Karen Laws is contributing a series of On the Ground feature essays leading up to Election 2024. This is her third. The complete series is available at our On the Ground front page.
“I’ve multiplied myself by seven,” I tell Shane, a Northern Nevada field organizer for the Democratic Party.
“That’s how it’s supposed to work,” he cheerfully replies.
When Shane and I first talked on the phone, it was just me coming from Berkeley to canvass voters in Douglas County, NV. Since then, I’ve recruited my husband, Dan, and five of our friends. We’re heading to the Silver State for the final push. Do or die. Kamala Harris for President.
“See you Saturday at 9 am,” I tell Shane.
~
The math doesn’t work out quite the way I hoped. One person backs out, others are delayed, Dan can’t come till Tuesday. But three of us arrive Friday night, October 18, at what will be our base of operations for a week of canvassing: my family cabin. Filled with furniture that once belonged to Republican voters (Dan’s parents and my grandparents), it’s a log-cabin kit house on high-desert land known locally as “the mesa.” We use the cabin for downhill skiing at Tahoe resorts, backcountry skiing and snowshoeing, fishing Sierra lakes, and hiking on the spectacular east side of the range. It’s also convenient to the Douglas County Democrats office in Minden, NV.
A few miles from the California-Nevada border, Minden—the county seat—and the adjacent town of Gardnerville have a combined population of 32,000. With a median age of 50, more than three-quarters of this population is white. The two towns provide an urban center for Carson Valley, where cattle graze in fields that stretch to a horizon bounded by mountain peaks. On our drive through the valley, we see stacked haybales and new calves, hawks perched on utility poles, roadside campaign signs for school board and other local offices, and Trump signs. Lots of Trump signs.
So it’s good to find the Douglas Dems office jammed with volunteers. This weekend the campaign is transitioning from persuading voters to vote for Harris, Senator Jacky Rosen, and other Democrats to getting out the vote. It’s a numbers game now. People new to canvassing sit on folding chairs and listen to an experienced canvasser go over the basics. My friends Rachele and Laird join the audience while I stand in line to get our turf, a list of addresses. A sign above the table where volunteer staffers hand out the lists makes me smile: “It’s OK to be a Democrat in Douglas County.”
Soon we’re on our way to a nearby subdivision. Gardnerville Ranchos got its start in the ’70s, and while some sections are new and upscale, with drought-tolerant landscaping, our turf has an old-fashioned suburban character. Halloween decorations abound. We see skeletons, and parts of skeletons, and blow-up ghouls lying flat on lawns among electrical cords. We’re unnerved by the Trump signs, two or more to a yard. Flagpoles stand in the center of yards, with oversize American flags hanging limp in the still air.
Laird and Rachele follow me up the sidewalk to the first house on our list. Never having canvassed before, they want to see how it’s done. I understand. When I first knocked on voters’ doors, I felt as if the person knocking must be someone else—because it sure couldn’t be me. Even though I’ve canvassed a lot since then, I still feel something like relief when nothing happens after the third time ringing the doorbell. Minivan, the canvassing app on our phones, tells us this voter is 99 years old. I’m reaching for a flyer to thread through her screen door when the entry door opens. She’s on her feet and surprisingly spry.
“Oh yes, I’ll vote,” she says. Her voice is faint, but she pumps her fist. “We’re going to have a woman president!”
As we’re leaving, I see tears in Rachele’s eyes. “That was so moving,” she says.
Later, Rachele will confess she’d been dreading this weekend. Both she and Laird see themselves as shy people.
~
The electorate in “deep red” Douglas County is 24 percent nonpartisan, 51 percent Republican, and only 18 percent Democratic. Grim as they are for a Democratic canvasser, the stats don’t capture what it feels like on the ground here. The phrase “enemy territory” comes to mind. We don’t have to guess why there are so few Harris-Walz signs; voters tell us. Fear of retaliation keeps them from signaling their opposition to MAGA. At the door, people look both ways and lower their voices before saying they will vote for Kamala.
When I assure a voter that she’s not the only anti-Trumper on her block, she nods dismissively and warns me to steer clear of every house on the opposite side of the street from here to the corner.
By Saturday evening, I’m exhausted. At the cabin, Rachele and Laird make my job as hostess easier by preparing dinner. The chicken marinated in advance and baked on a sheet pan with carrots and potatoes tastes delicious. After dinner, Laird reads a novel while Rachele and I play Scrabble. By now I’m so tired my eyes fall shut while she considers her next move. I want to call the game but can’t, first because good hostesses stay awake to entertain their guests, and second because I want to win.
Awake in bed hours later, I get a feeling best described as a slow punch in the stomach that I recognize as a symptom of fear. Like most people I know, I’ve lost sleep over this election. When I try to distract myself by reflecting on how I could have blocked Rachele’s game-winning final play, my thoughts go hurtling back to the emergency room where, on August 7, I saw through a morphine haze the surgeon who would replace my broken hip. I’d had what amounted to a diagnostic fall; due to the brittleness of the bone, my femur broke at the neck.
“You don’t see that kind of break except in cases of osteoporosis,” the doctor told me.
The surgery went well, and my recovery was rapid. Ten and a half weeks later, after a day of walking from house to house, I feel like living proof of the “science is real” signs in Berkeley yards. The slow-punch feeling goes away, and I fall back to sleep. When the alarm wakes me Sunday morning, I recall my dreams: I take calcium pills one after another without ever becoming certain I’ve had my daily dose. A woman places her hand over my breastbone; although her touch is gentle, I grimace with pain.
For me dreams are a resource, an aid to understanding. Besides revealing my fear that the next fall will land me in a nursing home, these dreams suggest that what I saw and heard yesterday while canvassing hurts my heart. They speak to the bitter division in American life. Like the books on authoritarian forms of government I checked out from the library and brought with me to the cabin, my dreams help me understand what’s going on in Douglas County.
~
There’s an adventurous aspect to voter canvassing. Sunday we drive south on U.S. Highway 395 through undeveloped land to reach “under-knocked” turf thirty miles from Gardnerville. The sky is cloudless, the light intensely bright. East of the highway, scattered pinyon pines declare what has been lost; blackened trees dot the hills to the west. Three years ago, the Tamarack Fire swept through here. We see a sign for the Lahontan National Fish Hatchery, and a few miles after that, the place where the fire jumped the highway. Ruined trees stand vigil on all sides. (The Tamarack Fire burned more than 68,000 acres.) With the eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada rising nearly vertically from the valley floor to ten-thousand-foot peaks, the landscape is both eerie and beautiful.
Democratic strategy in Douglas County this year is to “lose by less.” At headquarters they tell us it’s about creating momentum, turning red to purple on maps and in people’s minds, and possibly making up for a deficit elsewhere: if Las Vegas Democrats don’t vote in sufficient numbers, the votes we pick up in Douglas County could mean the difference between winning and losing the state.
At Topaz Ranch Estates, the census-designated place we’ve been asked to canvass this morning, places of business are limited to little more than Family Dollar, a beauty salon, and a small casino. Residents rely on propane tanks for heating. Long driveways lead from poorly maintained roads to homes that vary from double-wides to rustic structures with decks. On one such deck I chat with a registered Democrat who was visiting with a neighbor in the shade of her fruit trees when I arrived.
“Hal will want to leave now,” she says with a smile. When Hal laughs, I say to his retreating back, “We can have different opinions and still be good neighbors,” and am rewarded with a smile from him.
Given the time and effort required to canvass this area, we wonder if it’s worth the trouble. Laird is on his way to a door when three dogs rush him. No one calls the dogs off. Backing slowly away, he reaches the gate and exits safely. He checked the yard before entering; we’ll never know if someone let the dogs out on purpose or if they somehow escaped his notice until they started barking and running straight at him.
The day’s highlights include signing up a new volunteer for Kamala. (Such a nice guy, and I loved how he used pairs of old skis to make fenceposts.) A woman who comes to the door in a power wheelchair tells me she’s confident President Harris will do great things for our country. Together we make a voting plan for Tuesday: she’ll help her 101-year-old husband fill out his ballot and then vote early in-person at the community center adjacent to the dollar store. She’s white, her husband Latino, and they’ve lived in this remote place for decades. If not for canvassing, she would never have told me these things about herself.
Later this week, I will talk with a man whose three-year-old son has just died and a woman whose husband was recently diagnosed with cancer. One of several men who are working in their garages or on their cars when I show up teaches me some Mexican slang: “Me cae gordo,” he says about Trump. A canvasser’s encounters with voters take place amid circumstances ranging from ordinary to extreme; because these meetings are spontaneous, we never know what to expect. As I talk to the woman in the wheelchair, I’m conscious of how different we are. Only this election could have brought us together for a conversation that feels intimate.
~
Unlike Douglas County, Nevada’s capital city is a “battleground” where Kamala Harris has a slim chance to win. While most Nevadans have voted Democrat in every presidential election since 2008, Carson City, where Barack Obama won by the slimmest of margins, has long been considered a Republican stronghold. (Obama was the first Dem to win there since 1964.) Paid canvassers, along with hundreds of volunteers, have been very active in Carson City this year. My husband and I canvass there with Andy, a friend since our kids were in grade school. We knock doors in Carson City one day, Minden the next, alternating between turfs that have been heavily canvassed and ones where voters are surprised to see us.
“If we’re going to have a healthy democracy, ordinary people have to become comfortable being politically active,” Andy says over lunch. His comment stays with me, maybe because I feel it describes something that’s already happening. MAGA isn’t the only powerful movement afoot in America. Before 2016, few of my friends and relatives were involved in politics. Now that’s changed, and many people I know are working to promote/save democracy. They’ve joined grassroots organizations. They’re taking advantage of new software, such as TextOut, that makes it easy for ordinary people to do political outreach. But most people I know couldn’t be talked into door knocking.
My Nevada canvassing culminates in a weekend in Reno, where Dan and I join forces with two remarkable women who have become my friends through political activism. Martha and Maureen canvassed with me in California Congressional District 22. A third door-knocking friend, Ruth, wanted to come to Reno but was waylaid by COVID.
In Reno, we canvass under the auspices of the Culinary, a large and politically influential local union of hotel and restaurant workers, and Seed the Vote, a Bay Area–based political action committee. On Saturday Maureen leads a group including Dan and me through a wealthy neighborhood that borders a golf course. That night, we unwind at the home of a local activist. The party takes place mostly in the backyard, where a fifty-year-old wisteria vine grows on an arbor. By chance I sit at the same table with a woman who, at the age of six, met Marilyn Monroe on the set of The Misfits, that wonderful movie filmed on location in Reno.
Reno and its suburbs have been canvassed to the nth degree. Dan quickly becomes convinced that people are home even when they don’t answer their door; they’re just sick of being pestered by the likes of us.
A man who answers Dan’s knock says, “We’re both voting for Trump.” Back on the sidewalk, I ask Dan how he’ll fill out the Minivan survey for that household. Clearly the record should show the man is Strong Trump; his name will be dropped from the contact list. “But you need to mark her as Not Home,” I say.
If the knock comes when her husband’s away, there’s a chance she could be convinced to vote for Harris. It wouldn’t be our first “split house.” In Gardnerville, my conversation with a woman about whether to vote in person or by mail was interrupted by a man shouting from another room: “It’s none of her business!”
The woman winked at me and said sotto voce, “By mail.”
Sunday, Dan and I canvass an exurb north of Reno with Martha. In this neighborhood of prefab homes, some badly run-down, my best conversation is with a man who, after telling me he voted for Donald Trump, says, “I don’t know how my wife voted.”
So much of doorway meetings comes down to body language. My knock summons a tall, bearded, 43-year-old who positions himself so that I must choose between backing off and being too close for comfort. I hold my ground. He’s in my face. Seed the Vote asks volunteers to tell a personal story of what motivates them to volunteer for the Harris campaign. I’m ready with a story about my hip and Medicare, but—“I don’t want to hear it,” the voter says. “I’ll never vote for her anyway. I hate Kamala Harris. I’m from California and I know how bad she is.”
You’d think I’d choose caution over daring to approach a home with two Trump signs on the lawn. I could have checked the Strong Trump box and proceeded to the next house. But the voters at that address are young Latino men with no party preference. What if their Republican dad put up those signs? At the door, I hear a football game on TV. I knock.
I suspect the middle-aged Latina who answers the door knew who I represent before I name Kamala Harris. Informing me that the voters I want to speak to are not available, she gives vent to the kind of fury I’ve experienced firsthand only with intimate partners and family members. She detests Kamala.
“You need to open your eyes,” she yells. I remember those words. I remember her mispronouncing Kamala’s name and explaining the mistake by telling me, “I’m Hispanic, and that’s how we say it.” I remember thinking, my ears have sealed shut in response to her anger. It’s frustrating not to be able to recall the reasons this woman, whose demographic is vital to Democrats’ chances for victory, gave for disliking Harris so intensely; but the truth is that anger creates a wall between people. Anger and the defensive reactions it provokes inhibit understanding. I force myself to stay at the door until she pauses long enough for me to thank her for her opinion and say goodbye.
Sometimes saving democracy is a drag. Martha, too, has a tough time with that turf. When we’ve canvassed the last house on our 84-door list, she says let’s get milkshakes. A friend just knows. We skip the Seed the Vote debriefing session, find the nearest Baskin-Robbins.
~
In early October, before I had multiplied myself by seven, Dan and I were canvassing out of the Douglas Dems’ office when I rang the bell at a townhouse with an American flag flying above the porch. With some trepidation we waited for an answer. Per Minivan, the voter, an 87-year-old female, was a registered Democrat; but that flag had us wondering. A slender woman with shoulder-length silver hair and bright blue eyes opened the door. She had a poodle-mix in her arms, and the dog barked as I introduced myself.
“A Democrat! You’re Democrats!” the woman, let’s call her Jean, exclaimed. And then the dog was on the ground while Jean came forward, arms outstretched. “Can I hug you?” she asked.
That day Jean gave me her phone number, and a few weeks later, when Dan and I are canvassing with Andy, I call to invite her to dinner. Jean accepts the invitation and suggests J.T. Basque, where the four of us enjoy a traditional Basque feast, from soup and salad to beef stew (why beef stew in the middle of a meal?) to fried potatoes with our choice of entrée (I had sweetbreads), and still have room for ice cream. Jean treats us like old friends. Or is she this warm and gracious with everyone she meets? While speaking she reaches across the table, right then left, almost but not quite touching me or Dan. She entertains us with stories about Carson Valley in the ’60s, when “the entire valley was sheep.” Restaurants like J.T.’s, she tells us, were founded by Basque shepherds indentured to work seven years for local landowners. They saved their money and bought restaurants, hotels, and bars.
“I’m chattering too much,” Jean interrupts herself to say. Urged to continue, she recalls dancing in the road that runs through town (Highway 395) with the publisher of The Record-Courier, their intent to stop traffic from Canada to Mexico, and how their friends laughed when, perhaps due to the late hour, no cars came. She talks about growing up on a Wisconsin dairy farm, where she learned to ride horseback without saddle or bridle, her control of the horse achieved by shifting her body weight. She describes her work with Washoe Indians in Carson Valley, how when there wasn’t enough money to heat the room where she taught literacy skills, she asked the kids to bring in rags and got her mother on the phone to teach them how to make rag rugs to cover the cold linoleum. We are enthralled by Jean’s stories.
Earlier, she’d spoken about the changes she’s seen since 2016. On the afternoon of the day we had dinner, she drove through the formerly charming town of Genoa, known as the burial place of Snowshoe Thompson—“Mailman of the Sierra”—and was shocked by the number of Trump signs.
“What happened to Genoa?” she asked us in a tone of anguish. “People are so mean,” she lamented, referring to an encounter with a Trump supporter in a local park. Her failed attempt at dialog left her in tears.
On our way to the restaurant, Jean says it wouldn’t be safe to talk about politics at J.T.’s. “I’m not a coward,” she tells us, emphasizing that her concern is not for herself but for her friend, one of the restaurant’s owners. Any overt sign of sympathy toward Democrats, including bringing three of them into the restaurant, could hurt her friend’s business.
We’re only too happy to take a night off from politics. We’re happy to listen to our new friend talk about everything but the election.
~
In a late-October New York Times interview, the political scientist and historian Robert O. Paxton affirmed that Trumpism is a fascist movement, while also cautioning that the term has become unhelpful due to its overuse. But in Northern Nevada I find evidence of the “political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood” Paxton alludes to in his 2004 book, The Anatomy of Fascism. A militant, mass-based movement, fascism “pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion,” he writes. On Gardnerville’s suburban streets and in a Carson City trailer park I sense the growing strength of just such a movement.
“Authoritarians,” Paxton clarifies, “would rather leave the population demobilized and passive, while fascists want to engage and excite the public.” MAGA manifests itself in the fearful eyes of Democrats who feel isolated from their neighbors and in the angry voices of people who believe a Harris presidency would destroy America.
MAGA is bigger than Trump, and the danger the movement represents will outlast him.
~
Except for texting people to remind them they still have time to register to vote, my work on this election ends in Reno. When we get home to Berkeley, I see that our Welsh Springer Spaniel has been chewing his bed. No matter how well–cared for by the house sitter, he becomes anxious when both Dan and I are away. I sit on the stairs with my dog’s head in my lap and stroke his ears while making a mental to-do list.
- Help Dad fill out his ballot and take both his ballot and mine to a drop box.
- Sit shiva with Margret, whose husband died while we were in Reno.
- Set up a meeting with our financial manager to talk about contingency plans.
- Hang up the ghoul I bought at the dollar store in Topaz Ranch Estates and carve a jack-o’-lantern.
- Stay active.
