On the Doorstep

I had never canvassed in the US before, but, like many people, felt I had to do something. As a political writer and academic teaching democratic theory, I also wondered whether what has become conventional wisdom among many American political scientists was correct: that ‘affective polarisation’ has gripped the populace (translation: people viscerally hate partisans on the other side); that those who are politely called ‘low-information voters’ often decide elections on a whim; and that, yet again, pollsters might be underestimating support for Trump, because people don’t admit to their preference in front of strangers.

I had naively assumed you simply went from door to door. But the first thing we (I was with one of my sons) learned at the Democratic Party headquarters in a swing county in Pennsylvania was you have to download an app, and then you get your list of houses (‘We’ll give you a good list!’ a young volunteer beamed). You also get your script: identify yourself, politely inquire whether people are following the presidential election this year, find out which issues they care about most. Basically: become a human data collection machine. I don’t think we ever quite followed the script, not because it felt so stilted, but because conversation – if there was any at all – immediately went in a different direction.

The second thing we learned: never put campaign material in with the regular mail. The US Post Office insists that only something with postage can go in the box. It wasn’t clear who would sue, but fines could be in the thousands of dollars and someone might have fun going after hapless canvassers from the wrong party.

Many houses were listed as ‘unknown’ or ‘not canvassed’. That meant you never knew what was going to happen on the doorstep. Most of the time, nothing happened at all. Now that so many doorbells have cameras, people often wouldn’t open even when there were obvious signs of life inside. Sometimes they would play an automated message: ‘We cannot come to the door right now, but please leave whatever you want to leave.’ Once, after we had dutifully put down a flyer and registered that achievement on the app, a man yelled at us through the intercom: ‘Take that away immediately!’ – as if the wrong politics would somehow contaminate his property.

We’d also been instructed that ‘No soliciting’ signs shouldn’t deter us: we weren’t selling anything, but exercising First Amendment rights to talk to fellow citizens about politics. That argument did not go over well. It was always older men who would scream ‘Can’t you read?’ or ‘You shouldn’t be on people’s property!’ or ‘Stop bothering people!’ I doubt that exercising First Amendment rights more extensively with such folks would have resulted in a vote for Harris.

The neater the houses, the more likely such encounters. After a while, I thought I could tell from the cars and the sheer orderliness of everything around the house that a more or less authoritarian character might live there. In one neighbourhood this prediction proved mostly correct, but the neatness of the houses did not align with nice bourgeois norms. If someone was outside, the polite question, ‘May we give you some material from the Harris campaign?’ would be answered with things like: ‘Fuck, no.’

One man with a White Lives Matter baseball cap opened the door and immediately, politely, declared his intention to vote for Trump. The official instruction had been to wish every GOP voter a nice day and leave a good impression; this time, though, my inner deliberative democrat came out and asked: ‘What could Harris do to make you change your mind?’ Long silence. Eventually, a female voice from inside the house said something we couldn’t make out, and he proceeded to explain the problem was that Harris wants to give everything to the lower class and the migrants, and, on top of all that, she falsely calls these people ‘the middle class’. ‘But we are the middle class!’ We looked again: nice house, but separated from a major highway only by a high concrete wall. Nothing to be gained from Harris’s programme, really? A textbook case of white Americans hating anything that smacks of ‘welfare’ because welfare is assumed to go to black and brown people only?

Things don’t go according to script. Before we can say a word, an older, distinguished-looking African American man announces: ‘I am conservative. I am against same-sex marriage.’ Before we can say anything, a man in blue overalls explains that he’s a car mechanic and he always votes for the Libertarian Party. I’m lost for words, but my son jumps in and announces that he also has major problems with the two main parties, but this time, there’s a lesser evil.

One self-declared small business owner instructs us, as if talking to people unable to grasp the obvious, that, whatever happens, corporate America calls the shots – which is why he won’t vote for Harris. Another business owner politely complains about inflation; when pressed a bit, he ventures that it’s undemocratic for Biden to have received 14 million votes in the primaries and now there’s a candidate who got zero votes. Fair enough, but what about the danger to democracy from the other side? He turns the conversation back to the price of gas. We wish him a nice day.

Are there really undecided voters? What, at this point, is not known about Donald Trump? Maybe some undecided (or possibly uncaring) people will fall for Elon Musk’s scheme to give a million dollars a day to a person who has committed to voting Republican. The Pennsylvania district attorney has gone after what is plainly an illegal lottery (and a cartoonish version of how money buys votes in the US); though I also wonder about the messages from the Democrats that blare ‘incoming call from Kamala’. The small print says: ‘chip in any amount now, and the next time you pick up the phone, our vice president could be on the other end.’

One thing seems clear: the ‘shy Trump voter’ is an extinct creature. It isn’t only the grotesque fairground of yard signs designed to troll rather than to persuade – ‘I’m voting for the felon!’ – but his supporters’ willingness to profess their beliefs to complete strangers. There are surprises from time to time: a burly man covered with tattoos and two bulldogs roaming freely around the yard looks vaguely threatening – and stupid prejudices kick in, about a ‘white working class’ we’ve been told so often is now authoritarian – but he’s happy to take some leaflets and says categorically that he cannot vote for someone as crazy as Trump.

You might imagine the same thought would have occurred to so-called business leaders. True, Trump has been selling policies to the highest bidder, from fossil fuel industries to crypto bros, with tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation for polluters thrown in. On the other hand, there are the demands for shows of deference and his sheer unpredictability: what happens when you fall out of favour at court? And the Democrats are hardly anti-business: Harris has already been making all kinds of pre-emptive concession, scaling back Biden’s plans to tax capital gains properly, and not committing to continue his valiant efforts to go after monopolies.

Analogies with 20th-century fascism are not particularly helpful for understanding our times, but one parallel is instructive: it is not ‘ordinary people’ who decide they’ve had enough of democracy; it is elites, and economic elites in particular. Blackshirts marched on Rome, but Mussolini arrived by sleeper car from Milan because the leading strata of the Italian state had invited him to govern. People today also often take their cues from business leaders, in particular a pop culture figure like Musk. All the self-serving talk of ‘disruption’ can be adapted to make Trump acceptable, as can the studied neutrality of oligarchs who not only own their own rockets, but their own newspapers: refusing to endorse Harris sends a signal that it’s rational to be intimidated by Trump.

Even more dispiriting is the comprehensive failure of the ‘norms’ and ‘institutions’ that liberals put their faith in after Trump’s election in 2016. The bet on norms was always risky in a two-party system where one is being turned into a personality cult cum family business; the GOP has long been the party of hardball, but under Trump it discovered that all appearances could be dropped. In a law-obsessed society suffering from a serious case of constitutional fetishism and Founding Father worship, there was a hope that the courts would provide the ‘adults in the room’ willing to put ‘constitutional essentials’ above party. Yet the Supreme Court’s decisions to keep Trump on the ballot this year and guarantee him immunity were shocking not least because here, too, all pretence was gone: no more rummaging around the 18th century in the name of ‘originalism’; just freewheeling speculation about all the bad stuff that could happen if things didn’t go Trump’s way.

This has left plenty of Americans feeling that they’re on their own now; their betters will not come to their rescue. That feeling must be part of what brought energy to the Harris campaign, even if something like canvassing can often feel pointless (so many unopened doors) or embarrassingly intrusive. There is something unsettling about walking in suburban neighborhoods not designed for walking. In one not exactly wealthy neighbourhood we were the only people outside on a grey, chilly afternoon. Going from unopened door to unopened door, things felt more and more eerie. I asked my son if he’d seen the last scene of Easy Rider (he hadn’t). Eventually, an older black man appeared not far behind us, also not exactly wealthy-looking and seemingly uneasy. After a while, I realised that he also kept looking down at his phone and crisscrossing the street. He was distributing Trump doorhangers. I wish I’d asked him why he was doing it, and what he thought about Trump. But I didn’t, and now I’ll never know.

One way or another, though, we’ll find out in November what we were really up against, whether the world’s richest man – who happens to be a right-wing extremist – dangling money in front of people to get their votes (or at least their data) made a difference; and whether there’ll be a reckoning with the pathologies of US democracy – from the arbitrary power of oligarchs to the hollow nature of the parties (to be sure, one much more than the other) and the corruption of the Supreme Court – which have become so painfully obvious in 2024.