by Rob Lyons
October 29, 2024
We’ve been busy Getting Out the Vote here in Wisconsin for the past week. There’s one week left before the Election.
My friend Laurie Hogetsu Belzer asked: “What’s the mood of the voters?” For me this is a koan: Why did Bodhidharma come from the West? Does a dog have Buddha nature? What is your original face? It might be reframed as “How do voters feel about their lives?” About where they’ve been and where they’re going? Are they angry? frustrated? bored? hopeful? resolute? Do they feel like they have agency? Are they better off now than four years ago? Are they engaged? How do the feel about the prospects for their children and grandchildren?
Another way to read it: “Who’s going to win?” As Yogi Berra reminds us: when you come to a fork in the road, take it. Well, we’re going to take it alright: either Trump or Harris will be president, and half the country will be disappointed or outraged.
Or again: “Is the shit going to hit the fan?” If the mood is volatile, we might expect violence, if calm and steady, maybe we’ll be OK. Causes and conditions. Is there a deep enough reservoir of decency, and order, and respect, that we can fend off the coming power grab?
Or: “Who are we really, after all?” This election is a holding-up of a mirror up to nature, and is teaching us about ourselves. It is like the breaching of a leviathan: who and what will be revealed? We have a collective karma that dates to the founding of the nation, and to the original sins of slavery and subjugation of the indigenous peoples. This karma didn’t disappear with the passage of the 14th Amendment abolishing slavery, or the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote, or the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Between the Lost Cause and the Big Lie, these cruel, reactionary, violent impulses went underground for a time but then resurfaced during the Jim Crow era, were banished after the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950’s and 60’s, and have reappeared in the MAGA movement. Is there enough depth and strength to overcome these foul impulses, or are we doomed?
Hell if I know. So far we’ve canvassed in four environments: a) a working class Black neighborhood on the North Side of Milwaukee; b) a middle-class mixed-race suburban neighborhood also on the North Side of Milwaukee; c) a rural area of farms and isolated homes in Waterloo, about 25 miles northeast of Madison; and d) Watertown, a town just about halfway between Milwaukee and Madison, that’s home to two small colleges.
This is a VERRRY limited sample: we haven’t visited Latino or Asian neighborhoods, or any of the white ethnic neighborhoods in Milwaukee, such as the German, Irish, Italian, or Polish. I’ve been told that Milwaukee is the most distinctly segregated major city in the country, and the neighborhoods have largely retained their ethnic identities. So we have no idea how these communities feel. We also haven’t visited the Fox Valley (Green Bay, Appleton, Fond du Lac), or the heavy Republican areas in western Wisconsin, or the counties that border Lake Michigan, or the exurban WOW counties that surround Milwaukee (Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington).
We’ve been canvassing from lists generated by the Democratic Party. In Milwaukee these lists are strictly Democrats. In Watertown and Waterloo the lists also contain Independents. So we rarely met with Republicans except if they were part of a mixed household. Also the preponderance of voters we’ve talked to are over 50. We’re looking at a tiny sliver of the electorate, pre-qualified to favor the Democratic candidate.
But I can offer a few general observations. The older black electorate is strongly in favor of Harris, and seems determined to vote. Because we’ve been canvassing in the afternoon we haven’t run into many young Black voters, so we can’t say how they feel. Anecdotally I’d say they are repelled by Trump, and yet we also ran into a few who weren’t tracking the election or were befuddled. One guy said of Obama: “Eight years of The Man, and nothing changed.” I heard from one Black man that many of his male friends were NOT going to vote for Kamala, because they doubted whether she would be tough enough in wartime.
There’s a lot of division. Division within neighborhoods, for example in Watertown, where there are Trump supporters next door or across the street from Harris supporters. The Trump supporters crowd their front yards with Trump signs, while the Democrats are more discreet, apparently wanting to avoid confrontation: we’ve heard stories of Harris-Walz signs being vandalized or destroyed. Imagine what it must be like to live in a neighborhood where there’s such virulent distaste, one neighbor for another.
Division within a household, where the husband is going for Trump and the wife prefers Harris. One woman complained openly to me about the bitter split with her husband, and I got the sense that this election might almost drive them to divorce – or had at least thrown into high relief how incompatible they are. Division between generations, where the parents back Trump and the kids Harris. And division within the minds of individuals: I spoke to one woman who is deeply pro-life and can’t see voting for Harris on account of her position on abortion – and at the same time she’s convinced that Trump is batshit crazy and dangerous and can’t be trusted with power. She’s mulling a vote for a third party candidate.
We’ve been using a phone-based app called miniVan (for Voter Activation Network). We ask the voter what his/her key issues are, and we have a list:
- Corruption
- COVID-19
- Crime/Violence
- Defeating Trump
- Eduction
- Environment
- Foreign Policy
- GOP issue
- Guns
- Healthcare
- Housing
- Immigration
- Inflation
- Jobs
- LGBTQ+ rights
- Marijuana Legalization
- Opioid Abuse
- Political Polarization
- Reproductive Rights
- Roads/Infrastructure
- Social Security
- State Budget/Taxes
- Student Loans
- Supreme Court
- Systemic Racism
- Threats to Democracy
- Trade
- Veterans
- Voting Rights
- Wealth Inequality
- Women’s Rights
