, and then, well, I’m left standing on the otherwise empty porch, feeling a bit foolish, but still chuckling.\

• Last night, calling a 30-something woman who’d registered as an independent, and who lived on the rural outskirts of Farmville, a different woman picked up instead. The person answering identified herself as the other woman’s mother-in-law, saying her daughter-in-law was not home. Out of politeness, I announced who I was, volunteer, Harris campaign, calling because tomorrow was Election Day, and … abrupt click, disconnected, though not before the mom-in-law huffed, “Forget you!”

• The wild canvassing encounter last weekend with a serious crazy who, in his dirty-sock-feet, nearly pushed me out of his way with his tattered screen door to literally stomp onto his front porch, fuming that I was preventing him from coming out, so he could then scream at me that I wasn’t welcome there. He saw my Harris sticker, and before I could get in a word, his obese, dreadlocked, jet-black self declared he was an “Indian,” and we (which at the moment, consisted of me) stole his land, and why the fuck should he vote for somebody who stole his land? Also, voting itself was a lie, and that voting precinct literally just across his street was “a prison.”
  
  (I had actually been there to see his son, who was at work. I was, you might say, strongly encouraged to not come back.)
  
  I’m not saying dude wasn’t Native; I’m not. I have no idea. I am saying he was fucking nuts, regardless.
  
  At one point, I mentioned that my family had not been there to steal his land, that we came over much more recently; it’s a good rule to not engage with the crazy, by the way.
  
  “You’re a foreigner! A thief foreigner! Just like that woman you’re trying to get people to vote for! A foreigner! Get off my property! Go, go, go! Now!”
  
  Before I got out of his unkempt yard, trailed by his booming protests that I stop talking to him, because he had nothing to say to me, and even as he continued shouting at me while I went to canvass the (empty) house next door, and till I was finally out of his sight further up the street, he aggressively informed me that Trump had bought him his house. It was a really sad little house, by the way. Trump could have done the guy a lot better.

• Lemme just say it’s creepy to pull into a driveway in rural eastern N.C. on an overcast day while canvassing, then getting out of your car and glancing up to find the source of the wisping shadows on the concrete beside you, only to see about 10 turkey vultures wheeling directly above you.

• Another call last night, and this middle-aged-voiced guy picked up, so clearly not the elderly person I was calling for. I asked to speak with the 88-year-old registered Democrat on my list. Guy says, flatly, “Nope. He’s dead. He wouldn’t vote for you anyway.” Then he promptly hung up. I’d never even had a chance to identify myself.

• Last weekend, early into my canvassing, I visited this one small cluster of duplexes which wrapped around one block, and that I think served as some sort of informal halfway houses. At the last house on my list, I asked the kid who answered the door about the three people I had listed as living there. The kid, in his mid-20s, I’d guess, shirtless, shoeless, and tattooed all over, struck me as being of Polynesian descent, and had the bearing of someone who was probably fairly fucked up on something at that moment. He told me, his voice flat, that none of those people I’d asked about still lived there. One guy, he noted, was “back in prison, for some BS he should have known better about.”
  
  I asked if the kid himself had voted, and he said he couldn’t, and also that he was due back in court soon himself; so, end of that conversation. I also asked about the older African-American man moving from room to room in the darkened hallway just off the main room, which contained, by the way, not a single stick of furniture, just open space and worn floors.
  
  “Oh, him. You don’t wanna talk to him about any stuff like this, politics and stuff. He gets really worked up.”
  
  OK, then.

• About a week into canvassing, with session typically running for a couple of hours each day to allow me to race home to never quite avoid my old dog peeing all over the floor, and it happened again, something kind of sweet, but ultimately depressing: Another African-American family, all Democrats at first wary of me thinking I was there to push Trump, felt compelled before I left them to urge me to be careful, the unstated but obvious implication being that me, an old white guy out campaigning alone for Harris, could easy get attacked by one of the MAGA nutjobs out there.
  
  One really engaging young man, who was absolutely delighted to have a white guy show up promoting Harris, a black woman, and actually getting almost tearful in his enthusiasm, even asked me, “Are you carrying anything to protect yourself with, sir?”
  
  I told him I had a cane in my car. I don’t know that this inspired much confidence in him of my odds for avoiding the beatdown he was worried about.

• I met a younger woman in her yard out on Gum Swamp Church Road in Belvoir, as she was getting out of her car. She told me she was just then back from early voting. We talked for quite a few minutes, and she mentioned she’d also been canvassing for the Democrats, since … back in June.
  
  Um. Oh. Wow.
  
  #Humbled.

• Also out near Belvoir, I spoke with a very sweet woman with a Harris-Walz sign in her yard. I said something to the effect that I didn’t think Trump liked either black or brown people, to which she responded, “I don’t think he likes people at all.”
  
  Well, there it is.

And now, kids, I’m off to my final few hours of canvassing before the polls close, and, well, and.

I’m an avowed atheist, so take this in the weird spirit it is intended: God help us all.