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Canvasing

I spent yesterday afternoon in Virginia’s 10th Congressional District, where State Senator and former prosecutor Jennifer Wexton is challenging incumbent Republican Congresswoman Barbara Comstock. Comstock is widely thought to be vulnerable. It’s one of the contests that will decide whether Democrats gain control of the House  on Tuesday. I went because it is not certain Wexton will win, so my efforts might make a tiny difference, and because historic Leesburg is a nice place to have lunch.

At this point in the campaign, it’s all about GOTV: get out the vote. Canvasers are not encouraged to try to win people over, only to persuade people who support their candidate to get to the polls Tuesday. The lists of addresses and names they are given are supposed to be all on the “right” side, though that of course is not 100% accurate. Most people aren’t home on a sunny Saturday afternoon, so you leave a bit of literature stuck to the window, hanging from the doorknob, or inserted in the door jamb.

A lot of my addresses were few and far between. That meant I was mainly in Comstock country, which was also apparent from the lawn signs. The demographics were what you would expect: most of the people on my list of expected Wexton voters were women, many but not all from obvious immigrant backgrounds. Conversations were mostly easy: yes they would vote for Wexton, they knew where the polling place would be, and they had clear plans to go Tuesday.

A few interactions were less pleasant. Men answer the door much more often than women, and many of them are not voting Democratic. At one house, a middle-aged man followed me outside after I had asked to speak with a 19-year-old woman listed at his address as likely to vote Democratic. He wanted to make it clear that his entire household was solidly MAGA (Make America Great Again), including the young woman.

I suspect the 19-year-old might feel differently. I hope she didn’t get in trouble with this rather aggressive pater familias. Family voting at the polling booth is a big problem in many countries, when men crowd into the booth to “help” their spouses or daughters vote. I have to wonder whether the increased use of absentee ballots might be making American family members much more vulnerable to intimidation.

Those men who weren’t voting for Wexton all quickly identified themselves as Trump supporters. Comstock might as well not exist for them. The avowed Trumpistas were all white. The sense one gets–but of course these are brief conversations and the cues are at least partly non-verbal–is that they expect nothing more from him than to restore their sense of pride and preserve some vestige of white privilege. No one was threatening, but several were less than friendly.

Apart from the Comstock yard signs, there was no indication of a comparable Republican push in the small section of Leesburg I visited. I met no Republican canvasers and saw no Republican literature at the front doors. Maybe Comstock is confident of how people there will vote. Or maybe they’ve miscalculated. There is no way of knowing until Tuesday.

I am heading back to Leesburg this morning. The effort yesterday seemd worthwhile. The canvasers I met were enthusiastic and committed, perhaps a bit more so than for Hillary in 2016. One was a retired Foreign Service colleague, another a dean I know at George Washington University. I assume both traveled the hour out to Leesburg for the same reason I did: so much is at stake in this mid-term election that I don’t want to feel afterwards that I might have contributed more.