Canvassing for Pete

I started my volunteer work for Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign in Nevada on Saturday by canvassing a working-class neighborhood in East Las Vegas.  I arrived at the local campaign office on Charleston Street early Saturday morning and received a crash course in how to use the canvassing app, MiniVAN.  Then I headed out to knock on doors, my first time ever doing this for a political campaign.

The script for canvassing is pretty straightforward. The app provides the addresses and information for registered Democrat voters in a particular neighborhood. You knock on a door, introduce yourself and find out if the voter supports your candidate. If they don’t, you move on. If they do, you thank them and have them walk through their plan for getting to their polling location. If they are undecided, you engage in an empathic, persuasive conversation. I felt nervous and uncertainty as I knocked on the first few doors but became more comfortable as moved along. People responded well to my smile, politeness and authentic awkwardness.

The neighborhood I canvassed is dominated by a large apartment complex, surrounded by mostly smaller multi-unit housing. Most of the residents are minorities- African American, Hispanic, Filipino. It’s a gritty place where hardworking people seem to earn enough to get by but not much more.  As I walked from apartment to apartment I felt self-conscious, an affluent white guy who doesn’t need to work and owns a small yacht.  But I was there doing something I believe is important for our country, trying to make democracy work, supporting a candidate who is focused on uniting versus dividing us. I didn’t let the difference between my life and those I spoke to get in the way of discovering what we shared in common and just simply being friendly and respectful to each other. And that’s how my interactions turned out, some starting out with apprehension but all ending on a good note.

Most voters I spoke to were undecided but intending to go to the polls. For the Nevada Democratic primary, voters get to choose between Early Voting or caucusing. Early Voters fill out a ballot ranking their top five candidates. The results of these ballots feed into the caucusing process. Those who choose to caucus show up this Saturday to decide how delegates are divided among the candidates.

The voters I spoke to who had decided on a candidate were split between Bernie Sanders, Pete, Tom Steyer and Joe Biden in that order of popularity. Nobody mentioned Elizabeth Warren or Amy Klobuchar.  The Sanders supports were the most committed. The $15 million Steyers spent advertising in Nevada seems to have been effective in making him a contender through name recognition.

I’m continuing to canvass other neighborhoods this week, engaging in boots on the ground politics. But I’m also working more closely with the candidate himself as a driver of one of the two vehicles that move Pete and his staff team from event to event in Las Vegas. It’s a high profile, high energy, intense job. I’ll describe that experience in my next post.