On the Doorsteps of the Iowans, part 2

Bernie’s slogan, “Not Me. Us.” reflects not only his altruistic appeal to something beyond one’s immediate self-interest, a refreshing contrast from the standard campaign query, "Are you better off now than four years ago?" Wow, it really is possible to think about what happens to other people instead of just yourself and your own brood—who knew?
But his slogan also highlights the long-term strategy that he’s been promoting incessantly for four—and probably forty—years: change doesn’t come at the voting booth but through the mobilization of millions of people to demand it. Bernie’s under no illusion about the difficulties of ramming his neo-New Deal program through a recalcitrant Congress comprised of billionaires’ toadies and hired guns serving the war profiteers and financier class.

The only antidote is a vast army of citizen advocates ready to push relentlessly for his radical vision, and that’s what is on display in Iowa this month. While doing our rounds with our canvassing app, rousing Iowans from their warm living rooms to stand on the doorstep in single-digit weather, we occasionally saw organizers from the other campaigns. But I seriously doubt Pete or Amy or Warren had busloads of eager 20-somethings pouring in from Chicago and St Louis like the one that joined me last weekend in Muscatine across the Mississippi River from Illinois. They had heard his message, and they are alert enough to realize that this movement is the only way they are likely to have a living-wage job, a domicile, a life.

Obama said the same thing in 2008, touting OFA (Obama for America) as a permanent vehicle for grassroots involvement. That was, as a polite Spanish-speaker would say, “short of the truth.” After we volunteers met and formulated our vision of his first term’s program and our role in it, we never heard back.

In their rare idle moments, Bernie’s staffers explained that our door-knocking shifts were building the database not just for his election but precisely for this post-electoral function, the issue-based mobilizations to come, together with the state and local races of 2022 and beyond. Every hint of data about a voter’s concerns is campaign gold to be mined later for spin-off groups like Sunrise, Fight for $15, Justice Democrats, and others yet to be born.

Bernie is tied up most days in Washington with the impeachment trial, so stand-ins Michael Moore and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez headlined a rally in a packed Iowa City auditorium. Fox News noted suspiciously that AOC never mentioned Bernie’s name in her remarks, but building a cult of personality is antithetical to the Bernie message.

Canvassing is unavoidably manipulative as one learns the subtle techniques of getting people to see things from your point of view. But politics is persuasion, and our Bernie platoons are up against billions of advertising dollars trying to tilt people in the opposite direction. I had a number of meaningful discussions with open-minded Iowans and enjoyed the chance to meet them literally on their doorsteps as fellow citizens determined to exercise a civic function based on sober thought and reflection. After drawing out their primary issues of interest, I learned to offer them my point of view by saying, “Would you like to know why I came out here all the way from New York to speak to you?” One head of a four-voter household said my visit would be the topic of their dinner-table conversation.

Mind you, most people either were not in, not eager to be interrupted, favored other candidates, hadn’t thought about it, or didn’t intend to. In a three-hour shift, one was lucky to get in two of these front-porch chats and maybe another couple of doubters tilted into the Bernie column. One of my first encounters was with a young guy who had just moved into the apartment and wasn’t listed as a registered voter. (Iowans can register on the same day of the caucus.) “You’re the third Bernie person to come by, so I guess I’ll have to have a look at what he says,” he told me. Persistence pays off.

[If you want to receive alerts for future posts on this blog, please send an email to tfrasca@yahoo.com or find me on Facebook.]

Despite these low percentages, experts assured us that the strategy works to build support, and Bernie’s canvassing operation is crushing the field—130,000 doors knocked last weekend alone. If he continues to cruise ahead and scores a solid victory, one of the main arguments against him will be seriously undermined: electability. My interlocutors often commented that Sanders might not have broad appeal for a variety of reasons. But curiously, they never referred in such terms to themselves—people almost universally said they liked or respected Bernie—but rather to the anonymous average voter out there somewhere. If Iowans show that entirely typical Americans from the quintessentially middle ground are ready for a guy who calls himself a socialist, the following dominoes could fall, just as they did a while back for a black dude with an Arabic middle name.

On the Doorsteps of the Iowans, part 1

(Davenport, Iowa City & Muscatine, IOWA) – Canvassing ain’t beanbag. You expose yourself to all the variegated reactions people have to being accosted on their doorstep and made to discuss or, alternatively, to refuse to discuss politics. Either way, each individual who is the object of this core function of the “ground game” built by candidates for office is put on the spot in the same way a panhandler makes you decide how you relate to the annoyingly needy. “No response” is a response. Some wave you off, others are curious, and a few are willing to air their doubts, questions, and concerns.

The experts say this exercise works to draw in voters, solidify support, nudge people on the fence into one’s favored column, or at least (and according to some, most importantly) gather data on their preferences for future strategizing. It takes a lot of effort to roam through neighborhoods, finagle one’s way past locked doors of apartment houses, find people home, and get them out on their front porches for those crucial two minutes. Campaigns either fund this activity with expensive staffers or have to draw in armies of volunteers.
Iowans bask in the attention of the entire country once every four years for their famous caucuses, whose results often provide a crucial insight into who has the chops to snare the nomination and eventually the White House. Caucusing is not as simple as merely voting because electors have to show up to a caucus site, publicly stand with their preferred candidate, and wait for the process to unfold over a couple of hours. It takes place in the dead of winter, which in the Midwest can mean serious inconvenience.
Here in eastern Iowa, signs have sprouted up on the snow-covered lawns advertising sympathy for “Pete,” “Bernie,” or “Amy,” the chummier first-name candidates, as well as the more sober placards boosting “Warren,” “Yang,” or the occasional mournful “Delaney” (and even one forlorn “Bennet”).

You’d think after months of pre-caucus positioning and relentless news coverage—not to mention the barrage of candidate ads bombarding the broadcast channels every evening—that people have made up their minds. You’d be wrong. Plenty of people remain undecided even to the point of stating without embarrassment that they will decide at the event itself after the candidates’ reps make their appeals to the assembly. One voter reminisced that Hillary lost her vote in 2008 when the HRC stand-in pitched her as “a mother and a grandmother.”

Door knocking has advanced with the help of software that can slice, dice, and shuffle a candidate’s database to best utilize the staff and volunteer time available. Instead of blanketing a neighborhood, campaigns can focus on a given subset, such as known Democrats, prior voters, or already identified Bernie sympathizers. A volunteer enters a “turf” into their cellphone complete with names, ages, and addresses of the prospective caucusers, along with a handy map of the neighborhood by which to organize the route of the slog. Three quarters of those listed won’t be home or accessible, but the others, no matter how they react, will provide crucial information to add to the dataset. The volunteer rates them on a 1 to 5 Likert scale from strong pro-candidate to strong opponent, then types in any other key facts such as “says wife won’t caucus because she fears falling on the ice”—which will trigger a follow-up offer of transportation.

Our unscientific “convenience sample” survey reveals that the polls are respectably accurate given what they can measure, which is really not very much. Support is pretty spread out among the choices though the supposed Biden edge is invisible—a Biden sign is an oddity, and only a rare respondent claims to be staunchly in his corner. (My fellow canvassers and I have met exactly two all week.) If he has a hidden base of support, it’s a well-kept secret. Plenty of households refuse to engage, so maybe they’re the buried pro-Joe treasure representing platoons of Obama nostalgics gathering in catacombs to wave his flag in silence. Speaking of which, the (admittedly biased) rival camps claim his campaign offices are sepulchral. But all the candidates are fairly evenly represented in the vapid and generic TV ads, which are said to move voters for reasons future paleoarchaeologists may someday uncover.

Friday afternoon, Jan. 25, the Bernie headquarters in Iowa City hosted a volunteer booster session with some some of their backbench organizers from Chicago and Iowa politics. All delivered a preview of their speeches later that night at the U. of Iowa rally headlined by Michael Moore and AOC, both standing in for Bernie who was trapped in the impeachment jury. (More on them later.) I’m pretty immune to the rah-rah at this stage of life, and I don’t often get sentimental.

That said, something happened in that little campaign ritual that I’m still trying to put my finger on. Amid the usual phrases and standard campaign tropes, I felt something inexplicably potent. There was no obvious explanation for it, no particular anecdote or inspired thought from the crew up front. Instead, it seemed to emanate from the crowd, the very young, hopeful, generous, kindly, respectful kids perched on rows of folding chairs in the anteroom of a battered storefront at the edge of a slushy, antiseptic shopping center. It was something that would only be trivialized by definition, an intuitive, bodily, ineffable, and collective force, dare I say a spirit. I have no idea what it was, but it moves among us.