Canvas for Kamala
What It’s Like Walking Precincts in a Battleground State
Ding-dong. Inside the house, I could hear dogs barking then footsteps approaching. I readied my pitch as my wife stood about 10 feet back with our adorable dog, Arrow, hopefully our secret weapon in winning over swing voters in Nevada, a crucial battleground state.
“Hello, I’m Steve and this is my wife Lisa and we’re here supporting the Kamala for Harris campaign,” I stammered to the stone-faced woman who answered the door. “I mean, the Harris for president campaign. We’d like to talk with you about…”
“We don’t want any of that here,” she growled, closing the door in my face.
It was a rough start to our three-hour shift walking precincts for Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign. We’d begun at the Harris campaign office in a light industrial part of Reno, next to auto repair and detailing businesses and the Juggernaut Arms gun shop. The office was adorned with campaign signs for Harris, U.S. Sen. Jacky Rosen, and other Democrats.
A long-haired young man greeted us and a guy from San Francisco who had also signed up for this Reno Region Out-of-State Volunteers Weekday Canvassing shift. While he went over the materials with us and helped us download the app we’d use, a steady stream of young Harris campaign workers came over to meet and pet Arrow.
Our plan for helping Harris win Nevada and the presidential race seemed off to a good start.
Ringing Bells: The precinct we were assigned to walk was in the Wingfield Springs neighborhood of Sparks, Reno’s twin city. It was a well-manicured, well-off community built around a pair of golf courses, a neighborhood that we’d learn had lots of retirees, ex-cops, and transplants from California.
Politically, the neighborhood was a mixed bag, with very few houses sporting any political signs, and those flying Trump or other right-wing flags balanced out by houses with Kamala or “In this House We Believe…” signs. But our target list was only Democrats and independents who might be persuadable.
The MiniVAN app we used identified each target voter in the household by name and party affiliation. Our job was to ring the bell, chat them up, and find out what issues they cared about and if they supported Harris. If they were undecided, we’d try to persuade them using a script or our own wiles. Then we’d record all that data in the app.
If we encountered a Trump supporter, we were told to be respectful and not engage or try to persuade them, to just walk away. That would prove a difficult directive for me, someone who enjoys a good political argument.
It was a weekday afternoon, so we got no answer at most of the doorbells (mostly Rings with cameras) we rang. But then we found some nice Harris supporters who thanked us for our efforts and scratched Arrow behind her ears, and that buoyed our spirits. We were helping, yay us.
At one house, we met a sweet grey-haired woman in her ‘70s, and she also loved Arrow. She was so nice and personable that I was genuinely surprised when she said that she and her husband were voting for Trump. But rather than just thanking her and walking away, I needed to know why.
She acknowledged many of Trump’s failings and his divisive nature, saying she recoils at some of the stuff he says. But she said the last four years have been worse than the Trump years, and she wants to go back. I gently tried to cite improving economic and crime stats, and to remind her of the chaos and lies of Trump’s presidency.
But she just had the feeling that things have gotten worse in this country during the Biden-Harris administration, and it’s hard to argue feelings. So we wished her well and continued on our way, but we didn’t get far.
Another older woman walking her dog, a shy white whippet, stopped us on the sidewalk to say how gorgeous Arrow was, maybe the most beautiful dog she’d seen. Clearly, this was a discerning woman. But when we said we were canvassing for Kamala, she scrunched up her face, nonverbally conveying her disappointment at the life choices made by this wonderful dog’s owners.
We crossed paths with her a short while later, and she shouted something derogatory about “comrade Kamala” at us, and I responded, “At least she tells the truth.” Later, I wished I’d said, “I wish Kamala was a socialist, but she’s way more conservative than that,” thinking that might be more appealing.
But neither line was very good, and I was starting to understand why we shouldn’t engage with the Trumpies. Even our secret weapon didn’t do much to soften their scorn.
We did pick up a few more Harris supporters on our route — and had a really interesting conversation with an undecided voter. It was at a house where our app said a 19-year-old female Democrat lived, but she wasn’t home, so we spoke to her mother, a nice woman about our age.
She told us her daughter was definitely voting for Harris and her husband was definitely voting for Trump, but she was torn. As we talked, she told us that she wasn’t going to vote for Trump — his behavior was just too terrible to support — but that she wasn’t sure about Harris and wanted to do more research.
Lisa talked to the woman about economic issues and how Trump only cared about himself and other rich folks. I told the story about Harris opposing the death penalty as the district attorney of San Francisco, and showing her toughness and integrity by maintaining that stance even after harsh bullying from cops who wanted her to bring capital murder charges against a cop killer.
The woman was interested and engaged, but still noncommittal, so after about 15 minutes of conversation, we wished her well and marked her down as undecided. Our shift was winding down and we had just enough time to get back to Kamala campaign headquarters for the start of the vice presidential debate
Watch Party: The debate was already underway when we arrived. About 20 people — young and old, of varying ethnicities — were seated around a TV in the small front room where we did our canvassing training a few hours earlier. Office staff greeted us, urging us to sign in, sign up for additional volunteer shifts, and grab some food.
Beyond the next room where food was laid out on a table was a larger room with a bigger TV and even more people, filling every seat and raptly watching as Tim Walz fumbled through his answer about supporting Israel and J.D. Vance sounded surprisingly strong in claiming Trump “consistently made the world more secure.”
The mood in the room seemed somber, but eventually the crowd warmed up to more of the partisan cheering and jeering that I was hoping for. After downing a couple of beers, much needed after my canvassing shift, I found myself shouting at the screen as Vance portrayed a smooth and effective Trump presidency that bore no resemblance to my memories of that painful term.
But for someone who’s written off Vance’s inexperienced political stumping as “Junior Varsity,” I was unpleasantly surprised at his effective delivery. Vance may have distorted the facts, Trump’s record, and Harris’ responsibility for current affairs, but he sounded pretty reasonable, so much so that uninformed voters might accept this alternative reality.
Eventually, Walz found his footing and his voice — and Vance found the limits of his ability to spin Trump into a paragon of “common sense wisdom.”
Walz and Vance had some unusually civil policy exchanges and each acknowledged finding some common ground, even on the fraught issues of gun violence and abortion. For awhile there, it seemed like a wonky debate from the before-times — before Trump arrived to derange and enflame our political discussions.
After Vance dodged questions about whether Trump actually lost the 2020 election and on his responsibility for inciting his supporters to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6. Walz responded that he was happy with how the debate had gone and their agreements, but that he couldn’t disagree more with Vance’s defense of the indefensible here.
“We need to tell the story. I mean, he lost the election and said he didn’t,” Walz said, soon adding, “A president’s words matter. People hear that.”
When Vance continued to dissemble and distort, Walz zeroed in. “He is still saying he didn’t lose the election,” Walz said, grandly turning to Vance to ask, “Did he lose the 2020 election?”
“Tim, I’m focused on the future,” Vance replied, before weirdly veering into accusations of conspiracies against conservative misinformation during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
“That is a damning non-answer,” Walz replied, and Kamala’s campaign office erupted in cheers at his best line of the night.
“America, I think you’ve got a really clear choice,” Walz said, bringing it home, “of who’s going to honor that democracy and who’s going to honor Donald Trump.”
Back on the Beat: The next morning we were scheduled for another three-hour canvassing shift before returning home to California. We returned to the same Sparks neighborhood to finish up with the houses we hadn’t gotten to the day before.
We were supposed to finish in one shift, but between our training and drive time to get there and back, that would have taken far more hustle that we could muster. So we worked our way through the remaining targets, still finding the vast majority of people not home.
We started at a house across the street from one with a big Trump sign — and we were happy to find they were Kamala supporters. Well, maybe it’s more accurate to say they were Trump haters.
He told us he was a retired prosecutor from San Francisco who had worked under Harris, calling her a typical politician who can’t be trusted. But voting for her is an easy choice for him and his wife because they think Trump is a madman who would destroy the country and its democratic institutions.
“You just have to listen to him,” he said of Trump. “He’s telling us all what he’s going to do.”
Like many of the people we encountered, he was happy to talk and seemed to relish the opportunity for a long conversation, so he went on and on as we mostly just smiled and nodded, interjecting just enough to keep him going.
Some of our targets that day quickly told us they supported Kamala and thanked us for coming, which felt good. But the other big, long-winded conversation we had that day was with a Trump supporter — actually, it was less a conversation than a lecture we repeatedly tried to exit.
He said he was a businessman and a successful one, and he’d just had a big meeting with a bunch of other successful businessmen, and this cabal had supposedly decided that Harris would wreck the economy and they all needed to support Trump.
I’d learned my lesson from the day before, and perhaps I was a little hungover from enjoying a hot Reno night along its hip riverwalk, so I tried not to argue with the guy. Even as he veered into sexist criticism of Harris’ ability to hold her own with hostile foreign leaders, I mostly held my tongue. He seemed to think he could talk us out of supported Harris, but I knew there was nothing I could say to dissuade him from voting for Trump.
But then, as the guy ranted at us about how much money he made during Trump’s presidency and how Kamala would ruin everything, his 20-year-old daughter arrived home. She was the one we were actually there to see, the Democrat on our app.
I gently tried to engage with her, suggesting that maybe she supported Kamala, but she ignored both me and her ranting father and squeezed through the doorway. Clearly, this young woman wasn’t going to take her political cues from any of the old folks arguing on her doorstep — or even pause to pet the cute dog. I don’t know if she’s voting or who she’s voting for, but somehow, I took her indifference to us as a positive sign.
Young women, concerned about reproductive rights and other personal issues, may decide this election. And with that to ponder, we headed home.