Canvassing Las Vegas

Our first stop in east Las Vegas was drenched in ersatz gore: fake zombie limbs, scattered femurs, a plastic skull. ‘GET OUT’, screamed drippy red letters painted on a bedsheet. A second bloody bedsheet said ‘HELP’. Mixed messages. I imagine the residents kept up their leftover Halloween decorations to dissuade the likes of us: coastal canvassers begging them to vote for Kamala Harris.

Pity the swingstaters. In recent weeks, Californians have descended by the busload into Nevada and Arizona. Nevada has gone narrowly to the Democrats in the past four presidential elections and the race is so close that its six electoral votes have outsize importance.

Panicking at the prospect of a second Trump presidency, many Democrats in blue strongholds have resorted to do-something-ism. We phone bank, even though no one answers their phones any more; we write postcards to voters we will never meet; we knock on doors in places we would not otherwise visit. There is scepticism as to whether these efforts will make any difference. Many of us, I think, act from a self-serving desire to pre-empt guilt. We don’t want to wake up on 6 November, or whenever the votes are finally tallied, and feel we hadn’t done all we could to prevent the horrors Trump is promising: mass deportations, political retribution, bans on reproductive healthcare, dictatorship.

But is this weekend canvassing effective? My husband and I kept wondering aloud over our two days in Las Vegas. It had to be, I’d say: Elon Musk was shelling out tens of millions to send 2500 door knockers throughout swing states. My husband would shrug: ‘I guess so, then.’ We hear that volunteers are more effective than paid canvassers, but I’m not sure that applies to casual volunteers like us. A friend who’s spent the past three weeks canvassing for Harris among Latinos in Pennsylvania says he has only felt effective in the last few days. It’s a question of knowing the community and honing your message, he says.

For my husband and me, short-term activists, it was strange to proselytise in a place we’d chosen because it was relatively easy to get to and has a high density of likely Harris voters (80 per cent of Nevada’s registered Democrats live in Clark County); and throughout the weekend I grew steadily more embarrassed at our arrogance. We were missionaries in a foreign land.

Like most outsiders, all we knew of Las Vegas was the Strip, and we were determined to avoid that particular hell. Unfortunately (if unsurprisingly) the hotel we had chosen for its rugged sounding name, Red Rock, is also dominated by its casino. On Saturday morning, I woke up with nastiness in my throat and sinuses, which I blamed on the industrial strength solvents used to counter decades of cigarette smoke and general sin. Even our rented car smelled like toxic cleaner, and I longed for the California air. On our drive to the ‘staging location’ for out-of-state canvassers, we passed a billboard that urged people to vote against Proposition 3: ‘Don’t make Nevada like California.’ Proposition 3 would allow ranked-choice voting and open primaries. (California has the latter but not the former.)

Our training was minimal: a 35-minute Zoom session before arriving in Nevada, and then a seven-minute talk by an organiser in a small, windowless room at the staging locations, a storefront in a strip mall between a taco restaurant and a tyre shop. There was an app to download. We were told to ignore ‘no soliciting’ signs, because the First Amendment protects the right to canvas, and never to put campaign literature in mailboxes because we’re not federal employees. We were also instructed not to spend too long at any one address because the goal was to knock on a hundred doors in two three-hour shifts, which meant three minutes and 36 seconds per house, not including travel time or breaks. The numbers made a bit more sense after the organiser said that, on average, we could expect to have one conversation for every fifteen doors we knocked on.

It didn’t seem strange that our training included nothing about our assigned turf, or the city, county or state. We waited in line to get our turf lists. By the time we had downloaded our list onto the app, the storefront was teeming with out-of-staters, and the queue to get in extended past the laundromat. Everyone was moving. There was no time for questions. We were being absorbed into the vaunted Democrat ground machine, cast into little cogs.

At the GET OUT house I rang the bell. Dogs barked and scrabbled at the door. We waited. The dogs stopped yapping. I put a flyer near the bloody sheets. In the app, we marked the stop as ‘not home’. We walked down the driveway and on to the next house on our list. ‘You are currently being recorded,’ a robot voice said as we passed.

When you log an interaction on the app, there are seven options: canvassed, not home, deceased, inaccessible, moved, refused to answer questions, threatened. There is no option for wouldn’t come to the door, though I suspect that was the case for most of the people whose doors we knocked on in Las Vegas. ‘Would you guys please stop coming here – we already voted!’ hollered someone through the front door of a house where three young registered Democrats lived. She sounded like our teenage daughter when nagged to do her homework. On the doorstep of another house, a forty-gallon garbage bin was nearly full with campaign literature. Our voter list included a lot of women who were at work in the casinos.

After about forty doors we took a break. ‘Does anyone actually live here?’ my husband asked. There were lots of houses and lots of cars in the driveways, but few signs of life besides the barking dogs behind unanswered doors. No one was on the sidewalks. We pulled into a strip mall. A completely naked woman, her skin dappled by the late sunlight, was walking through the parking lot, one arm shielding her breasts. We drove to the next strip mall.

By the time the sun set, we had made it through 66 doors out of ninety assigned to us and spoken to four voters. At a house where a female independent voter was said to live, a man answered the door and said courteously that they’d both already voted for Trump. He gave us the ‘hang ten’ hand signal. We spoke to two women in their eighties who hadn’t turned in their ballots but said they intended to vote for Harris. We scrolled on the app to find the polling centre for one of them, and tried to explain how to get there. She wanted to know if it was the same school as the one she passed when she went to church. The three of us studied the map on my phone and came to no conclusions.

In the car, my husband and I decided that what we’d really like to do is drive old ladies to the polls. Next time, we promised, if there is a next time.

Our fourth voter conversation on Saturday was with a retired nurse who had already voted for Harris. She was just leaving a house on our list. Its residents were away; she was feeding the cat. ‘Finally, someone’s come to talk to me,’ she said. We explained that she wasn’t on the canvassing lists because she’d already voted. But she wanted to talk to us as much as we wanted to talk to someone.

Years before, she said, she had suffered a miscarriage that didn’t pass on its own. She’d had to have a surgical procedure, a D&C, that is also used in abortions. If she hadn’t been able to access the procedure, she might have died. Now, she worried about the ability of her children and their children to access reproductive healthcare. And she worried for herself and her husband, who rely on social security to get by. Tears came to her eyes. She said the prospect of another Trump presidency made her ‘heartbroken’.

‘But we had a Halloween party last weekend and almost everyone in this court is voting for Kamala,’ she said. She nodded at a house across the street and whispered: ‘Not them. They’re Republicans.’

The next day we started at another staging location. The storefront was in a fancier strip mall, with a Whole Foods and martial arts school, but also drive-thru payday loans. Overhead a digital billboard trolled us with Trump ads: ‘Economy. Safety. Peace. Trump.’

Inside was cheery. Volunteers were said to have knocked on a hundred thousand doors in Nevada on Saturday, and a surprise poll from the Des Moines Register put Harris three points ahead in Iowa, a state Trump has won twice. My husband asked someone who worked on the Harris campaign about the efficacy of canvassing. She said that for every fifty doors knocked on, a canvasser will move one voter ten percentage points closer to voting for their candidate. The results are better for people who intend to vote for a certain candidate but may have trouble figuring out how to vote. In that case, door-knocking efforts make a vote seven times more likely.

Lone Mountain is a richer, weirder and more desolate neighbourhood in northwest Las Vegas. The only person we saw walking was barefoot and wrapped in a blue blanket, or maybe a bathrobe. Many of the houses are surrounded by walls at least eight feet tall – ‘someone had a sale on concrete cinder blocks,’ my husband said – and we crept along roads with names like Conquistador St or Tee Pee Lane as we searched for a way in. We felt like thieves casing the neighbourhood, idling before the heavy gates of McMansion subdivisions, waiting to trail someone in. The houses in Lone Mountain seemed designed to thwart foot traffic – a selling point, I suspect, in an election year.

We managed to get face-to-face with only a handful of voters. A couple said they’d voted for Harris; others said it was none of our business. We only once encountered hostility, and it was mild. ‘I’m not voting,’ said a woman marked as a registered Democrat before slamming the door. ‘And if I were, it wouldn’t be for her.’ For the most part, we weren’t treated in any way at all. Of the 39 houses on our list, we had to mark fifteen as ‘inaccessible’.

A friend who lives in New York was much more effective when she canvassed in rural Pennsylvania this weekend. She took along her five-year-old, which made everything more intense, but may have helped to open more doors. In all, my friend said, she had eight or ten deep conversations with undecided voters. I congratulated her. She wasn’t so sure. Her parting thought, she said, was: ‘Oh fuck, I don’t know what’s going to happen here.’