Karen Laws is contributing a series of On the Ground feature essays leading up to Election 2024. This is her second. The first may be read here: OTG Election 2024: Deep Canvassing in District 22. Check back for more at our On the Ground front page.
Bakersfield, July 13
By the time I get to Bakersfield, California, I’m a veteran of canvassing in the heat. Last month I knocked on doors for three scorching hot days in nearby Tulare and Corcoran. My cohorts and I have been drumming up support for Democrat Rudy Salas since 9 am today, and we’ll be on the ground in triple-digit heat again this afternoon. Now I’m tucking into a generous helping of BBQ brisket at Honey I’m Home, a favorite lunch spot of Bakersfield locals.
On one large wall-mounted TV screen Donald Trump speaks at a rally. “Drill, baby, drill” plays well in Kern County, which is ranked the #7 oil-producing county in the nation. Both an oil and agricultural hub, Bakersfield is a fast-growing city of 411,000 people. I’ll bet many of those seated at nearby tables—family groups, mostly—see the strong leader America needs when they look up at the Fox News broadcast. Averting my gaze from Trump’s swaggering figure, on another screen I watch a trophy-size bass being taken out of the water.
I can’t ignore the trouble at the top of the Democratic ticket. President Biden seems to have become the leader nobody wants, and that hurts down-ballot candidates like Salas. It’s been two weeks since Biden’s catastrophic debate performance. The lowlights keep replaying in my head, televised moments when his lack of vitality, especially compared to Trump, became starkly apparent. High-profile Democrats are calling for Biden to step aside, he insists on staying in the race; a cloud of uncertainty hangs over his candidacy. It’s painful to admit, but maybe he’s just too old.
I try not to let misgivings get in the way of activism. Democrats can still take control of the U.S. House of Representatives by flipping a few seats in California and New York from red to blue. With more registered Democrats than Republicans, California’s 22nd congressional district remains in play. If enough Democrats vote, Salas will unseat his Republican opponent. Since February I’ve given up some of my weekends to canvass voters in the San Joaquin Valley because I believe a Salas victory is important and achievable. I’m here because I want to flip the House.
But as I drain my glass of iced tea, I worry that my work will come to nothing. The bleak outlook for Democrats—and the country—makes it hard to stay motivated.
Beside me on the padded bench is my canvassing partner for the weekend, Maureen Forney. Maureen is 68 and I’m 65; I mention our ages because older women are especially susceptible to heat-related illness. Across from Maureen is 70-year-old Cecilia Minalga. Cecilia oversees volunteers like us who come from the Bay Area, four hours away by car and culturally a world apart from Bakersfield. I’ve just learned that Cecilia is an elected delegate who will be in Chicago next month for the Democratic National Convention. Does she still think Biden can beat Trump?
“What about choosing the nominee at the convention?” I ask.
“Never in American history has a contested convention resulted in victory,” Cecilia replies. She looks and sounds glum. Handing me a package of fizzy tablets to dissolve in water, she adds, “Don’t forget to replenish your electrolytes.”
Cecilia is a leader I admire. I know she’s trying to keep me focused on the job at hand.
The people I’ve gotten to know best while canvassing in District 22 have leadership roles in Third Act, an organization for seniors who are pro-democracy and against banks that finance the fossil fuel industry. I filled out my Third Act membership form in the back seat of Maureen’s car on our first trip to Porterville. Maureen co-facilitates San Francisco Bay Area Third Act, and her co-facilitator Martha Sellers was in that same carpool.
The term “co-facilitator” sounds weak to me, but Maureen refuses to call herself a leader. She prefers “support provider,” a term that comes from her professional life as a public-school teacher and administrator. She tells me that she and Martha are “thought partners” who help group members achieve their goals. If this sounds less like leadership and more like a leaderless group, their approach seems to be working. Now 530 members strong, Bay Area Third Act started in 2022 with two dozen people on a Zoom call.
Ruth Schoenbach, 74, another of my Porterville canvassing partners, co-facilitates Defend Democracy, a Bay Area Third Act interest group. Members of Ruth’s group promote Democratic candidates by hosting five monthly postcard-writing parties; each month they send postcards to thousands of voters. Although proud of the group’s accomplishments, Ruth wants to see her Third Actors get “beyond their comfort zone” and talk to voters in person.
“My feet start hurting after about an hour,” she says, acknowledging the physical challenges of canvassing. But she keeps leading by example. For Ruth, motivating people is a leader’s most important job. She travels to the Central Valley and knocks on doors to show group members they can do likewise. This summer, Ruth came up with the term “anchor” to encourage people to be first to sign up for a canvassing trip.
If Ruth had asked me to lead a trip, I would have said no. Leadership, no matter how it’s defined, isn’t in my skill set. But I liked Ruth’s anchor idea.
“Picture a bunch of balloons—you need someone holding the balloons to keep them from flying off in different directions,” she said. “You have to be solid in yourself.”
And so I agreed to be an anchor for the weekend of June 21-23. It would be my first time canvassing in extreme heat. Globally, June temperatures were breaking records, and the San Joaquin Valley had been sizzling all month. In Tulare, the town where we’d be staying, a high of 112 was forecast for Sunday.
Tulare and Corcoran, June 21-23
Balloons were in short supply that weekend. The only other Third Actor who signed up was Martha Sellers, the Bay Area Third Act co-facilitator I met back in February. As anchor, I reserved our room at a hotel with a pool. The day before we left, I blended watermelon with sugar, salt, and the juice of a lime; I froze the agua de sandía and let it partially thaw in the refrigerator before packing it in a cooler along with frozen water bottles (good for pressing to your temples and wrists when you feel overheated), sliced cucumber with salt and chili pepper, and two bags of ice. I picked Martha up Friday morning and drove to Tulare, population 68,000, about five miles south of Fresno.
The choice of town was decided for us by Bay Area Coalition (BAC), the organization Cecilia co-founded in 2021 to coordinate the efforts of grassroots groups working to advance Democratic candidates and causes. From October through June, BAC oversaw 54 days of volunteer canvassing in Central Valley swing districts. On May 11 in Modesto, 38 volunteers knocked on 854 doors. In Tulare and Corcoran from June 21-23, six volunteers knocked on 662 doors. We had conversations 27 percent of the time and secured 81 pledges to vote for Rudy Salas.
Cecilia personally supervises voter canvassing in District 22 nearly every weekend. She met with us Friday afternoon at a warehouse-like community center. She assigned “turfs” and showed newbies how to use PDI, the canvassing app. Our main job, she explained, would be to listen and encourage voters to talk about issues important to them.
“But don’t forget ‘the ask.’ A good conversation ends with you asking the voter if Rudy can count on their support,” she told us.
Aware that Bay Area people are acclimated to wind, fog, and highs in the mid-seventies, BAC took a tip from California farmworkers—who use towels soaked in iced water to stay cool—and ordered hundreds of “farmworker towels.” After consulting activists in Arizona, BAC instituted a “cooling car” program to help canvassers stay out longer and feel less tired at the end of the day. A blast of air conditioning, some frozen grapes, a new towel fresh from the ice bucket; with on-demand breaks like that, “you’ll feel good about the experience and come back again,” Cecilia promised.
Looking around the room, it occurred to me that Martha, age 60, was the youngest among us. Bob Deutsch, 78, my Berkeley neighbor (though we met for the first time canvassing in Porterville) had come to District 22 every weekend so far in June—never mind the temperature. Ironic, isn’t it? Old people will go door to door when it’s dangerously hot, even though they’re at much greater risk of heat stroke than young people, because they believe government action is necessary to fight climate change. They—no, we—put our bodies on the line to change the outcome of close elections. We won’t let weather stop us.
Martha and I left the meeting with cold, dripping wet towels around our necks. We needed them just for the walk across the parking lot. Martha was eager to get to work. How to describe her? I’ll call upon my memories of Star Wars and say she’s a living lightsaber. Slender, quick, decisive. When she holds still, she pulses. Her ready smile is beyond warm; it has a burning-hot quality, as do her pale blue eyes. Her background is in finance: after many years as a professional money manager, she taught finance at Mills College. Friendliness seems to come naturally to Martha, but my guess is she makes a conscious effort to be patient with people less competent than herself. I try to remember, and often fail, to make the same effort.
Sunday we would canvass in Tulare. Friday and Saturday our turfs were in Corcoran, 18 miles to the southwest. Corcoran, population 22,000, is best known for its maximum-security state prison; Sirhan Sirhan and Charles Manson did time there. Corcoran’s poverty rate is 28 percent, and its population is 74 percent Hispanic. The road from Tulare to Corcoran zigzags through farmland. We passed acres of trees I learned to recognize as pistachios; at that stage of maturity, the nuts looked like bunches of pale green grapes. Martha, who grew up on a farm in Iowa, ascribed the dust in the air to an alfalfa harvest. She pointed out grain elevators and gave names to the vehicles we saw in the fields.
Of the three days, Saturday proved the most challenging. We got started at 9 am in a semirural neighborhood on Corcoran’s impoverished west side. At Martha’s suggestion, we divided the turf down the middle and walked in opposite directions. This meant maximizing efficiency, but also being out of earshot of one another.
The first street I walked down had single-family homes on one side, a pistachio orchard on the other. The houses were built in the twenties; some had been renovated, but many were run-down. No one answered the door at the first four houses on my list. At the end of the block, pistachio trees gave way to cleared, dry and dusty ground. Two streets over, a brand-new subdivision looked as though no one had moved in yet. I turned onto a street consisting of a one car–wide strip of pavement bordered on both sides by sandy soil.
At the first listed address, chain-link fencing prevented me from reaching the door. Noting “locked gate” in PDI, I proceeded to the next house, where a woman came to the door but refused to talk to me. I heard a man’s voice from inside say derisively, perhaps into a phone, “…it was someone here for Rudy Salas.”
Name recognition counts for a lot, I told myself as I returned to the street.
According to the app, the next registered Democrat lived one street over. I drank from my water bottle and continued walking toward the corner. I was feeling very alone when a man with three unleashed dogs stepped from his yard into the street. He and the dogs were headed in my direction, but when the bull terrier mix showed interest in me, the man called him off. The dog obeyed immediately and we passed each other without incident. Neither the man nor I spoke.
What disturbed me most was the expression on his face. He glared at me. Four other men standing in his yard ceased their conversation until I’d passed. All the men were Latino. I knew they fit the image of the scary brown-skinned aliens Trump has taught his supporters to fear. I lived in Mexico for a year. When I speak Spanish, I feel connected to parts of myself I can’t reach in English. But am I certain the distress I felt as I walked past those silent, unsmiling men was free of prejudice? No.
I had several friendly interactions with voters that morning, yet a feeling of upset lingered and the heat got to me. I was very glad to see Martha when we met back at the car. We dunked our farmworker towels in icy water from the bottom of the cooler. I poured agua de sandía into reusable cups and felt absurdly pleased when Martha commented on how good it tasted. Earlier, when I parked at the intersection of 6 1/2 Avenue and Hanna Avenue, we’d both noticed egrets perched in the topmost branches of a large tree. On our return, Martha pointed overhead, where dozens of egrets were flying. We watched their white wings slice through the blue sky.
The waterfowl served as a reminder that, just one year earlier, floodwaters caused by an extra-large snowmelt threatened both this town and Corcoran State Prison. Tulare Lake, which once covered 1,800 miles of the Central Valley, dried up a hundred years ago when its waters were diverted for agriculture. Nevertheless, this untamed lake periodically overruns the levies built to contain it. Groundwater pumping by agricultural companies contributes to flood risk. Since 2010, over-pumping has caused Corcoran to sink nearly twelve feet.
Martha and I had lunch at Corcoran’s Lake Bottom Brewery & Distillery, where we chatted with members of the Exeter Little League team, who seemed unfazed by their 15-0 loss. From the restaurant we drove to our new turf, more suburban than rural with its mix of single-family homes and low-income housing complexes. Soon I was seated in the cool dark living room of a young Latina. While I sipped from the chilled bottle of water she gave me, her three-year-old daughter played on a blanket spread out on the floor. From the back of the house came the voices of other adults and children.
The voter leaned forward in an overstuffed chair and told me about some unintended consequences of liberal victories. She already knew that Salas, as a state assembly member, had fought for and won overtime pay for farmworkers. The big growers, she informed me, responded by shortening workers’ days to seven and a half hours so they wouldn’t have to pay overtime. She gave elected Democrats credit for new safety regulations that protect California farmworkers from extreme heat. But she herself has worked in the fields, and when she was ordered to stop until the weather cooled off, she felt frustrated. Her fellow workers felt the same way.
“It’s hard not to be able to work when you need the money,” she said.
When I made the ask, she replied without hesitation that she would vote for Rudy. But I think we were both wondering: Why can people in power always find a loophole? Why do poor people end up with less, even when government leaders succeed in helping them?
Because their houses had similar floor plans, with entry doors that open directly onto small living rooms, the seating arrangements were nearly the same when I conversed with the farmworker’s neighbor, a middle-aged white woman. I sat on a flowered sofa to the right of the door, she in an armchair three feet away. She told me about the downside of another liberal legislative success story: California’s increased minimum wage. An administrative assistant at a physical therapy clinic, she’d been given a raise a few months before. “I couldn’t take much satisfaction in it,” she said. She wished she’d been rewarded for her skills and expertise. She believed her boss decided to pay her more only because he feared that upward pressure on wages due to the new minimum wage would cause her to leave.
Homelessness came up in my conversation with a disabled man who shares a low-income apartment with his son, an elementary school teacher. When I knocked at the door, the father invited me in. Seated in a wheelchair, wearing shorts and a ribbed white cotton tank top, he ate spaghetti from a large bowl while I introduced myself. “Would you like some water?” he asked. When I said yes, he nodded to his bearded son, who immediately left the room and returned with a chilled bottle. Both men expressed concern about the high cost of living. But the price of groceries disturbed them less than the fate of a dozen or so people evicted the previous week from an encampment in Corcoran.
“There was nowhere for them to go,” the older man told me.
In the end, Dad said yes to volunteering for the Salas campaign. His son declined, citing the time he puts in after school grading papers. “And taking care of him,” he added, with a curt nod to his dad. This young man was squeezed between a demanding, if poorly compensated, day job and the unpaid work of eldercare.
It was 107 degrees—I checked my phone to find out exactly—when I entered a single-story apartment complex in the shape of a horseshoe. The area in the center was paved and free of cars. There were a few shrubs, no trees. No porches, just two concrete steps leading up to each door. I rang a doorbell. Waited. I had a foot on the bottom step when the door cracked open. Staring out at me was a towheaded little girl. As my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I saw the adult standing behind the girl, a woman in her twenties whose arms and legs were covered in tattoos. I told her who I was and who I represented.
“Rudy has asked us to talk to voters and report back on what issues matter most to them. What’s important to you?” I asked, looking up at the woman.
A second child had appeared. Neither child made a sound.
“Nothing,” the woman said.
I nodded, and, as Cecilia taught me to do, held the silence.
“Well, kids and animals,” said the woman. Opening the door a little wider, she approached me. “I’d like to play safely with my kids in the water,” she said, pointing to the side of the building. “Drink clean water out of the hose. Can he give me that?”
When I assured her that Rudy has fought for clean water for people in the Valley, she looked skeptical but accepted a campaign flyer. I forgot to ask if Rudy could count on her support. I remembered what she said about the hose, and I thought about what it would be like to turn on my faucet not knowing if the water that comes out is clean.
I should mention that our Corcoran cooling car driver, Barbara Castle, shadowed both Martha and me throughout the day. I took occasional breaks in Barbara’s air-conditioned vehicle, as did Martha. I’ve described Martha as a lightsaber, but she’s not invulnerable. In some ways, she’s fragile. On the drive down from Oakland, she kept her hat on so that light coming through my car’s moonroof wouldn’t bring on a migraine. When we stopped at a fast-food restaurant, she put on an N95 mask she kept on except while eating. I let her know I thought it was brave of her to walk through neighborhoods with little or no shade on a cloudless day when the temperature reached 107. But Martha shrugged off the heat.
“Not a problem for me,” she said.
We were packing our bags Sunday morning when I told Martha I wanted to have a little more “togetherness” in our work that day. Initially resistant, she agreed to canvass opposite sides of the same streets when I responded evasively to her question about being afraid the day before. Our Tulare turf was an inviting, ethnically diverse neighborhood of three-to-four-bedroom houses. The streets were named for 19th-century American writers, the lawns looked freshly mowed, and many doors were festooned with red, white, and blue wreaths in anticipation of Independence Day.
Martha was doing the even numbers and I was doing the odds when I got into conversation with a woman setting up a yard sale. When I approached, she was sanding a table. With no potential customers sifting through garments on a rack or knickknacks on makeshift shelves, she set aside her power sander to talk to me. The household’s only registered Democrat, I soon learned, was her daughter.
“I voted for Biden,” she confessed, “but I didn’t tell my husband. He’s a Republican. We don’t talk about politics in this house.”
Looking over the flyer I handed her, she commented that, as a schoolteacher, she took seriously the California Federation of Teachers’ endorsement of Rudy. When she read that Rudy had secured funding for Valley Fever treatment she said, “My daughter’s a nurse. She’ll like this.”
“Can Rudy count on your support?” I asked.
The woman wanted to do more research but said that both she and her daughter probably would vote for Rudy. Just then, Martha came across the street. She greeted us briefly and examined a set of side chairs. Hoisting one, she commented on the chair’s solid construction. I introduced the voter and Martha to one another; we continued chatting for several minutes. As we were saying goodbye, I thought: one woman knocking on doors is canvassing. Or maybe even soliciting. Three women talking at a yard sale is community.
Bakersfield, July 13-14
At 3 pm it’s crazy hot. Around my neck, the farmworker towel feels warm and dry. Maureen and I are working different sections of a relatively upscale neighborhood when our phones light up with the news: someone shot Trump at a campaign rally. He’s been wounded but only slightly; the bullet grazed his ear. I open a news app and see Trump with fist raised, mouthing, “Fight.” I think then what I will later read in opinion pieces—so he’s a martyr now. People will love him even more, the election is over, he’s won.
I leave the shaded porch where I’ve been staring at my phone and march myself back down to the blazing sidewalk. Waiting for me is our Bakersfield cooling car driver, Barbara Mansfield. I wave to her and keep walking.
Inching along to match my pace, her passenger window open, she says, “You look like you could use a break.”
“I’m fine,” I say.
Having found the next address, I climb the steps and ring the bell. Wait, ring again. I don’t have it in me to write Thanks for being a voter and sign my name to the flyer I leave next to a business card for a pest removal company. I return to the sidewalk. Barbara is no longer in sight as I trudge down the street. At the next three houses I hear the recording, “You are on camera,” before I reach the door. Porch pirates beware. As for invited guests, well, let’s hope they like being filmed and talked at by robots.
Like many upscale neighborhoods, this one is hilly. I turn onto a cul-de-sac called Loch Fern. Two-story houses, minimal landscaping, no respite from the sun; a far cry from the Scotland of the developer’s imagination. I check my phone, see I missed a house, and double back. No one home there either. I make my way out of Loch Fern and onto Auburn Street. At the next house a man tells me it’s not a good time to talk because they’re having a wake for his grandmother. I offer my condolences and retreat to the sidewalk.
Barbara is back, her car idling. I’ve got work to do, but I get in the car to be polite. She must not have checked her phone, because she says nothing about the shooting. She complains about “this blasted heat” and asks, “How are you feeling?”
“Well, a little foggy. Kind of muddle-headed,” I admit. “And I think my heart rate has accelerated.”
“You’ve just described the symptoms of electrolyte imbalance.” Barbara gets out of the car, opens the trunk, and retrieves a Gatorade from her cooler. “Drink this. I’m not letting you out of this car until you drink the whole thing.”
I obey Barbara. Begrudgingly. I hope I remembered to thank her, because only later do I think, She was right. I hadn’t been worried about staying hydrated because I was drinking so much water—at house after house, people offered hospitality in the form of a chilled bottle, a seat on their couch, an opportunity to use their bathroom. But I should have been using the fizzy tablets Cecilia gave me.
That night, Maureen and I join Cecilia and other canvassers for dinner at a Mexican restaurant. Besides Bob, there’s a married couple originally from Japan. I overhear Bob talking to the husband about cycling. Bob has a cyclist’s alert gaze and a classic cyclist’s build: long and lean. Soon the conversation becomes general as we trade facts and opinions about the Trump assassination attempt. We can’t help gloating over the news that the would-be assassin was a registered Republican.
Sunday morning Cecilia assigns Maureen and me our final turf of the weekend. “Ask people if they want a lawn sign,” she says. “You can text me the address and I’ll put up a lawn sign for anyone who wants one.”
Maureen, acing the job of anchor, arranges for late checkout so that after canvassing we can shower. By 9 am, we’re knocking doors. By noon I’ve gotten six lawn-sign requests to Maureen’s zero, and I think she’s a teeny bit jealous. When we ring the final doorbell and synch PDI for the last time, it’s 109 degrees. We use the app to check our personal stats: 58 door knocks Friday, nearly 200 Saturday, 55 today, with a 29 percent contact/conversation rate. Not bad for amateurs.
Soon we’re on the freeway, homeward bound. From the passenger seat, I look out at the oleander bushes in SR 99’s center dividing strip. The bushes go on for miles. In June they looked lush and green. The pink, white, and magenta blossoms were wonderfully abundant. Now, the leaves are dusty, as are the few remaining flowers.
Maybe Republicans in flippable seats won’t benefit from the coattails effect when Trump coasts to victory. Maybe Biden will eke out a win. When I think about the election I sometimes fall into paralyzing despair, but the people I’ve met through canvassing—including those who open their doors when we knock—motivate and inspire me not to give up hope for my country.
