In October, as a novice volunteer knocking on doors in Allentown, Pennsylvania, for the Kamala Harris campaign, Julia Preston’s task was to make sure that committed Democrats voted, and to persuade undecided voters that Harris was the better choice.

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In October, as a novice volunteer knocking on doors in Allentown, Pennsylvania, for the Kamala Harris campaign, Julia Preston’s task was to make sure that committed Democrats voted, and to persuade undecided voters that Harris was the better choice. She had quit her job as a journalist, she writes, as she felt she “could no longer comply with its rules proscribing partisan activity.” Just as she was being initiated into the world of political activism, she was presented with a historic chance to help elect America’s first woman President.
“This is what I was up against,” Preston writes. “Donald Trump was broadcasting on some direct wavelength with his followers, and he had drawn them into his alternate universe of looming economic disaster, menacing migrants, and outrages perpetrated by Democrats against their children, which only he was visionary enough to see and strong enough to combat.”
“From walking my Allentown turf, I learned that not even the most disciplined campaign could bridge, in one hundred days, the enormous disconnect between Harris and the voters who might benefit from her proposals,” Preston continues. Canvassers were reëstablishing, very belatedly, a dialogue that had lapsed. “After years of reporting on immigrants and the essential optimism of their hope to prosper in the United States,” she writes, “I reject the idea that, to mobilize working people, the Democrats need to imitate Trump’s demonization and demagoguery. But building a movement will require better systems for communicating with potential voters and listening, anew, to what they need to make their lives easier.”
Read about what Preston learned while canvassing for the Harris campaign:

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