Karen Laws is contributing a series of On the Ground feature essays leading up to Election 2024. This is her first. For the others, see our On the Ground front page.
Sometime during 2023, I promised myself to do voter canvassing in 2024. Fearful that the Donald Trump juggernaut might gain control of all three branches of the federal government, I felt an imperative to talk face-to-face with voters who could potentially flip a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives from red to blue. And that’s what brings me to the Central Valley town of Porterville, Calif., four hours south of my Berkeley home.
It’s Friday, February 2—fleece weather, the temperature in the fifties—and I’m waiting for a voter to come to the door. This is a quiet street of single-family, ranch-style homes with well-kept yards. Standing beside me on the voter’s front steps is Maureen Forney, an experienced political activist with iron-gray curls and a big, ringing voice. She and I are volunteers representing Rudy Salas, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Congressional District 22, which stretches from Visalia, the Tulare County seat, to Bakersfield. Nationwide, this seat is among a handful in California and New York that could mean the difference between a Republican-led House and Democrats regaining power.
I’m not sure how Maureen gets this voter, a middle-aged Latino who wears a cross necklace, talking about his daughter, but she does. He tells us that because his daughter became pregnant by a rapist, he now has an adult granddaughter he loves very much. Therefore, he can support only candidates opposed to abortion. End of conversation, I think. But it isn’t, not even when Maureen expresses her opinion that a woman should be free to choose whether to carry a child to term. The three of us continue talking. We discuss the morality of abortion. Maureen, her voice full of feeling, keeps bringing us back to the man’s personal experience. It’s clear she empathizes both with his pain and joy. I can see he’s becoming more relaxed. As am I.
On our way to the next house, Maureen says, “That was a real conversation.”
I’ve signed up for three days of canvassing. By Day Two I’m “knocking doors” alone, my partner one street over. (A trained canvasser says “knock doors,” not knock on doors—efficiency encoded in argot. And usually we ring the doorbell.) In this semirural neighborhood, the house numbers seem to be in random order. 3576 and 3581 on the same side of the street? Hmm. Eventually I see the address I’m looking for painted on a mailbox. There’s a pickup truck in the driveway, a lovingly maintained succulent garden, a little sign by the door that says Este hogar es catolico. I notice that the front porch, a concrete slab painted red, has a crack running down the center and plastic chairs on either side. Symbol of a divided nation?
Three registered voters live here, per the app on my phone. And there’s more info to absorb: names, ages, gender, party preference. If a woman answers the door, she’s probably 75-year-old Maria Rodriguez. As an older Latina she might not be bilingual, but the polite thing to do is start with English and switch to Spanish only at her request. On the sidewalk I commit all three voters’ names to memory, but when I reach the door, I’ve forgotten them. I’m 64—short-term memory loss. My phone’s in low-power mode and the screen saver has activated. I find my way back to the canvassing app and reread the names. Internal voices spur me on and cast doubts: Oh my God, can you not retain the name Jose for three seconds? The 23-year-old’s first name is multisyllabic and looks hard to pronounce. Do your best. I knock on the screen door. Hollow clanky sound. Could someone inside even hear that? But opening the screen door feels intrusive. I knock again, wait, pull a flyer and a clipboard from my over-the-shoulder tote bag, write, Thanks for being voters! and sign Karen. I tuck the flyer into the screen and check the Not Home box on the app.
~
Porterville is a gateway town to the Giant Sequoia National Monument; but agriculture, not tourism, fuels the local economy. Last year, Tulare County was named the top-producing agricultural county in the nation; it alone produced more milk and other dairy products than the entire state of Wisconsin. The Kings River, one of four that flow from the Sierra into Tulare Lake basin, irrigates over one million acres—more than nearly any other river on the planet, including the Nile. Most of that land is owned by a few big growers; just two companies control 378,000 acres of irrigated land in the San Joaquin Valley. The big growers are notorious for “double dipping”: they cash government checks worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for growing crops, such as feed grain and cotton, that are eligible for subsidies. Then they irrigate those fields with deeply discounted federally subsidized water. The average citizen, meanwhile, is working hard just to get by. Tulare County’s biggest employer is a Walmart distribution center. Per the 2022 U.S. Census, 18 percent of people in Tulare County are living in poverty.
Last year, Tulare Lake reappeared for the first time in decades, and crops in the lakebed were inundated. But water in the Valley is scarce overall. Groundwater supplies are seriously depleted, and local people who rely on private wells find sand in their toilet tanks during drought years. In 2014 and again in 2021, unincorporated East Porterville was the epicenter of a dry-well crisis that left thousands of Valley residents dependent on bottled drinking water, with no water at all for the garden, cooking, or showers.
Tulare County is 67 percent Hispanic, and yet it took until 2018 for a Latino to be elected to the Board of Supervisors. (Only two women have been elected to the Board since 1852, when the county was founded.) Although District 22 has more registered Democrats than Republicans, the area has historically been represented at the national level by a Republican man. Salas is up against Republican incumbent David Valadao, who has been re-elected multiple times since 2013. The problem for Democrats is low voter turnout. And that’s where canvassers come in. Studies show that in-person conversations produce better results than phone calls, texts, or handwritten postcards.
I introduce myself to voters as a volunteer representing Democrat Rudy Salas, but neither Maureen nor I are working for the Democrats. We’re here under the auspices of Bay Area Coalition (BAC), an organization that plans and implements 70 percent of the Democratic canvassing in District 22 and its neighbor to the north, District 13. BAC is here because this race is critical and winnable. BAC knows how.
“Whenever we’re involved, it’s a branded event,” says BAC cofounder Cecilia Minalga, who sits in the hotel lobby where we report for duty, her hands busy with flyers, forms, the phone. She looks at us over the top of reading glasses, a pink and purple Statue of Liberty emblazoned on her shirt, and assign “turfs,” one for each pair of canvassers. As volunteers come and go, she handles one request after another with a seemingly endless supply of good cheer.
The branded experience started before I left home, with a call from a BAC “concierge.” Based on personal experience, concierges are chosen for their friendly voices. They know how to soothe fears and make canvassing sound like a cakewalk. They’ll find you a spot in a carpool (which is how I met Maureen) and suggest places to stay, including the homes of local volunteers. But the real key to the BAC brand is deep canvassing.
“Bay Area people want to have meaningful conversations, not just put up numbers on a board,” Cecilia says, adding that canvassing run by political parties is usually “quantitatively driven.” The precise meaning of deep canvassing depends on who you talk to; BAC offers weekly Zoom training sessions on their version. My takeaway from a presentation Cecilia gives in the hotel lobby is: Listen to the voter. Ask what issue matters most to them. And if they shrug or say nothing, count silently to ten before speaking again.
“After the 2016 election, my husband and I decided we had to do something every week,” Cecilia tells me. Like so many others, myself included, who had not been politically active pre-Trump, she saw a need to defend our democracy at a national level. I joined a local chapter of Indivisible, formed in 2016 to “resist Trump’s agenda,” and reached out to voters via postcards and text messages. Cecilia, who by 2019 had retired from her career as a temporary CFO, accepted a full-time position with the California Democratic Party.
“My political naivety was stunning,” she says, explaining her failure to understand why the party wanted her to oversee two offices and a staff of four in the safely blue Bay Area. Gradually she realized her job was to build an activist base that would operate in the far more conservative Central Valley region.
But there was a problem. The grassroots organizations that already had volunteers working to advance progressive causes didn’t trust the California Democratic Party. For too long, the party had taken a top-down, hierarchical approach the grassroots found disrespectful. Cecilia understood the need to approach Bay Area chapters of national organizations like Indivisible by asking what the California Democratic Party could do to help them. Noticing how much excitement got stirred up in large phone banks, where volunteers saw dozens of other people making calls and could feed off their energy, Cecilia surmised that one huge phone bank would yield better results than multiple small ones. To provide logistical support for such combined efforts, Cecilia quit her job with the party and became a co-founder of BAC. It didn’t take long for the grassroots to see the benefits of joining forces when it made sense to do so.
BAC now has more than fifty Bay Area partner organizations, from Swing Left Peninsula to Democracy Access Marin. Cecilia and five partners, all volunteers, meet weekly to strategize for BAC and keep things on course. Cecilia has served as the onsite staging leader for every District 22 canvassing event since October ’23, the beginning of this election cycle, and she plans to keep up the pace until Election Day in November.
~
“The time comes when you realize your boss will never pay you enough to be their neighbor,” says Raul Garcia, a volunteer canvasser who grew up in Porterville, where he still lives. I meet Raul at one of the dinners BAC arranges at local restaurants for us. Among the septuagenarian white folks wearing Columbia and Patagonia, Raul stands out with his dark brown beard, ball cap, and faded T-shirt. When I hear him talking about how getting exposed to pesticides at work led him to become an activist, I switch seats to listen in. Later, he and I will talk at length over the telephone.
Raul, who is Mexican American, first became interested in politics when faced with the injustice of the 2008-9 housing meltdown. Then fourteen, he saw that his parents were “working hard, doing all the right things,” and yet they lost their home while others did not. To help sustain his family, he went to work at a dairy after school and during summer. His exposure to pesticides occurred at the dairy, due to regular spraying at an adjacent almond orchard. In college Raul studied political science with the hope of discovering who was “pulling the strings” that cause injustice. He now thinks he wasn’t ready for college; his grades were poor, and he dropped out. He preferred volunteering for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), where he met “like-minded people” who introduced him to deep canvassing. It was the kind of work he’d been looking for. He canvassed for Democrats in 2018 and led a successful effort to ban the use of glyphosate, a dangerous pesticide formerly found in Roundup, at local schools. He also saw how outside organizations, despite their best intentions, can leave local people feeling disillusioned. He cites an environmental nonprofit that took high-school kids on hiking trips and got them excited about planting trees only to disappear by spring break.
While on the phone with Raul, I think back to the night I met him in downtown Porterville. Volunteer turnout that weekend was high, and around fifty of us were seated at tables that had been pushed together. Looking up from my bowl of over-salted minestrone, I took note of Raul’s self-effacing manner. His body language telegraphed concern not to offend anyone. He hadn’t ordered dinner, only a beer. He repeatedly thanked the people around him for their volunteer work in Tulare County.
“Do people in Porterville see us canvassers as rich white liberals swooping down from the Bay?” I ask Raul. He laughs, then reassures me: “People may think it’s strange for some random person to come to the door, but they don’t know you’re from the Bay Area, and I’ve never heard anyone say anything bad about canvassers.”
As our call comes to an end, Raul says how impressed he is that I’m willing to make the effort to come to Porterville. He says commuter canvassers like me are needed to counter a prevailing attitude of “give-up-it-is” in his town. I tell him not to be so impressed. I could stay home and work on local issues—like homelessness. But that’s a tough problem to solve. Salas vs. Valadao offers me the chance for a clear, game-changing win.
~
In March I return to Porterville for GOTV (get out the vote) canvassing. It’s the weekend before the primary election, and many people who open their doors to me say they’ve mailed in their ballots. A few are eager to share that Rudy got their vote. Others let me help them make a voting plan; we discuss exactly when and where they will cast their ballots. Still, the apathy, the resignation, is real. At least you’re doing a good job of holding the silence, I tell myself after a young woman silently closes her door. Raul told me he has friends who laugh at him for voting. Like me, he has to fight against the contagion of give-up-it-is.
Time to hunt down the next address on my list. I like this town. I like the Welcome signs on front porches and Easter Bunny wreaths above doorways and the hollow eggs someone has attached to the long, pointed leaves of aloe plants. It’s Sunday morning, and my canvassing partner is Ruth Schoenbach, who shared the back seat of Maureen’s car with me in February. On this trip I’m the driver, and my longtime friend Naomi has joined our carpool. Today’s turf is in a neighborhood bordered on two sides by orange groves. The fruit has been harvested; fallen oranges under the trees tempt the gleaner in me. Clouds rush by overhead, blocking the sun, and there’s a rawness to the air. Ruth is one block over when I approach a man seated out in front of his house, not on the porch but among perennial bushes and plants, where he can enjoy the warmth of the sun. The pair of shiny, jumbo-size pickup trucks in his driveway suits him the way a book of poetry would suit me. He is solid and unmoving, his body a barrier, his gaze a deterrent. “No English,” he says, dismissing me with a wave of his hand. But I smile and address him in Spanish. After a few minutes of reluctant conversation, he agrees to accept a campaign flyer on behalf of his son, the registered voter whose name came up on my phone. I hand him two flyers, one in English and the other in Spanish. The Señor, which is how I think of him, frowns while looking over the information. “It’s not true,” he exclaims, jabbing his finger at the flyer. “The Democrats promised water for mi terreno, and they never delivered.” I tell him I’m sorry about his land and thank him for his time.
The day before, canvassing with Naomi, we knocked doors in a neighborhood of Section 8 housing, chain-link fences, and streets full of potholes. At 11 a.m. we get little response to door knocks in an apartment building with a common balcony and external stairways to a gravel yard. A man on the second floor who answers the door is barely upright, half dressed, and disturbingly thin. “What issues are important to you?” I ask. On our way downstairs, Naomi suggests we spend less time with people who are unlikely to be alive in November. I laugh. We both do.
But we feel bad for the man. We feel admiration for a woman two streets over, who answers the door with a baby in her arms and a toddler clinging to her leg, and who tells us that better nutrition in school lunches is what matters most to her. We’re a little shocked when we meet a man who has the name of his household’s registered voter tattooed above his eyebrow. On our lunch break we drive past orchards. Walnuts? Some kind of fruit? We’re bound for a restaurant I looked up on Yelp. The rain is coming down in torrents, and I tell Naomi to stop talking so I can concentrate on driving. I can’t see—the rain’s falling too fast for the windshield wipers to keep up. Do I have a right to be here? My inability to answer that question makes me uneasy. We feel all kinds of ways, and we need the release of laughter.
Naomi can stay only one night. After dropping her at the hotel, where a non-canvassing volunteer will pick her up and take her to the train station, I drive out to East Porterville. The rain has stopped. Ahead of me are green hills with volcanic outcroppings, land that rises upward to the Sierra. Since the last drought, the state has invested in wells and water lines to connect East Porterville to the municipal water system; but I’ve heard reports of interagency squabbling, and it’s unclear whether residents will fare any better in the next drought. Here there are no sidewalks. I see houses on some lots, trailers on others, chain-link fences patched with chicken wire and plywood. Dogs run loose; a horse drinks from a trough. I drive down one street after another but never get out of my car.
East Porterville isn’t part of District 22, and I can’t think of a good reason for me to be here beyond my own interest in water issues. On my way back to Porterville, I see a shaggy-haired man walking alongside the two-lane highway. Plaid shirttails flapping in the wind, he puts his back into pushing a shopping cart piled high with sections of tree trunks. Oaks maybe, or eucalyptus—huge chunks of heavy wood. To either side of the road are fallow fields. Wherever the man is going, he’s a long way from it.
~
Early Sunday afternoon, Ruth texts me from one block over to say it’s time to head home. I’m seated beside a voter on her front porch, and she’s been telling me what it’s like to be a small-business owner now that homelessness and mental illness have become prevalent in Porterville. We finish our conversation, and she says she’ll consider volunteering for Rudy.
I’m pumped to keep knocking doors but agree to meet Ruth at the corner. She offers me carrot sticks from a Ziploc bag and politely refuses when I try to talk her into finishing our turf before heading back to Berkeley. Like Maureen, Ruth has many years of experience working for social justice. She knows how to avoid burnout and prepare herself for the next action. She wants to be home in time for dinner with her wife. On the way back to the car with Ruth, I recall that my husband promised to make split-pea soup for dinner. I think of our cat, our dog. It will feel good to be home.
A word Cecilia used when telling me about her journey from doing “something once a week” to becoming the District 22 staging leader comes back to me that afternoon. I’ve driven past the feedlots and dairy yards and am approaching the freeway, Ruth beside me in the passenger seat. Resonance, that’s the word. While doing political work, Cecilia has met some people she “resonated” with and wanted to hang out with, others not. It’s a strange way of putting it, but as with her comment about doing something, I get what she means.
I feel a connection with Maureen and Ruth, something beyond the sense of purpose we share with other canvassers I meet; we three resonate with one another. I’ve experienced a similar resonance with some of the voters I’ve encountered, despite our differences. Over blended margaritas at a BAC dinner, I talked with a guy named Bob, who, during the week, thinks about the canvassing he did the weekend before and ponders what could have made his encounters with voters better. He’s concluded the most important thing is not anything that’s said, but the feeling of the conversation. “If the voter closes the door thinking, that was a nice conversation, he was a nice guy to talk to—then I’ve done my job.” When Bob tells me this, I immediately think of my first day of canvassing and the voter whose daughter had been raped. I remember thinking at the time that he enjoyed talking with us, and that the feeling was mutual.
A few days later, I get the news that Salas and Valadao have beat back their respective challengers in the primary election and will face each other in the fall.
I expect to be back in District 22 soon.
