by Peter Thorlichen, Third Act Massachusetts Member
We pulled up to the last house on our list a little before 7:00 pm on Sunday, June 9. Meg Clough, Betty Southwick, and I had been canvassing door-to-door for much of the day in Nazareth, Pennsylvania. We had missed this house on our way into the neighborhood where we had just talked to a number of people. It was getting late, we were all tired, and we had gotten back into the car ready to head to our temporary home. But there it was. After a short discussion, I agreed to take this one by myself and rang the doorbell, holding my Susan Wild for Congress literature in my hand. A man in his thirties opened the door and said that they were in the middle of putting their children to bed, but he told me to go ahead and briefly tell him why I was there. We discussed the Wild campaign and the equally important campaign for state representative, and I began to remind him about Bob Casey for Senate when he interrupted me to say, “So you mean, Vote Blue. You got it.” I smiled, said, “Yes,” and handed him the Wild flyer, wishing him a good night. I walked back to the car with a slight bounce in my step—an energizing note on which to end our weekend canvassing trip.
The three of us were compelled to go to Pennsylvania because of the urgency of this election—a choice between democracy and autocracy—and we wanted to have an impact in a swing state. Susan Wild’s seat had been strategically chosen because it is rated as one of the most endangered Democratic seats in the country. By working in this district, we could have an impact up and down the ballot, from the state house to both branches of Congress and, of course, on the presidential election. As the voter to whom I spoke so succinctly put it, we were encouraging Pennsylvanians to embrace the importance of voting blue at every level, each one of which will play its unique role in safeguarding our democracy.
On Friday night, we met with Susan Wild’s unflappable and energetic young campaign manager, Molly, who explained that we would be engaged in what some have called “deep canvassing” with registered Democrats who had been identified as low-propensity voters. In short, it meant beginning a conversation with questions designed to elicit voters’ responses about issues that are meaningful to them. A simple idea, yet it effectively sets a non-threatening tone for these interactions.
On Saturday, Meg and I were paired together to canvas. The first voter on our list was a woman in her sixties sitting next to her husband in a lawn chair by their backyard swimming pool. Practicing our best deep canvassing, we initiated the conversation by asking what her concerns were. She talked about Medicare reimbursement and the lack of recycling in the district—something we became very aware of during our stay. Though she did not fully commit to voting in November, hopefully, as the election nears, she will remember the time Meg and I spent talking with her over her backyard fence about issues that mattered to her.
Later in the afternoon, Meg and I went to the home of two voters on our list, a fifty-year-old woman and her eighteen-year-old daughter. The husband/father came to the door and called to his wife, who came outside to speak with us. Her daughter, she said, was busy in the kitchen. After spending five or so minutes talking to us on their length-of-the-house front porch looking out over the fields, she called to her daughter. The younger woman very proudly told us that she had voted for the first time in the primary in April. We asked her what issues were important to her, and, without hesitation, she identified reproductive rights. After a bit more conversation, she agreed to work as a volunteer for the Wild campaign. Meg and I left feeling giddy about this interaction, and, perhaps, we played a small role in altering the trajectory of this young woman’s life toward becoming more involved with politics.
The lengthiest conversation I had was with a man in his mid-thirties who was sitting on the floor in his garage working on some kind of machine. He got up and told me about the positive experience he had had with Congresswoman Wild’s office after he had been laid off from his job a few years earlier, when his company closed his union workplace and he and other former union employees were denied jobs for openings at a non-union site a short distance away. Our conversation went all over the place from the state of the country to Trump’s recent convictions. This discussion was a reminder to me that it’s people like him who stand to lose a lot from a potential second Trump administration, geared to servicing the wealthiest among us. For him, I think it mattered that someone had cared enough to talk to him about his life. Making these person-to-person connections is critical to building our democracy movement.
It is, of course, difficult to measure the precise impact of the canvassing we did. Most everyone we spoke to was extremely appreciative. I have to believe that some of the goodwill that we engendered was due to the fact that we were older people engaged in this work, validating the Third Act premise that we seniors have a crucial role to play in this election. I came to see the work as lighting little sparks. We don’t know which ones will catch fire, but I have no doubt that some will. Wildfires is perhaps not the best metaphor for those of us concerned about climate change, but maybe we can all get behind the notion of lighting fires for democracy, the only way we’re going to have any realistic chance of mitigating the extent and frequency of those other types of wildfires.