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Since I came of age (long ago in another century), I've never missed voting in a presidential election. And I guarantee you one thing -- barring a health disaster -- I won't miss this one either. I'm not in need of one of the movingly committed people TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon writes about today who are going door to door in Nevada to get out the vote in an election that could quite literally be the difference between life and death, between a White House (mis)managed in such an authoritarian fashion, so corruptly, so blindly, so grotesquely that it guarantees a future hell on Earth and one that at least gives us a chance to begin to imagine and press for another, better world. In fact, I expect to vote in person, masked, well distanced, and early in a city (New York) and state that isn't even in question this grim election year. No wonder Donald Trump said a bitter goodbye to my hometown and moved to Florida (with, unfortunately, an ever more dismal stop at the White House on his way down there).
But everywhere in this country, let's hope that the urge to vote, to act as if this were still a genuine democracy (and not simply a democracy of the billionaires) worth saving, is as powerful as it is in the world Gordon has been inhabiting these last weeks. It matters beyond words. Tom
Guns, Germs, and Smoke>
UNITE-HERE! Canvassers Take on Trump in Nevada
By Rebecca Gordon"Look, folks, the air quality is in the red zone today. The EPA says that means people with lung or heart issues should avoid prolonged activity outdoors."
That was J.R. de Vera, one of two directors of UNITE-HERE!'s independent expenditure campaign to elect Biden and Harris in Reno, Nevada. UNITE-HERE! is a union representing 300,000 workers in the hospitality industry -- that world of hotels and bars, restaurants and caterers. Ninety percent of its members are now laid off because of Trump's bungling of the Covid-19 pandemic and many are glad for the chance to help get him out of the White House.
"So some of you will want to stay in your hotel rooms and make phone calls today," JR continues. Fifty faces fall in the 50 little Zoom boxes on my laptop screen. Canvassers would much rather be talking to voters at their doors than calling them on a phone bank. Still, here in the burning, smoking West, the union is as committed to its own people's health and safety as it is to dragging Donald Trump out of office. So, for many of them, phone calls it will be.
My own job doesn't change much from day to day. Though I live in San Francisco, I've come to Reno to do back-room logistics work in the union campaign's cavernous warehouse of an office: ordering supplies, processing reimbursements, and occasionally helping the data team make maps of the areas our canvassers will walk.
Our field campaign is just one of several the union is running in key states. We're also in Arizona and Florida and, only last week, we began door-to-door canvassing in Philadelphia. Social media, TV ads, bulk mail, and phone calls are all crucial elements in any modern electoral campaign, but none of them is a substitute for face-to-face conversations with voters.
We've been in Reno since early August, building what was, until last week, the only field campaign in the state supporting Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. (Just recently, our success in campaigning safely has encouraged the Democratic Party to start its own ground game here and elsewhere.) We know exactly how many doors we have to knock on, how many Biden voters we have to identify, how many of them we have to convince to make a concrete voting plan, and how many we have to get out to vote during Nevada's two-week early voting period to win here.
We're running a much larger campaign in Clark County, where close to three-quarters of Nevada's population lives (mostly in Las Vegas). Washoe County, home of the twin cities of Reno and Sparks, is the next largest population center with 16% of Nevadans. The remaining 14 counties, collectively known as "the Rurals," account for the rest. Washoe and Clark are barely blue; the Rurals decidedly red.
In 2018, UNITE-HERE!'s ground campaign helped ensure that Jacky Rosen would flip a previously Republican Senate seat, and we helped elect Democrat Steve Sisolak as governor. He's proved a valuable union ally, signing the Adolfo Fernandez Act, a first-in-the-nation law protecting workers and businesses in Nevada from the worst effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Defying a threatened Trump campaign lawsuit (later dismissed by a judge), Sisolak also signed an election reform bill that allows every active Nevada voter to receive a mail-in ballot. Largely as a result of the union's work in 2018, this state now boasts an all-female Democratic senatorial delegation, a Democratic governor, and a female and Democratic majority in the state legislature. Elections, as pundits of all stripes have been known to say, have consequences.
Door-to-Door on Planet A
"Â ¿Se puede, o no se puede?"
"Â ¡SÃ , se puede!"
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