Welcome to the Hotel Pennsylvania

What a lovely place to get out the vote.

Knocking on doors in Steelton, PA, just south of Harrisburg.

Making pizza in the communal kitchen, chatting late into the night, sharing a room with single beds: it all takes me back to Oberlin in the ’70s and my co‑op days at Keep and Old B. Except that now, a half century later, we’re drinking red wine legally, late night means 10 o’clock, and everyone in the bunk room snores, because the youngest of us is about 67 and the rest range upward from that.

Welcome to the Hotel Pennsylvania, an Airbnb set amid rolling hills by the Susquehanna River north of Harrisburg. It’s our home base for a month of canvassing to get out the Democratic vote in this battleground state. Volunteers are rotating through the house all month, most of us coming from Baltimore or DC. Of the 20 or so people signed up to spend nights here, all but three or four are women.

We’re livin’ it up at the Hotel Pennsylvania. Glenn and Martha make homemade pizza while I enjoy a glass of wine.

Smashing my stereotypes

We’re canvassing for the top of the ticket – Kamala Harris and Tim Walz – and for Janelle Stelson, who’s running for Congress to defeat MAGA warrior Rep. Scott Perry. Each day we report to campaign headquarters in downtown Harrisburg to receive our voter lists. I load mine into the canvassing app and drive to my assigned “turf,” 50 or so addresses clustered in some corner of the city or its suburbs.

In these final weeks before Election Day, we’re mainly contacting Democrats to make sure they vote. But the targeting isn’t perfect, and you never know who will open the door. I can find myself face to face with a Trump voter, an undecided voter, or – all too often – somebody who sees voting as futile and says they just don’t care.

Standing on a doorstep, I size up the house and voter – age, race, gender – and form an expectation of the response I’ll get. But I am regularly surprised.

In a Harrisburg suburb, I approach a ramshackle house with a large American flag. My knock is answered by a scowling older white woman and her aggressively barking dog. Trump voter, I think to myself. But the woman sends the dog inside and proceeds to rip into Trump. He talks trash about immigrants, but look who he hires at his clubs! He wants to tell women what to do with their bodies! We need more women in office, and we need term limits, because half those guys in Congress are just too old! She bends my ear for 10 minutes. Glancing again at the yard as I leave, I see that what I took to be junk is actually a curated, if quirky, display: artificial flowers, Halloween ghosts and jack-o-lanterns, a five-foot-tall lighthouse, and more.

Information and disinformation

While individuals defy profiling, certain patterns stand out. Across neighborhoods, older African Americans, especially women, are the most reliable Harris voters. Many are well informed on politics and history, viewing the present through the lens of the past. Still, it’s not policy proposals that animate most Harris supporters. It’s visceral disgust with Trump and everything he stands for, and fear about what his return may bring.

Halloween decor in Allison Hill, a distressed section of Harrisburg. The clowns laughed and the wolf snarled and roared as I walked by.

In the poorest neighborhoods, disinformation is rife. Many people believe that the pandemic stimulus checks bearing Trump’s signature came from him personally – the exact deception he intended – and hope that if he is reelected, another check will arrive. That money was approved by Congress, I told one young woman, who stared at me blankly and asked, “What’s Congress?”

A glimpse of other lives

In 2016, after days of canvassing in York, Pennsylvania, I wrote:

What I saw there will stay with me always. Boarded-up houses, block after block. Broken furniture piled on the sidewalk. Shattered windows, crumbling steps, doorbells dangling from wires. A front porch held together with spray-on foam.

I hadn’t yet seen Harrisburg.

To be clear, I’ve no doubt that most big cities have neighborhoods like this. I live in central DC, but the area is economically mixed, and I seldom see such abject poverty in my daily life. Canvassing brings me face to face with it. What I witnessed in Harrisburg, within view of the state capitol building, hurt my heart.

Rounding a corner can take you from a relatively stable block of working-class families to one where a quarter of the voters on your list have moved and every fourth or fifth house is vacant or condemned. Porches are piled with rotting trash; a musty smell and a sense of hopelessness hang in the air. Many people in these neighborhoods don’t plan to vote. And why would they? Both parties make promises, they say, but nothing ever changes in their lives. There’s little I can say to this. They’re not wrong. One man tells me he doesn’t vote because he’s waiting for the Rapture.

This household’s power was cut for want of $291. It wasn’t the only such notice we saw. Canvassing takes me out of my bubble and shows me lives I can scarcely imagine.

When I see an opening, I press gently. A young mother has never voted, but she’s willing to talk. It’s about his future, I say, gesturing at the baby on her hip. Democrats want to help families that are struggling, and Trump only wants to help himself. She agrees with this, at least the last part, and says she’ll think about it. Maybe next time. Who knows.

Persuasion sometimes works

From the above, you might wonder if canvassing is worth it. I would say yes – absolutely. Each day I have several conversations that leave me thinking, “I just may have gotten a vote.”

Changing minds is difficult but not impossible. A white suburban voter tells me she’s undecided between Harris and Trump. “Interesting!” I say. “It sounds like you see some good on both sides. Can you tell me something you particularly like about the Democrats?” She replies, “They would protect the ACA [Affordable Care Act]. Our two adult kids are on our health insurance because of the ACA.” “It sounds like that’s important to your family,” I say. I then press from another angle: “Is there something that worries you about the Republicans?” It turns out the voter is pro-choice and doesn’t want the government making decisions for women. By the end of the conversation she says, “All in all, I guess you could say I’m leaning toward voting Democratic.”

Not all my conversations go so well, but in this case I refrained from making my own arguments in favor of Democrats and tried instead to elicit hers. Rather than convince her, I wanted her to convince herself. I got better at doing this as the week went on. Also helpful was a book titled The Joy of Talking Politics with Strangers, written by longtime canvasser (and my fellow Obie) Elizabeth Chur.

Debbie and Liz prepare for the next day’s canvass in our Airbnb.

Helping voters vote

The easiest way to secure votes is to help Democrats make a plan to cast their ballots. We want to turn an intention to vote into an actual vote. On Front Street in Steelton, a gritty borough south of Harrisburg, I encounter a young white man and his Black wife or girlfriend, both heavily tatted and pierced. They want to vote for Harris but are unsure of their polling place. I open GoogleMaps on my iPad to show them the location, a few blocks away. They’re grateful and offer a bottle of water to see me through the hot afternoon.

A few people want to vote by mail or vote early in person, and here the rules can be complex. An older African American woman is helping everyone in her extended family vote. At least one relative is disabled and needs to vote by mail, and we review the deadlines and process for this. My most challenging conversation is with a Spanish-speaking woman who says that she and her husband need to both register and vote. There’s still time, I explain in my rusty Spanish, but you need to act fast. I urge her to go in person to the Bureau of Elections, where the couple can register, request ballots, and vote in one visit. I open my browser to vote.pa.gov and select “español” to show her voting guidelines in Spanish. She promises to go the next day.

The difference eight years makes

In 2016 in York, I could knock on doors from late morning to early evening and be just fine. Those days are gone. Climbing front steps at house after house, I find I’m short of breath. I sit down on a stoop, sip some water and eat a few bites before pushing on. After about 50 doors – three hours, roughly – I’m cooked.

At the Airbnb each night, we chat about canvassing but also about our adult kids and grandkids, about aging solo (at least five women in our group have outlived husbands, some by many years), and about health concerns, large and small. We don’t know how long our canvassing days will last. For now, we’re just happy to be here.

NOPE, the all-volunteer group I work with, is canvassing in south-central Pennsylvania every weekend and some weekdays from now until the election. If you’re within driving distance of PA, please consider signing up. Everyone is welcome, and we’d be glad to have you.

Note to Bill, who I’m sure is wondering what the title of this post could possibly mean: the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” from 1977, is considered one of the greatest rock songs of all time. Listen here. Lyrics here.