Today I door-knocked in Bucks County, PA. A place where they apparently call themselves the swingiest county in the swingiest of states. My doorknocking partner and I had 44 homes on our list. The other two folks in our car in our carpool had 35 homes on their list in the same neighborhood, so we split up and we hit them all. We had seven contacts out of the 44. The first half hour nobody answered. Then we started meeting people.
It was pretty consistent, everytime we'd hit an address with only one older person on the list (40 or oler) as a D, the person in our app, it was always a woman, not the husband. That was the registered D. And as my knocking partner corroborated, when she came two weeks back, there were a lot of split households. So midway through we hit a home with just a 60 year old woman on the list as a D. We also saw registered Independents on our app. Anyway, at this house with just the one registered D voter, an older gentleman came out, her husband. So immediately I knew he was a registered R. He was. At first we were feeling him out but after a minute he said we are all voting straight blue. We had a great talk. Turns out he was a lifelong Republican. He did vote for Obama once, but he said otherwise in general in all local, state, and federal elections he voted R like 99% of the time. He's like we gotta get this fucking guy out. Maybe in ten years I'll have a Republican party to go back to, but for now we gotta get rid of him. He also worked in a chemical industry. He said the Trump tariffs fucked him out a bunch of money (due to tariffs on a rare chemical). He said multiple times that Trump is a fucking idiot that doesn't understand how things work, he's stupid. Plus he stated that Trump was clearly a sick terrible individual. Anyways that was absolutely amazing. He also stated their daughter who was from elsewhere in PA, was a solid D voter. That shit lit a fire of hope in me. These people are truly out there!
We talked to one other R. Thirty something guy. His sister and wife were both solid D, but he didn't like either candidate. We had a nice back and forth. On economic issues he was basically a misinformed Libertarian but at the end of our discussion, he let it slip that Trump was a disease on the R party. So I said look, to get rid of that disease, you have to get rid of it, then claim the party back. He was happy to engage and we had a good long talk, but the vibe was he could not say he'd vote Kamala. I bet if she was a straight white guy he would, not even because of conscious bias, but implicit bias. I left it at - look, you admitted Trump was a disease, you gotta get rid of him, but if you end up not being able to pull the lever for Harris, just write someone in or leave it blank.
We talked to one woman who was very D but said she didn't bother with putting up a sign because they get stolen so often. The old dude I mentioned before told us about this rich ass dude who owned like a gym/club type place would send out dudes to steal them, he had a bunch at his club. He said that guy was a crazy Trumper. Anyway so this woman who said she didn't bother putting up a sign, when we mentioned the old guys story, she said of course I know who he means. Everyone does. She said he got into legal trouble because he went to Jan 6th, and arranged for three busses of people to go there. Now he was on a revenge tour for facing some repercussions. So just a stereotypical shitty rich white Trumper.
Anyways, it felt great to talk to voters, especially that one dude, but really even the other dude too. My knocking partner told me about her phone banking experiences which were mostly great too, so I'll be putting in some hours phonebanking until the election.
We saw signs for both parties, but they were all fairly typical - but I'd never seen this one before online or anywhere so far.
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