On the Doorsteps of the Iowans, part 4

Now that the Iowa caucuses are just hours away and opposition camps can’t take advantage, I will describe a surprise we discovered and exploited while trudging the snow-covered byways of that state: the vote-rich African immigrant communities.

Africans are not a population you immediately associate with Iowa, but the state has large cohorts of Sudanese, Congolese, and Ethiopians, among others. Many were settled as refugees but are now doing that American thing of merging with their new homeland and raising children who are as Iowan as the white kids next door whose families immigrated a few generations earlier. (The Iowa, the Missouri, and other nomadic tribes inhabited the area pre-European settlement—all others are newcomers.)

We volunteer canvassers were given lists via a cellphone app that directed us to the doors of prospective voters in Iowa City, and by chance my team, comprised of Grandma Jan (profiled in the New Yorker recently) and a South African academic who holds a U.S. passport, were given a neighborhood almost entirely populated by Sudanese. It is a sign of how weak all the campaigns are (including Bernie’s) in terms of organizing their own potential base that so little had been done to educate and mobilize these highly motivated recent citizens.

Iowa City is a liberal-ish university town with a gay mayor, so you’d think the hundreds of Sudanese suddenly facing the Trump travel ban preventing their relatives from visiting would have been targeted for a major effort months ago. But we found that these very welcoming people who, like Arabs everywhere were only too delighted to have visitors sit down for tea and meet their families, had only the vaguest notions about what is happening later today, where to go to participate, or who the candidates are. While the half-dozen well-funded campaigns scramble to pull traditional caucus-goers this way or that, they all left this mountain of potential votes on the table. We did our best to remedy that.

As a lone male, I did not get the entrée that our female canvassers received though I was always treated more politely than in white neighborhoods. This was not entirely a disadvantage because the ladies were so often delayed with lengthy visits. (When I went with a female partner, the women home alone could invite us in.) Imagine the work that could have taken place among these families whose children now face hostility and threats for the mere fact of being Sudanese-American.

I did get extra points for actually knowing something about the Sudan, having spent two months there in 1979. One prosperous head of household getting local teenagers to shovel his suburban driveway insisted that we come back for a formal visit, shaking his head at how the promise of America had suddenly soured under “the monster.” Where we normally would get only one or two “commitment to caucus cards” signed during a shift, among the Sudanese I came back with no less than six.

Our team concentrated its efforts among the Africans in the lead-up to today’s crucial vote, and the Bernie campaign has waked up to the potential, albeit tardily. If the Sanders phenomenon fulfills its promise to be a movement rather than a mere election, someone will take up where we left off.

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