Now this Kamala Harris is getting drunk and putting out bizarre videos. Where the hell did the democrats find this lady?
Willy Brown found her, although I guess she was the one who found him. A key figure in California politics, the former mayor of San Francisco launched the political career of Kamala Harris, with whom he had a brief relationship was her mentor – and partner for a brief time – in the mid-1990s. She was 29, he was 60.
The following is an article in The New Yorker by a Canvasser for Harris. I will reply inline, below, to various points by the author. The article has been reformatted to facilitate my reply. A Kamala Harris Canvasser’s Education Even on my first day, I sensed dissonance between the campaign’s celebrity-inflected exuberance and the raw divisions I saw in the streets. By November 30, 2024 I have done canvassing for political and marketing purposes. Feedback, or more accurately, correctly interpreting feedback and adjusting campaign accordingly is indispensable for a successful campaign. In October, as a novice volunteer knocking on doors in Pennsylvania for the Kamala Harris campaign, my task was to make sure that committed Democrats voted, and to persuade undecided voters that Harris was the better choice. I was told not to spend time talking with voters who were clearly supporters of Donald Trump. But there was something about the way one man snarled at me, “She’s evil,” as he was tending his front lawn on a quiet, tree-shaded street in a suburb of Allentown, that made me stop. So far, so good. An obvious and very efficient canvassing plan. When I approached, he seemed to shrink back, but he recovered and told me that Harris was a moral and physical danger to children because she supported public middle schools allowing students to undergo transgender surgery without the consent of their parents. Damn, this new canvasser is reading and reacting to body language and expression. Impressive. By this time, after two months of canvassing, I had heard from several Trump voters some version of this noxious innuendo. I shrugged, told him his concern was not based on any reality I was aware of, and moved on to the next door on my list. "Noxious innuendo". "I shrugged". Here this canvasser goes askew. While moving on from this voter was correct, some homework that night, involving other members of her group were in order. An objection was made, and a weak answer by the canvasser was given. The focus would not be to try to directly influence this voter, but rather to address the underlying reason for the objection. By characterizing the objection as "Noxious", it is effectively diminished, and more likely to go unaddressed. A possible adjustment might involve an adjustment of messaging, if not policy. Often, stated objections are not the underlying objections. Relevant to this point are voter's concerns of Leftist leadership taking an excessive interest in influencing personal, including parental decisions. Children don't like being told what to do. Apparently, neither to parents or other adults. Perhaps especially by a candidate with no children of her own. A few minutes later, another voter on the same street opened his door to declare that he would vote enthusiastically for Harris. He was a pastor in a local Protestant church, and he expressed disbelief that Trump, after his attempt to overthrow the results of the 2020 election, his felony convictions, the court case that found him liable for sexual abuse, and his increasingly erratic and crude behavior, was even close to Harris in the polls. “How is this possible?” was the refrain I heard time and again from Democrats. Democrats were the minority in this election cycle, weren't they? The next question should be obvious. Allentown is the most populous city in the Lehigh Valley, a forty-mile stretch on the eastern edge of Pennsylvania that follows the path of the Lehigh River. The city’s suburbs have a peaceful veneer that belies the tensions on the ground. On a winding rural road, I met an older woman, a registered Democrat, who had volunteered as a poll worker in recent elections. She said that her whole family was under online siege by MAGA militants who were accusing her of preparing to subvert the upcoming count. Another volunteer I met, who had come from Brooklyn with his two pre-teen kids, had been confronted by an armed Trump supporter. The man had claimed to be in charge of security for his neighborhood and said they were barred from entering. "Barred from entering". I don't know if local ordinances apply to political canvassing. I hate to hear anyone interfering with legitimate canvassing for political purposes. Interesting to note, Republican ground game is nearly non existent. Perhaps partially over security concerns going into certain, if not many, neighborhoods. As far as online harassment, we have seen it both ways. At some point, there should consequences against perpetrators. My own presence in Allentown, where I walked the streets with a green-and-pink shoulder bag carefully selected to convey joyfulness and filled with Harris campaign literature, had followed an abrupt life change. I’ve been a journalist for four decades, reporting on immigration and other subjects for the Washington Post, The New York Times, and, most recently, The Marshall Project. But, on June 27th,... This canvasser was a Journalist for four decades? No wonder she had some skills. Sadly, only some, it seems. ... as I watched the debate between President Joe Biden and Trump, I was overcome with dismay. That night, Trump unleashed a barrage of lies about immigrants and asylum seekers. Biden failed to respond with any corrective truths or positive portrayals of immigrant families. A few days later, I resigned from The Marshall Project, as I felt I could no longer comply with its rules proscribing partisan activity. The Right has made significant gains in elections in France, Germany, Spain, and other countries on immigration policy. At what point do Democrats realize it is not voters, but it is themselves. Could it be that voters want to feel represented, especially those already well established, even if they were immigrants in the not too distant past and not subordinated to new immigrants, both legal and illegal? Especially as costs of living increase, including real estate availability? I would think a well established journalist would have better situational awareness. A case of blindness by dogmatic political philosophy? I joined a voter uprising against Biden, writing letters and making calls. My sense of relief when the President stepped aside, on July 21st, became exhilaration when Harris sprinted out of the gate the following day and assumed the Democratic mantle. Just as I was being initiated into the world of political activism, I was presented with a historic chance to help elect America’s first woman President. I started canvassing on August 11th. I can relate to the energy, the excitement of joining a political movement. During the Bush Administration, I met a Chinese woman and joined protests against the Iraq War. I participated in demonstrations, gathered signatures for a petition, donated money to Leftist causes, and participated in house parties that had Democrat politicians as guests. I am still a Leftist, but am a long term Trump supporter. I suspect the author and I see many of the same things about Trump, except I believe Trump is a better leader for the United States than what Democrats have been able to offer, since Bill Clinton. I Left my Leftist compatriots when Barrack first came on the scene. My induction took place in Bensalem, a township northeast of Philadelphia, in a spare campaign office still announced by a Biden-Harris yard sign. I received training on a mobile app that would guide my steps, generating for each of my canvassing forays a street map with dots showing the households of registered voters, who were identified by name, age, gender, and party affiliation. The app meant that, when people opened their doors, I could ask to speak with them by their first names. I recorded their responses, indicating whether they were “strong” for Harris––definitely voting for her–– “strong” for Trump, or were still in some murky terrain of indecision, in which case I was on: I had a minute or two to launch my pitch to sway them. I also received my first training in campaign messaging––a short course on Project 2025 and the catastrophic perils it posed for American democracy. The training provided suggests a high level of organization. So we have many canvassers, including many bussed in from out of state, per the author, running an efficient campaign against almost no Republican ground game. Yet still, PA flipped back to Trump. Could it have been related to messaging? To policy? To ineffective campaign adjustments based upon canvasser feedback? Even on that first day, walking around in sultry heat, I began to sense a dissonance between the celebrity-inflected exuberance of the Harris campaign and the bleak mood and raw divisions I encountered in the streets. I canvassed a gritty apartment complex, with brown grass in the green spaces, that surrounded a small pool, where several mothers languished as their children splashed. They all scoffed when I asked if they were Harris supporters. By the end of that afternoon, the warnings about Project 2025’s plans for an “authoritarian, Christian nationalist movement with broad control over American life”—in the words of a flyer I received as part of my “lit pack”—felt too academic for a voter with gray and missing teeth who told me she could not afford dental care. By contrast, just blocks away was a curving street lined with colonial-style homes, with Volvos and S.U.V.s in the driveways, where one smiling Democrat after another opened the doors. Here was the class polarization that would later get so much attention. "Too academic". This canvasser is perceptive. Is this leading to the old saw, "It's the economy, stupid", as in the cost of living and or perceived economic opportunities? Voters feeling a sense of political betrayal in regards to healthcare? As for the Trump voters who turned up on my lists, I quickly understood that we were not operating on a plane of shared facts. A retired police officer shouted me down when I asked him to explain his support for Trump, given that the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, had injured a hundred and forty law enforcement officers. “That’s a lie!” he said, even though I had, at the ready, the latest Justice Department report on the prosecutions of the rioters. Upon reading this paragraph, the term, "The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" comes to mind. How might Leftist proposed policy, "Defund the police", potentially influence a voter concerned about rising crime or are otherwise supportive to police? Democrats may want to avoid cherry picking facts in addressing voter perceptions and why 2024 transpired the way it did. Another voter insisted that all Trump had asked for after the 2020 election was “a recount” of the national vote, as if that were a remotely feasible, or legal, proposition. Others echoed Trump’s dark visions of millions of criminal migrants rampaging across the land, though there was little sign of them in northeast Pennsylvania. This is what I was up against: Trump was broadcasting on some direct wavelength with his followers, and he had drawn them into his alternate universe of looming economic disaster, menacing migrants, and outrages perpetrated by Democrats against their children, which only he was visionary enough to see and strong enough to combat. Whatever one may say about Trump, it does seem he is an effective marketer. At least on some things. How does one become a effective marketer, you ask? Asking questions, listening to objections, determining the underlying reasons for those objections might be a good start. Then again, does it not ultimately come down to whether voters feel a candidate better represents their interests rather than a political party demanding voter acceptance to what the party feels is important? By late August, I decided to focus my canvassing on Allentown. The city, the third most populous in Pennsylvania, was once an emblem of American steel, but deindustrialization led to its decline, several decades ago. (“Well, we’re living here in Allentown / and they’re closing all the factories down,” Billy Joel sang in 1982.) In recent years, Allentown has undergone an uneven revival spurred by the arrival of tens of thousands of Latinos, many of them exiles from New York, who now make up a majority of the city’s population. About half are Puerto Ricans, American citizens who can vote in federal elections if they are registered in the mainland U.S. Another large group are Dominicans, including longtime U.S. citizens and first-generation immigrants. Most of these voters were likely to be registered Democrats or Independents. I speak Spanish, and I concluded that my most effective contribution would be to help run up the vote in Latino neighborhoods in Allentown. I understand Trump gained with Latino voters nationally. Apparently same theme as suggested earlier, in spite of specific "blunders". In a campaign office on Hamilton Street, in the center of the city, I found a corps of young staffers who were smart and vigorous, but perhaps not deeply experienced in the engineering of campaigns, backed up by volunteers who were union members and other stalwart Democrats. In the early days, after Harris’s choice of Governor Tim Walz as her running mate and her spectacular performance at the Democratic National Convention, the buzz was like a defibrillator bringing the campaign back from the dead. We were thrilled to think we might be witnessing something akin to the history-making excitement of Barack Obama’s first Presidential run, in 2008. I had serious reservations about Obama because I did my research. History suggests I was correct in my assessment. Obama did a lot of systemic damage to our Government that still has not been undone. I know a lot of "Obamanistas" will argue otherwise, but actual evidence supports my case. Sometimes practical decisions outweigh "Feel good" decisions. Just like Trump versus Harris, it seems. But what I encountered at the doors in Latino neighborhoods were disaffected people under severe economic stress—workers with little time to watch television and no consistent or reliable channels for political news, who received scattershot information about both Harris and Trump on their mobile phones, and were disgusted by what they perceived as the nasty and pointless name-calling they saw there. I recall the harried look of a Puerto Rican grandmother, one of three registered Democrats in a walk-up apartment crammed with boxes and randomly placed furniture. She was home with her grandchildren, a wailing toddler and a teen-ager, while their parents were juggling day and night shifts at their jobs on a Saturday. She wanted to vote for Harris, she said, if she could get to the polls on Election Day. Often, my conversations started with voters telling me they did not plan to vote because they did not see any point in it. On September 7th, I attended a rally, organized by Latinos con Harris and headlined by her husband, Doug Emhoff, in the gym of a local high school. A d.j. from La Mega, the local Spanish-language contemporary radio station, played thumping dance tunes. The crowd cheered boisterously. Even so, the underlying distress was startling: two voters I chatted with ended up in tears. A woman named Julie, who had a disability caused by a car accident and who was living on a fixed income, said she hoped Harris would do something to increase the value of food stamps, because she was not getting enough to eat. A young Dominican mother, Melvis, carrying her infant daughter, said she saw Harris as both an example and protector for the little girl’s future. She said she deeply feared that Trump, a court-confirmed sexual predator, would only encourage the rampant, unseen sexual abuse and violence against women in her community. Meanwhile, I sensed that Harris was struggling to break through. She had an immense hurdle to overcome: the void of communication from the White House about what, if anything, the Biden Administration had done for Allentown and the larger Lehigh Valley. Voters associated Biden with higher prices for basic needs and virtually nothing else. They seemed to think that Trump’s term had ended with the stable economy of 2019, rather than with the pandemic and the steep economic downturn that followed. With six weeks to go, Harris’s identity as the daughter of a working immigrant mother and her proposals for an “opportunity economy” were barely beginning to resonate. In all my weeks of canvassing, only one voter, a Black Latina I met by chance in the parking lot of a Supremo grocery store, raised the issue of women’s reproductive rights, a centerpiece of Harris’s campaign. At long last, in the last few paragraphs, this canvasser-reporter is addressing immediate causes for the 2024 US Presidential result. What about the underlying causes? Therein is the basis of an successful campaign. I set aside the campaign’s talking points and improvised my own. I talked about what I remembered from 2020, when friends were dying of COVID-19, millions of Americans lost their jobs, and Trump suggested we inject bleach into our bodies. (I found the bleach anecdote invariably sparked vivid memories for voters.) I made a point of saying that Joe Biden was not on the ballot. I created cards with bullet points on Harris’s child tax credit and other family-friendly proposals, which even I had a hard time understanding and explaining. I shared a video by the salsa star Marc Anthony, who said with grim intensity that he had not forgotten when Trump blocked funds for Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. I described the terrible harms of family separation that immigrants would face from Trump’s mass deportations. I connected with more than one Latina mother when I asked whether Trump, with his lying and philandering, was the example she wanted for her children. Ah, these are some of the types of adjustments I alluded to earlier. The author definitely has strong canvassing chops. Especially if she effectively communicated her results with others of influence. At times, our tools seemed excessively intrusive. In addition to the door-knocking, voters were bombarded with phone-bank calls and text messages. On my turf lists, most of the voters were not home, and I would leave flyers for the Democratic candidates tucked in their doors. I wondered if they felt uncomfortable that a stranger, presuming to know their political inclinations, had been lurking at their front steps. There were times, too, when I questioned the campaign’s tactics. At one point, I was told that paid canvassers had been hired to fan out across Allentown’s Latino neighborhoods. Fired-up volunteers (including me) were prohibited from door-knocking there. A major issue seemed to be the information flow, which moved entirely in one direction: from the candidate to the voters. With such an abbreviated campaign, there was little time to collect and respond to the concerns that people were raising at their doors. The author presents a valid concern. Nevertheless, by mid-October I noticed a distinct shift. On the weekend of October 19th, thousands of volunteers flocked to the Lehigh Valley, coming from all over the East Coast in convoys of buses and cars, armed with no specific battle plan but determined to answer Michelle Obama’s call to “do something.” Campaign staffers, pale from exhaustion, deployed these volunteers across the region. Harris and Walz kept up a blitz of rallies. Harris seemed to be growing into her campaign, articulating more specifics on her “to-do list” for everyday Americans. Then came Trump’s closing rally, at Madison Square Garden, on October 27th, where the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe committed the epic unforced error of calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” When I returned to Allentown the following Wednesday, Puerto Rican flags were flying on porches. Residents suddenly realized that Trump’s demeaning rhetoric about Haitian and Venezuelan immigrants could extend to them. At one household, where my mobile app told me the family included four registered Democrats, the eldest member saw my Harris-Walz button and shouted to the street, “Fuck Trump!” The four had agreed they would go together to cast their votes for Harris on Election Day. On Monday, the last day before the election, Harris finally came to Allentown for a whistle-stop rally. Thousands of people stood in four-hour lines to attend, a more diverse crowd than I had seen at any previous event. The Puerto Rican rapper Fat Joe opened for the Vice-President, exhorting his gente: “Where’s the orgullo? Where’s the pride?” As the vote totals rolled in during the early morning of November 6th, Lehigh County remained a patch of blue in a plain of red that spread across the state of Pennsylvania. We won a fair share of suburban voters and alienated Republicans, and we held off the flight of Latinos to Trump, revealing the fallacy of commentators who had attributed an over-all trend to voters as different as Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in Pennsylvania and Mexican Americans along the border in Texas. But for Harris, I now see, it was never really an even fight. Trump commands a movement that he has been fuelling with dark delusions and unapologetic bigotry since he first entered politics, in 2015. "Dark delusions". "Unapologetic bigotry". Here we go again. Characterizations, especially inaccurate ones, can blind one from obtaining accurate situational awareness. It can lead to comments such as Trump supporters are garbage or basket of deplorables. Sometimes one can inadvertently confer an identity upon a group where none existed before. Further, such statements can undermine credibility when declaring "bigotry". Harris was a talented candidate running a modern professional campaign that was just reaching full speed by Election Day. In the middle were millions of voters who merely wanted some relief from the demoralizing strain of life on the economic edge. In all my time in Allentown, I never saw any sign of a Trump ground game like the one the Harris campaign organized. It turned out Trump did not need it. I've said positive things about Harris for years. Harris demolished Trump in their sole debate so badly, Trump would not agree to another one. Unfortunately for Harris, she did not fully exploit her opportunity and failed to close effectively on the debate results. That marketing thing again. Who knew? At least one candidate knew. What Democrats needed to win was a movement of their own. Harris seemed to recognize this at the end, when she gave a closing speech at her alma mater, Howard University, saying, “While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fuelled this campaign: the fight for freedom, for opportunity, for fairness, and the dignity of all people.” In the wake of a sweeping defeat, instead of vivisecting Harris’s performance as a candidate or concluding that electing a Black woman to the White House was unrealistic, Democrats should be thinking about how to channel the energies of the supporters who turned out for her, to wage the fight from the ground up. Perhaps thinking in terms of how Democrats as a party can represent the interests of our constituents would be a good start. Unpaid bills and shitty healthcare while Democrats are championing transgenders in sports, bathrooms, cartoons, and in front of children seems a bit out of focus. Emphasizing the "Rights" of illegals while decrying Trump's "Crimes" that many see as political persecution is disingenuous, at best and credibility sapping. From walking my Allentown turf, I learned that not even the most disciplined campaign could bridge, in one hundred days, the enormous disconnect between Harris and the voters who might benefit from her proposals. Door by door, with the blunt methods of a traditional campaign, canvassers were reëstablishing, very belatedly, a dialogue that had lapsed. After years of reporting on immigrants and the essential optimism of their hope to prosper in the United States, I reject the idea that, to mobilize working people, the Democrats need to imitate Trump’s demonization and demagoguery. But building a movement will require better systems for communicating with potential voters and listening, anew, to what they need to make their lives easier. There is it, "Listening, anew". Pure genius. This Wisdom to be unheeded for 2026 and 2028? Probably, from what I've seen from most Leftists so far. I have been thinking of the last voter I spoke to in Allentown on Election Day. Charles is a Black man and a Democrat who worked for most of his life as a tile layer. I had met him a few weeks earlier, while canvassing. He suffers from debilitating arthritis and, when I knocked, he had limped to the door with a cane and a pillow under a sore arm. He told me he needed home health care, affordable medications, and confidence that his social-security benefits would sustain him. I followed up with him, because he had told me he needed a ride to the polls. I picked him up in my car. At one point, while waiting in line, he bent over and began to weep in pain, but he was determined to cast a vote for Harris as the first woman President. I’m sorry he did not see her win, but I’ll be keeping his tenacity in mind. ♦ I've been a registered Independent for most of my life. I then became a registered Democrat during the Bush years. I'll be happy to vote for Democrats when they get their house in order again. If they get their house in order. "Listening, anew" is the key. Our key. Edit: Link to article, below: https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/a-kamala-harris-canvassers-education
The post will discuss the story behind the posted article. The author of this "8 page article" is a journalist with 40 years of experience that included writing for multiple, prominent publications. The article certainly could have been shorter, so the question becomes why did the author write a relative novel here? I believe the author's target audience is Harris supporters, including fellow canvassers, allied media personalities, and other Harris campaign participants. The article's purpose seems to be an attempt to influence thinking of those still in denial why Kamala lost. The author uses her experience as a canvasser to introduce observations in a way that is both measured and credible. Remember the nature of the intended audience. By measured, I'm thinking "Little doses" of facts at a time as to not overwhelm any reader that may happen to still be in emotional distress over election results. For the most part, the author did a great job. Some important facts were seemingly left out, but perhaps this was because her situational awareness gave a sense of how far to push it in one sitting.
"Harris was a talented candidate running a modern professional campaign that was just reaching full speed by Election Day." There's her problem right there, and underlies all her sneering comments trying to make the point that voters are too stupid to understand what a great candidate Kamala was, and that anyone who supported Trump was obviously not getting information from any reliable source and that the only reason the pubs won was because all the knuckledraggers and neanderthals of the country were organized into a movement. James Carville would eat her for breakfast and spit her out. He is disgusted with his own party and says they may be out of power for decades for this very reason. You don't have to agree with James but he is pantload smarter and more experienced than the lefty woman who wrote that article. Also, at the end she gloats and pats herself on the back a bit by saying that at least she and the army of volunteers in her canvassing area held the line on latinos and blacks crossing over, etc, etc. Nope. The Trump campaign in PA was dominated by Elon Musk's PAC and Charlie Kirk's PAC and their analytics undoubtedly showed that there were few moveable votes in that area, which is why no republican ground game was encountered there. Instead, the author and her canvassers got sucked into working their arses off there when it was better to write it off. Republicans notoriously have a poor ground game compared to the dems so I am not shy about being critical of that. But they played PA very well.