Opinion: A Letter From the Campaign Trail

I woke up at 1:30 in the morning, still sitting cross-legged on a folded towel in front of the coin-op dryer in the motel’s little laundry room, my laptop still lit, still perched precariously in my lap.  Mercifully, no one had taken it.  Somehow, I gathered up my damp clothes and got them into my room and myself into bed.  I had little memory of doing this when I woke up six hours later.  It’s Sunday, so I lay there for a few minutes. I’ve never thought political canvassing was decent on a Sunday morning before about noon, so I didn’t need to rush out yet.

As some of you know, I am on a very meandering return trip east from a visit to family in the upper midwest, door-knocking my way for the Democrats in a number of the swing states, from Minneapolis, MN to Scranton, PA, with heavy doses of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio in between, and squeezing in the occasional phonebank from motel room desks when I can.

A few nights ago, my wake-up call was from a small pack of coyotes in the deserted campground of Wild River State Park, on the St. Croix River between Minnesota and Wisconsin.  Their call and response a bit unnerving in the foggy 4 AM woods, but at least it wasn’t a black bear nosing around the edges of my thin nylon tent.  They have bear there, too – at least according to the park’s many warning signs, but I never saw any.

It may not be the most efficient way to campaign, a lot of highway miles driven, a lot of blocks walked on sweltering sidewalks, and money spent on gas and campground fees, and cheaper motels, just to get to talk with a few handfuls of voters in a day.  But there are things you see, and hear, and get to say, small connections you get to make, in person, that you just can’t get over the phone.  

I had a long talk with an articulate and exceedingly well-informed young black man who wasn’t on my walk list (his wife was), who told me up front he wasn’t going to vote – the two parties were essentially the same, funded and run by the wealthy classes, busy financing foreign wars and never actually making any changes for people in neighborhoods like his.  

I told him I completely understood his view, that’s why I was registered as an independent, and on one of those intuitions you can have in an in-person conversation, shared that I had done a lot of volunteering for Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020 for just those reasons.  That opened up the conversation (he had been a Bernie fan too), and I said, that despite all my disagreements with the Democrats, I had grudgingly decided I had to help the Democrats win against Trump and the fascists running the Republican Party right now, so that the political hole we were in didn’t get any deeper, and we had a chance to fight for our progressive goals in the future.  He said his wife had been coming around to this point of view as well, especially because of the Republican attack on reproductive rights. 

I would have liked to have spent the afternoon on his front porch, hearing more of his political ideas, how he came to them, what I should be reading and who I should be listening to, what groups he thought were making a difference.  But I had already spent more of his time, and mine, than I probably should have, so we wound down the conversation, shook hands, and he said I could add his name and cell number to the Democrats’ contact list.

A bone thin man on another porch not far away, with a mean, large dog, barking at me apoplectically, just barely restrained by a nylon rope, a man who had lost nearly every tooth in his mouth, said he was undecided who he would vote for, but gave me nearly every Republican talking point, about ‘illegals’ bringing fentanyl across the border and coming here and committing crimes, about Biden not stopping them, maybe encouraging them, with China behind it all wanting to destroy our country, and Russia able to poison our water, bomb us, or shut down our power plants any day now.  Whatever contrary facts I raised (and some agreement I offered on Russia and our power plants, given the looming threat of cyberwar on all sides), he seemed to listen to, but then brush off, before he just left me alone with his bloodthirsty dog, walked off his porch and down the block – with me hoping I could do the same before that nylon rope broke.

A few streets later, I found myself in the bar below the apartment of a couple whose door I was having trouble finding.  There were six or eight partly sober guys at the end of the dimly lit bar.  They told me the couple wasn’t home, lived upstairs from the bar, and they would be happy to give them the flyers we were leaving at doors.  I wondered if those flyers were ever really going to get to the couple upstairs, but left them with the guys at the bar anyway.  

Our flyers still hadn’t been changed from Biden & Kamala to just Kamala, and one of the guys called out to me as I was leaving, ‘Hey, I thought Biden had dropped out of the race.’

‘Yeah, we’ve been telling the campaign they had to get us new flyers already.’  

‘Yeah, they better do that,’ the guy said.  Sensing it was a politically mixed crowd at the bar, I said, ‘Well, for now you can take the Trump approach and take a magic marker or a sharpie to make the change yourself.’  That got a laugh, and a laugh is always a small step towards realizing we’re all, somehow, in some way, on the same side.

Being here in person in these swing states, I also get to listen to local talk radio, see the many Trump signs in the cornfields and smalltown yards (and some Democratic signs pushing back as well, “Vote for Democrats – They vote for us” is one), overhear conversations.  I can confirm ‘from the field’ that the change to Kamala was a very good and necessary one.  The mood of pro-Democratic activists, staffers and voters at the doors is much lifted from the gloom and resignation surrounding the Joe Biden candidacy of before. 

But my sense also seems to confirm the national polling – Democrats’ Congressional and White House chances are improved, but this is still going to be a very close race for the future of the country.  In Wisconsin, for example, the past few elections have come down to a difference of two or three votes per ward.  

Forty or fifty thousand voters in a few swing states could change the future of our country completely.  Forty or fifty thousand voters is a margin of difference that you and I and thousands of pro-Democratic volunteers can definitely win.  So, whatever you can do, phonebanking, textbanking, postcard- and letter-writing to voters, going to knock doors in swing states, giving money to Democrats in close races, best be doing it, doing it now.  There’s less than 100 days left before November 5th, with democracy or fascism on the knife edge.

Many thanks for all I know you are doing, and will be doing.

Rudy Perkins is a former staff attorney and project manager for an area affordable housing developer, where his work included managing development of energy-efficient apartment buildings with rooftop solar. He served as a member of Amherst’s Fort River Building Feasibility Study Committee and helped renegotiate Amherst’s Zero Energy Town Buildings Bylaw.