Citric Acid
An Online Orange County Literary Arts Quarterly of Imagination and Reimagination
Activism & Analysis
Difficult Conversations: Canvassing Against Trumpism in Arizona & Orange County
by Trevor Griffey
A few months ago I decided to volunteer to stop Donald Trump from being elected President of the United States.
The first problem with my decision to volunteer during the election was that in many ways, I did feel defeated. I’m a temporary teacher of US History and Labor Studies at two great public schools— UC Irvine and UCLA— but I’m also part of the 70 percent of college instructors who serve as low wage temps ineligible for professional (or “tenure”) status. I joined the labor movement as a college instructor wanting to demand for a radical transformation of the college teaching profession and our public schools, but found most unions I was part of struggling to just their members to show up to a meeting. A veteran of the protests against the WTO in Seattle in 1999, I had dedicated my adult life, about a quarter century, to writing and teaching to support and encourage participatory democracy—not just in our government, but in our media, schools, and workplaces. But seeing the media, our schools and our labor unions march in lockstep with US support for Israel’s illegal, immoral and arguably genocidal war of collective punishment in Gaza made me question whether these institutions were so reliant upon US militarism for their continued existence that democratizing or radicalizing them was a fool’s errand.
When I told faculty union activists I knew that I was going to Arizona, and encouraged them to join me, most remained silent. One eventually did join the effort, but another sent me this message:
How depressing that someone with your acumen is joining the Dems’ latest finger-in-the-dike mobilization, scrambling at the eleventh hour to compensate for decades of incompetence and outright corruption. Kamala Harris recently graciously accepted Dick Cheney’s endorsement, and she’s signaling a welcome to Republicans for her proposed administration. Don’t those developments— if nothing else— tell you where her presidency would be headed?
I did see where it was headed, but I went to canvass anyway.
Re-Orientation
When I signed up to canvas for Harris in Phoenix, Arizona, I did it to prevent Trump and the Right from destroying the last vestiges of the 20th century regulatory state and the labor unions that helped build it. And I did it to stop Trump from packing the federal judiciary with right-wing extremists with lifetime appointments who would make progressivism (including labor rights) unconstitutional, effectively constraining any activism to reform capitalism to a handful of isolated state and local governments.
The group I volunteered to canvass with, called Seed the Vote, was independent of the Democratic Party, so I didn’t have to pretend to like Harris or the Democrats. Seed the Vote was founded in 2017 by Bay Area activists who believed that Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign against Donald Trump had relied too much on ad buys and superficial rallies without doing the necessary work to engage or support irregular voters or build power among working class people. Instead, Seed the Vote raised money and recruited volunteers and paid canvassers who worked with and through local labor unions and anti-racist community organizations. The goal was for the canvassing we did to not just turn out the vote to defeat Trump, but to contribute to building local organizations’ power by providing data through which they could power map and engage in community and labor organizing. At a zoom meeting of volunteers in October 2024, I recall one of the speakers saying that our canvassing for Harris was our way of choosing which enemy we wanted to fight against when the election was over. A friend of mine who enthusiastically encouraged me and others to join Seed the Vote later openly admitted that even though she was canvassing for Harris in Nevada, she wouldn’t vote for Harris in California because of Harris’s support for genocide in Gaza.
This was the community I was looking for and didn’t even know it. One that was led by people who saw the 2024 election as a referendum on Trumpism, while being honest about the fact that the election provided us with no meaningful opportunity to push corporate liberals out of the Democratic Party or change US foreign policy. When I arrived at the canvassing operation, run by UNITE HERE’s political arm (Worker Power) and Seed the Vote, I was greeted and trained by a union staffer who was also graduate of the UCLA Labor Studies program, where I teach. A co-organizer of the volunteers was active in the UC Berkeley Labor Center. The volunteers seemed disproportionately middle class and college educated— including a contingent with a Harvard alumni group called “Crimson Goes Blue.” There were a couple Australian and British volunteers who were there to stop Trumpism globally. There was an artist from Colorado between gigs. There was a writer from the D.C. area who said she was partly doing research for her next novel. There was a longtime peace activist and communications professional who moved back to the U.S. from Brazil to volunteer full time to stop Trump. There were a lot of leftists from the Bay Area, especially Bay Area Rising— many of them connected with non-profits, unions or community-based organizations.
The canvassing facilitators were some of the most effective organizers I’d ever worked with. They were positive, focused, and direct. Our days began with succinct and effective group meetings. We welcomed newly trained arrivals into the community of volunteers, then had a briefing on the data, locally and nationally: how many doors knocked, how many conversations, how many commitments to vote for Harris. Because most voters had received their ballots in the mail before I arrived, but had yet to mail their ballots in, our mission had shifted. Instead of just asking people to vote for Harris, we wanted to ask people who committed to vote for Harris to fill out their ballots, seal and sign them, and put them in the mail. Or we could give them a ride to a place to hand-deliver their ballots to county officials. We never touched anyone’s ballot, but we were at a stage when we could not simply rely on people telling us they planned to vote. We were going to be assertive: canvassing in gated communities, knocking on doors that said no soliciting because we were not selling anything, knocking three times and waiting substantial periods of time. To create a supportive environment for asking strangers to vote immediately, organizers solicited stories from canvassers: methods for engaging people, stories of helping people vote who might not otherwise have done so, and challenges “at the doors” (from policy questions to personal security tips). The urgency of our work was underscored by reminders from the last election: Biden won Arizona by a mere 10,000 votes. He won Wisconsin only by 20,000 votes. Every potential Harris vote in battleground states like Arizona mattered and had to be submitted as soon as possible and had to be counted. “So what are we here to do?” the facilitator asked. “Get the votes!” she led us in responding, and did a “unity clap” before we broke up into smaller groups that would walk different neighborhoods together.
The organizers helped bring the volunteers into a sense of shared purpose, and being part of the community of canvassers inspired me to overcome my dread by facing it. Together, despite our wide range of feelings about Harris and the Democratic Party, despite our own readiness or lack thereof for the task, we had the capacity to stop Trumpism before it was too late. I had feared that canvassing might just be a rote exercise— superficial, as writer and activist Astra Taylor has since argued, or even a narcissistic act of telling others who didn’t ask what to think. But stories from other canvassers about conversations with voters who needed language translation or ride assistance to get to the polls, or who could be persuaded to not vote for Trump, inspired me to think that this kind of canvassing could provide the difference between a win and a loss in a close race. Given the political polarization of our country, it was a turnout election more than a persuasion election. Nearly all the polls placed Harris in the lead but placed a Trump victory within their margin of error. So focusing our efforts on identifying infrequent voters who might vote for Harris made sense.
I was sold that what we were doing was righteous and important work. Had I, as Chris Newfield later described himself, “smoked the hopium of street education in the form of door-knocking persuasion”? Maybe. But I didn’t take for granted that Harris would win, or I wouldn’t be there. I was merely grateful to be part of a process that could stop Trump. And that felt a lot better than doomscrolling and bad faith punditry, while leaving the work of voter turnout to others.
Difficult Conversations in Phoenix
We had scripts that I mostly didn’t follow. They were simple, but embodying them authentically was difficult for me, in part because I’m often uncomfortable in my own skin, especially when I initiate an uninvited exchange. I had lots of experience talking teacher-to-teacher about the need to join a union and fight for quality public higher education, and a collegial persona I could fall back on when doing so. But I hadn’t canvassed in an election since before the War on Terror began. And it felt like civic identity has become so polarized and fractured in the digital age, that I felt like I needed a persona that wasn’t “absent-minded professor” or “neurotic, overeducated white guy” to connect with voters.
We had to introduce ourselves to people who didn’t ask for us to knock on their doors, often didn’t want us there, and in some cases came to the door with the explicit purpose of telling us to fuck off. Should I say I’m from Worker Power, which sounds vaguely communist? Or from Seed the Vote, which sounds like a fake group funded by a super PAC? I certainly couldn’t introduce myself as a Californian, or a college instructor, given the endlessly raging culture wars. I would work on my introduction throughout my first day, deviating from my script (which said I was there to help working families) to ultimately land on saying that I was volunteering with my teachers’ union to help get out the vote. It was authentic and made me feel more comfortable being there, though also was vaguely misleading because I wasn’t from a K-12 union in Arizona.
Our training encouraged us to find our voice as canvassers by conveying what we cared about to the voter, both so we could authentically tap into what we felt was at stake in the election, and to have as sincere a conversation as possible about the voter’s values and concerns before turning to the question of how to vote. For a number of volunteers I trained with, their motivation for traveling to Arizona and canvassing for Harris was to protect a woman’s right to choose or the integrity of our elections. For some, it was protecting LGBT rights. What was mine? Reflecting honestly, it was union rights and economic democracy. I didn’t see how a more fair economy was possible without working people having greater political power. And for all its many flaws, organized labor was one of the few ways that working people had to counteract the power of money in our lives, including elections. Saying I was from my union, and that I was a volunteer, was my way of conveying that I was there because I care about economic fairness and quality public schools. Fellow canvassers affirmed my choice, in part because it could open up a conversation about how Arizona had the worst-funded public schools in the US, and Trump was talking about abolishing the Department of Education.
I soon learned that the work would be challenging. On my Lyft ride to the canvas training on my first full day in Phoenix, I pointed out the many political signs dotting the landscape along our route. The driver responded by explaining that Obama was secretly still in control of the Democratic Party and the government, and that he had already stolen the 2024 election after having also done so in 2020. She appealed to me personally, saying that we were losing our country, and only we the people— all of us, regardless of party identification— could take it back. I asked her when she thought the problems began, given that Arizona was a historically Republican state, and she said it began with “RINOs” like John McCain failing to stand up for ordinary Americans. It was a vision of patriotism that was so narrow, and so hostile to political differences, that I felt far outside it, and said nothing about why I was there or what I thought of her conspiracies. Part of me wondered if she would have made the same appeal to me as an American if I wasn’t white.
As canvassers, we didn’t have a lot to work with when talking about why people should vote for Harris. Reports from the field suggested that the economy was the number one issue that voters we canvassed cared about, along with immigration and women’s rights. As I’d find out while canvassing, crime and fentanyl use were also significant concerns, usually blamed on immigrants. On nearly all of these issues, it was easy to talk about why Trump would be worse than Harris: his tariffs and tax cuts for the rich would make the economy worse rather than better; his Supreme Court picks overturned Roe v. Wade; and deporting undocumented people would separate families and result in labor shortages without providing drug treatment programs or addressing the crime committed by US citizens. But in my own opinion (I didn’t talk about this with other canvassers), it was difficult to say what Harris would do to substantially improve things other than defend the existing rights of women and LGBT people. The economic talking points were in retrospect far too abstract on the level we needed to speak to voters and risked making us come off as pedantic and uncaring about the challenges of the post-COVID economy. Biden may have been more progressive economically than any President in 60 years. But it turns out that that’s a low bar, and in retrospect it would have been helpful to be able to say in more simple terms what Harris planned to do to make the economy more fair.
Not that most voters wanted to talk with canvassers at all, let alone get into the finer points of who to vote for. On my first knock while being shadowed by a more senior canvasser, a very large shirtless man with a lot of tattoos came to the door. He pointed to the "No Soliciting" sign when we asked for his housemate, and we assured him we weren’t solicitors. When his housemate came to the door, also large and shirtless, also covered in tattoos, he claimed that he didn’t recognize the sovereignty of the US government because he was native Hawaiian, and never voted even though he had chosen to register to vote in Arizona. And he got very mad when we explained that while we were not solicitors, we did want to talk about the election. Feeling lied to, and maybe also lying about their not voting, they cursed us out, flipped us off, stared at us menacingly as we left their property and eyed us until we left their block.
Most encounters were not so threatening or potentially dangerous in a state where roughly half the population owns firearms, because the residential landscape itself had been so highly securitized. In fact, depending on the time of day and neighborhood, the majority of door knocks went unanswered or simply ended curtly. It was common for people in houses we visited to turn off their lights, stop talking, pull their blinds, and otherwise pretend not to be home when we rang their doorbells or knocked on their doors. Waiting on their doorstep and continuing to knock or ring was a real provocation— you risked pissing people off, but you could still sometimes quickly ID voters and their preferences as they were shooing you away. In a few instances you could even have a substantial conversation if you engaged them respectfully. In a number of neighborhoods, people had locked metal screen front doors that let the desert air in but that you couldn’t see through. Residents would stand behind those doors and talk with you, but you couldn’t read their faces and had to go by sound to even guess how tall they might be. Probably two thirds of the doors I knocked had security cameras and or smart doorbells with recording devices on them, and sometimes people would talk to you through those devices without opening the door. I even once got someone to commit to voting for Harris as she was driving her car but talking with me through her doorbell though unfortunately the folks at Seed the Vote didn't count that as legitimate because it wasn't in person. There was a lot of lying— people claiming that they were not the person you were looking for, or that the person wasn’t home, or that they didn’t know when the person would return. In one case, I asked a woman sitting in her front yard if she was the person I had on my list, she said no, and her three-year-old toddler pointed out that that actually was her name.
One neighborhood seemed to have large lots with little to no zoning— light industrial warehouses abutted properties with mansions that had yards big enough to ride horses in, while other nearby small homes had five-to-ten detached trailers in the backyard and the whole property listed as many as ten registered voters. Many of those properties were completely fenced, so it was impossible to even get to the door to knock. In one case, as I walked toward a house with a very large lot, it seemed that someone who was putting their trash can on the curb accelerated when she saw me coming, so she could close the 8-foot fence to her property before I arrived.
The defense of people’s homes against canvassers also brought to the fore how polarized some families were politically, with that polarization often overlapping with age or gender differences. It’s not uncommon to have politically mixed households— where parents or grandparents might have different politics than their children, or spouses might have different politics from each other. While canvassing I got to see this dynamic firsthand and hear stories from fellow canvassers that were more extreme. There’s a particular dynamic that came to feel normal where men who you didn’t ask for and didn’t want to talk with would refuse to let you talk to others who were clearly home or might even come outside in a threatening way to shoo you away. It seemed that some men thought the right to vote was a family question, not an individual one. For instance, I had a man in military fatigues come to the door one night, and he insisted to me that he didn’t need to first consult with his wife to know that she didn’t want to speak with me. One woman that local canvassers talked with was part of a secret Facebook group called “Wives of Deplorables.” Someone I canvassed a neighborhood with described talking with a woman who wouldn’t open her screen door, whispered that she supported abortion rights but that she had to vote in person because it wasn’t safe for her to vote at home, and then raised her voice telling the canvasser to go away and shut the door when her husband approached. We shuddered to think how many people are married to someone who they didn’t feel comfortable voting in front of.
When people were willing to talk with me, conversations varied from house to house and neighborhood to neighborhood. From what I could tell, I talked mostly with low-turnout voters, in a state where a large number of registered voters identified as independents, so responses were unpredictable but leaned conservative. In my limited experience, those who articulated talking points found regularly in right-wing media were mostly unreachable. Many who didn’t express right-wing talking points tended to be extremely disengaged or disaffected and angry— in other worse, they were nonvoters by choice. Which is exactly why I was there to talk with them: less to convince them who to vote for, and more to convince them that their vote mattered. In some cases, they seemed indifferent to the fact that their votes could determine the outcome of the Presidential election, which made me hate the electoral college even more.
I wasn’t particularly good at canvassing when I started. On my first day, I was mostly awkward. This was made worse by having someone train me who was so anal that he gave me advice about how to knock without sounding like a copy, what kind of rock to use to tap on metal gates so that I didn't injure my knuckles, how to stack the literature on my clipboard and in what order, and other techniques that were helpful but made me very self-conscious and increasingly defensive.
I also had what seemed like a particularly bad list of unsympathetic households on my first day. One of the few people who didn’t end the conversation with me quickly had given up on voting altogether. The only time she had voted, she told me, was in 2020 for Trump. But her vote wasn’t counted because she used a sharpie instead of a pencil. Now, she told me ominously, she was convinced that all elections were rigged, and that “Everything is fake.” She repeated the word “fake” a number of times, in a variety of contexts. Not long afterward, I talked with a man who seemed mentally ill and lived with his elderly father who— he told me multiple times— was in the bathroom. Still not quite comfortable with canvassing, I feared it would be manipulative to wait for who knows how long for his father to come out of the bathroom, especially to ask them both to vote, and left the family in peace.
At the end of the day, while others were reporting the multiple commitments to vote for Harris they secured, and some even had convinced people to vote on the spot, I had zero confirmed Harris voters. Like being in a sales team environment, others’ stories of success still inspired me. But I had to look within myself to try to more effectively articulate why I had traveled 400 miles to talk with strangers, or I would be wasting everyone’s time.
The second day was easier. By sheer accident, I canvassed a modest housing complex in a more affluent part of town that happened to have a number of Harris supporters. I got my rap down, for better or worse, and became faster at reading our neighborhood maps. I shared a union voter guide with a woman who happened to be filling out her ballot when I arrived, and who connected Harris supporters in the same community with each other so they could potentially volunteer to help turn out the vote. Throughout the day, fellow canvassers shared pictures and stories of successfully encouraging people to vote via group chats, which inspired me. My numbers of ID’d Harris supporters roughly caught up with office averages, though I still hadn’t developed the nerve to have someone fill out their ballot and put it in the mailbox in front of me.
It was on the third day, when I was canvassing in Scottsdale, where the median home price is over $850,000, that I encountered Trump-leaning voters who seemed to want to persuade me of their politically savvy. They would claim to be leaning toward, not definitively voting for Trump, and it was hard to tell if they were really inviting conversations. But I felt I had to try my efforts at persuasion in case they really were undecided.
My first real attempt at persuasion was with a person who claimed she was an independent, a mother of a recent college grad in a house that Redfin estimates is worth $1.5 million. She said, as her husband lurked and sometimes paced behind her, that she studied politics closely with her women friends, and read widely. She said she didn’t like that Kamala Harris’s campaign was so negative— more so, she thought, than Trump’s. I asked what concerns most animated her participation in politics, and she said it was the economy, women’s rights, and immigration. When I asked about the economy, she changed the subject to her concern that Harris had supposedly allowed a death row inmate in California to get a gender reassignment surgery. When I asked about abortion rights, which she said she supported, she said she didn’t mind the repeal of Roe v Wade because the issue should be decided by the states. When I pointed out that Harris and Biden had pushed for bipartisan legislation on the border, she changed the subject to talk about her concern that gang members were committing property crimes with greater brazenness. When I said, “Okay, so it seems like you’re voting Republican down the line,” as a way to leave, she corrected me and say she wasn’t, as if she wanted to talk more. I was genuinely curious, so I wasted more time talking with her. She thought it was a good sign that RFK had endorsed Trump and looked forward to his cleaning up Big Pharma. She didn’t believe in COVID restrictions, and strongly opposed electric vehicles for reasons I didn’t care to ask about. She claimed to read multiple sources of news beyond ideologically narrow ones, but did not know that Trump had been impeached a second time for trying to disrupt the certification of the 2020 Presidential election. I can’t recall how I finally extricated myself, but I was shaken to engage someone seemingly so wealthy and so invested in being an “independent thinker” who could be so totally unwilling to admit that Trump had any vices at all. I came to suspect that a lot of people who called themselves independents were just declaring their independence from the “establishment”— political parties, universities, scientists, and professional journalism.
As I was leaving, he asked when the number of people visiting his house to talk about the election might abate. “When you submit your ballot,” I told him. “That’s the cost of your living in one of the few states in the country where your vote for President actually matters,” I told him. “You get a lot of attention, especially when you’re not a registered Democrat or Republican. By the way, how visitors have you gotten?” “About twenty or thirty in the past month,” he guessed. No wonder so many people were getting so irritable about my knocking on their door, why some of their handmade signs telling solicitors to get lost seemed a little unhinged. Who wants their neighborhood swamped with canvassers for a month?
Before the end of my shift, I met someone who seemed to be in his 60s or 70s outside his house and asked him about the election, which inspired him to tell me about how he believed that climate change was god’s divine punishment for “what we did to the Indians.” In a less religious sense, I thought he wasn’t wrong, so I engaged him more, both out of curiosity and to see if he planned to vote. He talked a lot about the injustice of things that were recently done to him in the hospital. From what I could tell, he had recently had a seizure and wasn’t able to leave supervised care for some time, and he resented how he was treated. He hated our medical system, which, as a long-suffering victim of medical malpractice, I could relate to. I couldn’t always understand what he was talking about, but unfortunately, he managed to conclude the conversation an extended rant about trans people being another sign of God’s punishment, along with COVID. I can’t remember if he told me he voted for Trump, or if he voted at all. I had nothing left to say to him.
By the end of my third day, I felt shaken by directly talking with so many people who seemed to have marinated in right-wing conspiracy theories— people who were more worked up about false stories about trans people converting children and undocumented immigrants bringing drugs and crime than they were about the economy. Almost no one I talked with seemed to care much about U.S. foreign policy, except for one person who wished money spent in Ukraine could be spent in the US instead. People took for granted that their schools were poorly funded, or that the economy was so unequal, so my own personal expression of interest in the election didn’t seem to move the needle much.
There was something both exhilarating and simultaneously emotionally draining about these conversations. It wasn’t that I was surprised that many people hate canvassers, hate politics, distrust people who are different from them, and have given up on the possibility that government could be a force for good (if they ever believed it in the first place). It’s just that I wasn’t accustomed to talking about politics with people who feel that way, or the emotional discomfort that comes from speaking across our differences in less than ideal circumstances and asking them to do something they might not want to. I have right-wing relatives who I mostly avoid speaking about politics with. I have a relative who believes that there are shadowy forces who have “replaced” Biden, as well as Eminem and a number of other celebrities, in order to keep people in a world of spiritual darkness. I mostly avoid talking to them about these differences, lest we hurt each other’s feelings. For better or worse, canvassing was ending the practice of avoidance. It felt emotionally intense.
Even though I was aware that canvassing strangers in a community I didn’t live in was hardly “deep organizing,” and involved no real community building, there was no disputing that inspiring and helping people vote felt like it made a difference. Every day, I had a chance to do that work, and I took it seriously. Others’ canvassing stories were more inspiring than mine, in terms of literally helping people research candidates, or advising them how to complete and submit their ballot. Our organizer leaders skillfully reported back how many other commitments our efforts were getting throughout the state, and across the country. Bit by bit, we were making a difference.
I wanted to skip work and stay in Arizona beyond the three days I set aside, since it took me at least half that time to get the swing of canvassing in a new place. But at the same time, I also knew that just a couple miles from my house, the labor movement was trying to get voters to help Democrats get elected to seats in Orange County that could determine the fate of which Party controlled the U.S. House of Representatives. Instead of being hundreds of miles away from home, dodging the fact that I wasn’t from Arizona, I could return to California and keep doing the same work. What’s more, I could help other people in my union do the same. The California Labor Federation set up a series of canvassing opportunities in swing districts across the state— from the Central Valley to Irvine. My union, AFT, supported both canvassing and calling of fellow union members to turn out the vote in battleground states across the US. I felt renewed inspiration to get my union colleagues to participate in these activities. And through family and friend networks on social media, I raised $1,000 for Seed the Vote. If more people got involved, I believed after my experience in Phoenix, we really might win this. All we could do was try.
Difficult Conversations in Orange County
Unfortunately, most of my union’s members and its leaders, who represent over 6,000 lecturers and librarians in the UC system, never shared my enthusiasm for volunteering to stop Trumpism— or if they did, they didn’t do the work through our union.
But two of my union’s leaders did join me at an Orange County Labor Federation event just before the election that involved our canvassing for Derek Tran and David Min. Maybe a hundred people turned out for a brief rally that included labor leaders from throughout the state and Democrat politicians from across Orange County– including Katie Porter, Dave Min, Derek Tran, and Josh Newman. Inexplicably, some of the canvass lists focused on local and state candidates and issues and not national ones. But I made sure to request a list to canvass for Tran’s campaign to unseat Republican Michelle Steel, and was assigned a far western district in Garden Grove.
It turns out that west Garden Grove, California is Trump Country. This was not the part of Garden Grove with a lot of Vietnamese immigrants. It was a walled but not gated community near State Route 22 that resembled neighborhoods in nearby Los Alamitos, Lakewood, and northeast Long Beach— all of which tend to vote majority Republican. At least a third of the houses in my “turf” had American flags, maybe half of them had large trucks or RVs in the driveway, and there were a few Trump flags flying on every block.
I got commitments from a few voters to vote for Derek Tran, and emphasized to them the urgency of the election and their need to vote as soon as possible. One registered Democrat thanked me for my work, gave me bottled water, and shared with me that she avoids talking about politics with her neighbors— most of whom were Trump supporters— because their kids play together at the nearby park. It felt good to be doing this work as part of a broader labor movement effort, and I felt more comfortable being able to sincerely reference my commitment to nearby public schools as my reason for being out in the community.
I also had a couple of substantial conversations. One was with a Teamster who drove for UPS and owned his own house, and whose wife had been a public-school teacher. He said the rising cost of living was driving a number of his neighborhood friends to move out of California. He seemed to be leaning toward not just voting for Trump but voting Republican down the whole ballot as a kind of protest. He thanked me for being out talking to people as part of my union, and respected teachers’ unions partly because of his wife’s work. His wife joined our conversation as we talked— she seemed glad that someone was encouraging her husband to vote to give Democrats control of the House, and multiple times ask her husband to stop interrupting me. He supported public schools, he told me but was frustrated that increasing funding seemed to always get siphoned off by a growing level of highly paid managers who didn’t do anything— something I enthusiastically agreed with! He supported unions, he told me, but was frustrated that their gains weren’t more broadly shared with low wage workers who needed unions the most— something I also agreed with. There was something refreshing about our talking openly about our own “none of the above” feelings, based in a sense of economic fairness, so that I could frame my own canvassing not as telling him or others what to think but as a warning to not be seduced by the pseudo-populism of right-wing billionaires. I didn’t care if he voted for Trump, who had no chance of winning California. “But help us flip the House!” I encouraged him as I left, leaving him with a flier. He probably voted for Steel, the Republican. But if he didn't, I told myself that I could take at least some credit for his decision to vote for Tran.
My experience talking with the Teamster stood in marked contrast to a meltdown I had at a Trump voter a few blocks away. I approached the house of two registered Democrats, which Redfin says they purchased in 2017 for $715,000 and is now worth $1.1 million and asked a woman in her driveway if she planned to vote for Tran. She told me she already voted for him. Just as I was about to leave, a man came into the driveway, seemingly unhappy that I was talking with his wife, and said that actually “we” had voted “Republican down the line.” Taken aback, I did something I shouldn’t have done. Something that Seed the Vote has trained me not to do. Instead of leaving, I asked why he voted Republican. Our conversation that followed went something like this:
“I voted for Republicans because of inflation,” he said.
“But inflation is under control now,” I replied.
“But interest rates are still high— though I have a low fixed interest rate on my house, I don’t have one on my car,” he explained.
“But the Fed raised interest rates to get inflation under control,” I said.
“But prices are still high,” he added.
“That’s because of the inflation caused by supply chain issues during COVID, and that’s now under control,” I said with exasperation, and some condescension. “What is Trump going to do about any of this for you?” I added.
“Trump will lower taxes to get the economy going again,” he replied.
It’s not that I thought Bidenomics was perfect. It’s that I was sick of talking with people who considered Trump a normal politician and was deeply upset by this normalization. I considered Trump a malevolent cultural and political force in our society that any normal person should be able to see was totally unfit for office. And because this voter said he already voted, I laid into him out of frustration, not for anything specific about him. I derided his ideas while playing into every bad stereotype of out-of-touch Democrats. He was frustrated that I didn’t give him the last word, and I was frustrated that a registered Democrat would vote for Donald Trump.
As I was walking away, now on the sidewalk while he was still in his driveway 20 feet away, I said something like “Well, if Trump loses, I hope he respects the peaceful transfer of power this time.”
“Trump told people to go home on January 6,” he replied, adding “That was a long time ago. You need to get over it.” Both of our voices were raised as we spoke to each other literally and figurately from a distance, acting out polarizing talking points from our separate media environments.
I gave an angry retort, saying “Which is it? It didn’t happen or it doesn’t matter? Or both?”
Apropos of nothing, he then pivoted to talking about how Trump would also secure the border.
“Is that what this is really about?” I asked. “Immigrants?”
“How dare you!” he raised his voice. “My mother and grandmother were Mexican American. I’m just concerned about crime and have seen first-hand the effects of fentanyl use.” I knew I had crossed a line, and didn’t push back anymore, leaving him the last word. He said “Why on earth would you come to my house to talk to me like this? I’m not going to your house, criticizing you. You people don’t listen! I used to be a Democrat. When you lose next week you’re going to have to face why, and maybe then you’ll listen.”
I walked away without saying anything more to him. I didn’t know what to say to a homeowner who (I later found out) saw the value of his house increase 50% in 7 years say the economy was not good enough. Or to a Democrat who supported trickle-down economics. Or to someone who identified as partly Latino, but conflated undocumented immigrants with fentanyl use and voted for an open racist. I was also embarrassed. I had let my anger get the best of me, and he was right that there was no reason for me to come to his house and belittle him.
I’ve thought a lot about that conversation since, along with another contentious conversation I had later with a doctor in Placentia who said he voted for Trump to protect his family and to reduce taxes. On the night of Trump’s election, the historian Daniel Bessner tweeted that “Kamala ultimately lost because the Democrats are part of a terrible party that not only doesn’t make people’s lives better— it actively accuses those who feel precarious and left-behind of being idiots.” I’m ashamed of how I might have contributed to that dynamic.
At the same time, I remain absolutely incensed that right-wing economic populism has provided cover for a lot of middle and upper-class people who are neither precarious nor “left behind” to pretend that they support Donald Trump because they want an economy that will help poor and working-class people. Supposedly, they aren’t really voting for Trump because of his racism, his misogyny, his homophobia, his sadistic embrace of criminal cops and soldiers and vigilantes, his climate change denialism, his authoritarianism, his blaming immigrants for crime and drugs, or, worst of all, his promise of tax breaks for all. Those features of Trumpism are supposedly incidental to his supporters’ motivations. The economy is their number one issue. And who better to fix the economy than a billionaire celebrity whose wealth came mostly from defrauding the investors in his hotels and casinos in the 1990s, being a reality TV star in the 2000s, and being a racist Twitter troll in the 2010s?[1]
Difficult Conversations Around the World
Why did Kamala Harris receive 6 million fewer votes in 2024 than Joe Biden did in 2020? Why did 77 million Americans vote to re-elect Trump President of the United States of America in 2024 when only 74 million voted to re-elect him in 2020? As pundits in various media environments in the US and around the world intensely debate why the 2024 US Presidential election turned out the way it did, I return to memories of my canvassing experiences for some kind of unique insight that I can bring to the conversation.
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If I were to draw simple political conclusions, they wouldn't be much different from what others have already written. When my friend Jeremy Simer, who I met 25 years ago when he was organizing protests against the WTO in Seattle in 1999, was profiled as a Seed the Vote volunteer canvassing in Phoenix a few weeks before me, the San Francisco Chronicle reporter hit all the right notes: the positive and sometimes transformative effect of canvassing conversations, the helpfulness of canvassers (especially bilingual ones like Jeremy), and the importance of groups like Seed the Vote for building the power of labor unions nd community organizations between elections to advocate for an economy that works for all and not just a few.
But what about those we didn't move? The jarring emotional experience of my trying to speak across wide gulfs in perspective and ideology lingers with me in a way that stories about my conversations with Harris voters, which were mainly affable, do not I'm more comfortable strategizing how to eke out marginal victories against the Right than explaining the Right's growing appeal in the US and around the world. I'm accustomed to political debate, and all the contradictions that come from humans conflating their own interests with "the public interest," while accusing their rivals of being selfish. But I was shaken by my directed encounter with what feels like a pandemic of conspiracy theory, mental illness, and misanthropy in the dystopian landscape of America's sprawling cities and suburbs.
Are men okay? Are white people okay? Are conservatives okay? Are liberals okay? Is anybody okay?
Kevin Baker, a writer on technology and its history, tweeted a couple year ago that, following the easing of COVID restrictions,
...one of the basic facts of contemporary politics is that huge swaths of the population are traumatized, unwell, and are desperate for stability...I guess I just wonder about what a decade full of frightened, traumatized, stability- starved, angry, isolated people is going to look like against a backdrop of institutional collapse and escalating climatic disasters.
This kind of analysis can go beyond powerless lament to rethink changes in the conduct of politics itself. While some describe the appeal of Trumpism as an embrace of right wing principles, others think of it more as an empty signifier for which an increasingly wide group of people can express a politics of negation that reaches well beyond any particular issue: anti-politics for an anti-social age. Has our growing isolation from each other in suburbs, and the increasing replacement of human connection with digital mediation, led to the end of a shared sense of public good, and with it the progressive political project? Has the decline in economic opportunity and the quality of work in an era of neoliberal globalization contributed to drug use and mental illness, making everyone angry at the existing order and terrified of the future, so that a politics of inchoate rage can express a wide range of anxieties at a diverse range of phenomena without providing any kind of substantive political project? Is this what made my conversations at the doors so difficult?
Partly, yes. But the fact that right wing billionaires have successfully created complex “echo chambers” and “network propaganda” to foment and channel a sense of disgust with not just liberal institutions but with actual groups of people is what makes this “anti-politics” seem distinctly more sadistic. Let’s set aside my political frustration with people voting for billionaires to pillage our public institutions, including the public schools that people supposedly support. What I was honestly surprised about while canvassing was the grassroots appeal of anti-trans rhetoric, and the frequency with which people said they could remedy effects of poverty in America by increasing the policing of the border. Whatever innocence people I talked with felt about their concerns, their expression of that concern by voting for Trump has sanctioned if not celebrated his supporters’ vigilante violence against minorities and calls for deportations at such a scale that they could legitimately be called ethnic cleansing. It’s this aspect of Trumpism that I’ll never be tolerant of. And I guess it’s why sometimes, against my own better judgement, I felt it necessary to tell people who thought they were voting to protect their family that they were doing something else entirely.
[1] Because most Americans don’t read newspapers, and TV and radio news never provided a clear understanding of who Donald Trump is to voters, most people don’t know that Trump’s 1980s real estate investments with Daddy’s money all went bust in the early 1990s. He had $1 billion in personal debt and $2 billion in corporate debt for most of the 1990s. No bank would foreclose on him, but no bank would give him a loan either. So he transferred ownership of most of his hotels and casinos to a publicly traded company he controlled, used his fame to get people to buy stock in the company, then transferred investors’ money to himself it to pay off his personal and corporate debts. He then ran his publicly traded company into bankruptcy multiple times before selling it off entirely, tanking the value of his stock and leaving his stockholders with next to nothing. Afterward, still unable to get loans except from Russian oligarchs, he shifted his business model to licensing his name for use by other people’s companies— from steaks to online universities to golf courses. For more info about this history, see Timothy O’Brien’s TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.
Trevor Griffey is a lecturer in US History at UC Irvine and in Labor Studies at UCLA. He serves as Vice President of Legislation for AFT Local 1474, which represents lecturers and librarians in the University of California system.