Trick or treat for Kerry

Tuxedo is covered with John Kerry stickers. Tuxedo is a black mutt, traveling down the empty streets of Lancaster, Pennsylvania in the back of Kim Allen's pickup truck. It's noon on a peculiarly warm and sunny Halloween. I'm sitting with Tuxedo and Kim, talking about the election, while my mom and Kim's husband Mike sit in the front, and the wind reverts my hair to its post-nocturnal discord.

We are spending our Sunday in this central Pennsylvanian wasteland to canvas for the next President of the United States, John Kerry. Kim and Mike drove up from northern Maryland to volunteer. Kim works as reporter for U.S. News and World Report and Mike is a building contractor and Vietnam veteran. My mom and I have been placed with them by the local Democratic headquarters in Lancaster. We came up with a bus group from Washington DC, one of the many groups bringing volunteers from our area to Get Out The Vote (GOTV) in swing states.

I signed up for the trip at www.johnkerry.com. All three buses were supposed to leave at 7:15a.m., but one of the them (ours) was late, so in the meantime I went to Starbucks for a Venti calorie surprise, and chatted with some of the other volunteers. One person I talked to was Rene Carlos, the leader of our bus group. Carlos is a thin, mustached independent in his late twenties, with a "Bikers for Kerry" pin on his shirt. He has headed bus trips in "the trifecta, Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania."

I meet Vera Sky, a lifelong Democrat. She wears a sterling silver "dollars for Democrats" pin from the 1952 Adlai Stevenson's campaign against Eisenhower. Sky was only twelve years old at the time, so she became a poll runner, basically running around trying to GOTV. Today is the first time, however, that she has canvassed officially for a political candidate.

Around 8a.m. the bus finally arrived. Forty-eight volunteers filed in, and we began our three-hour trek up to Lancaster. As soon as we got going, Carlos gave us the rundown of what we would be doing. With only two days before the election, he explained, this is not an effort to convince the undecided, as previous trips had been; this trip is strictly GOTV initiative. On the way we were passed a bus of young Bush supporters, waving their signs at us. Their bus might have been faster, but it also had more empty seats.

As Carlos explained, we would each receive a list of sympathetic voters, along with each voter's age, address, party affiliation and telephone number, at the local office. He quoted Sun Tzu saying, "Know your enemy." We would then be paired up with locals (or in our case other volunteers with cars), who would take us to the neighborhoods that we will be canvassing.

At each house we are supposed to ask for the person on our list, introduce ourselves and ask three questions. First, we ask if the person is registered to vote. Second we ask, "Can we count on your vote?" If the person is a Kerry supporter we put a "y" on our sheet, otherwise we put an "n." If the answer to either of these questions is no, we simply thank the person and walk away; we don't want to waste time or encourage the opposition. If we can count on their votes, we ask if the voters know where their polling place is and if they need a ride. If no one is at home, we drop some literature about Kerry and the local candidates, and move on.

In the rare case that we come across a truly undecided voter, we are allowed to try and convince him or her, but only for a minute or two, as time is of the essence. Carlos spent the remainder of the bus trip discussing arguments to use to help convince "undecideds" and "leaners" to vote for Kerry. Even among Democrats, Lancaster is socially conservative, and the big issues that are keeping voters away from Kerry are abortion, gay marriage and religion. One volunteer named Chris remarked that, "The Republicans have managed to convince America that Democrats hate God."

Carlos also passed out information from the ACLU on Pennsylvania voting rights and numbers for voters to call in case their vote is suppressed. However, campaign laws prohibit us from citing the ACLU, because we are not allowed to collaborate with another organization. By the same token, many houses in the neighborhood were also being canvasses by groups including MoveOn.org and ACCORN, but we are not allowed to coordinate with them, so we sometimes end up with double and even triple coverage.

At 11:15a.m., we reached the local headquarters, the Aroma Borealis Café. There was a line a mile long for the only bathroom, but everyone was in good spirits. The local coordinators, Brandon and Matt, were so sleep deprived that they didn't know how many days there are before the election, but they managed to introduce the stump speaker, Mallisa Fitzgerald, an actress from The West Wing and a Pennsylvania native. Her speech focussed on the environment, and although it was essentially devoid of substance, it got the crowd riled up. "I want my country back," said Fitzgerald. "We've got to make Pennsylvania go blue again."

Finally we were given our packets of names, about 50 names per person, paired with Kim and Mike and driven out to our neighborhood. We get lost on the way, and we don't get to our neighborhood until 12:30p.m.

Even though every shop downtown is closed (except for the Chinese restaurant), only one fourth of houses I visit has anyone at home. The neighborhood that I'm canvassing is a lower-middle class outskirt of Lancaster. There are beautiful old houses with metal and glass work that could never be replicated today, but they are not that well maintained. Few have Halloween decorations. (Kids went trick or treating the night before). Instead, about one third of lawns are covered with political signs. One woman tells me that last election she was the only one on her block with a lawn sign. The area is also quite diverse: mostly white with a large numbers of African Americans, and Hispanics. I have to ask one woman in broken Spanish if she knows where her polling place is.

But socially, the town is almost homogeneously conservative. The population is also very old, with the median age around 45. Pretty much everyone is friendly, pretty much, but not everyone.

I stop at one house on my list and ring the doorbell. A friendly elderly woman answers the door. When she says she is undecided I start to give her the spiel about how Bush has robbed the Social Security trust fund. She is becoming visibly nervous and she whispers to me, "My husband is a Republican." A second later a 77-year-old bearded man, who must have been six foot three, comes to the door screaming "NO JOHN KERRY!" "Kerry is a hero to the Vietcong, him and Hanoi Jane [Jane Fonda]," he continues. He asks me whether I really want a communist for president; I politely thank him for his time.

I meet some other interesting people going from door to door. One woman I speak to is blind, but luckily knows where to go to vote. One middle-aged mother says she recently switched to Kerry. "Bush is for the rich," she says.

One woman asks me, "Do you know how many times people have asked me who I'm voting for?" When I ask her if she knows where her polling place is, she says, "At age 77 I'd better know where it is." The woman next door asks me if I'm coming to harass her, too. Apparently MoveOn and ACCORN have already canvassed the area.

I bump into a friendly man on the street who asks me if I'm canvassing for Kerry. He says that his house has six Kerry voters, and that his eight-year-old daughter is upstairs making Kerry posters. Later I come across his little house on my walk list and he greets me again with enthusiasm, enthusiasm characteristic of all the Kerry supporters I have met today.

At around 4p.m., my mom, Kim and Mike meet up and head back to the Aroma Borealis. Most people are still working on their walk lists, so I decide to stop for some Kung Pao chicken. Afterwards, I go back to headquarters, as more and more people file in, and begin tallying up the "y"s and "n"s on the walk sheets, and striking up conversations. The talk begins politically, but soon moves onto analogies between the presidential race and the World Series. Everyone is thrilled when the Redskins lose (since 1936 the fate of the Redskins on election weekend has agreed with that of the incumbent). Everyone is friendly, excited and getting along. I start to doze off after from a combination of lunch, the comfortable couch, my walk list and waking up before the crack of noon.

At 6p.m. it's time to get on the party bus. Aroma Borealis provides the rocky road brownies; Carlos provides the chips, cheese pretzels and beer. Aileen Humphreys, a reporter for the Intelligencer Journal, the Lancaster morning paper, asks me some questions about my canvassing experience.

The bus pulls away at around 6:30p.m. On the ride home I talk some more with Sky. It turns out she met her husband while waiting for Hubert Humphrey at the Democratic National Convention in 1968.

"I have never seen so much hatred on each side, especially among Republicans," she says of the current campaign. She is impressed, though, with the "determination" and "enthusiasm of the people that we reached." She, along with everyone else on the bus, is exhilarated and hopeful about Nov. 2.

I also talk to the ever-busy Carlos. He has led a trip every weekend this month, including a trip yesterday. "I've got to whip these people into shape on a two- hour bus ride," he says.

"I don't think it's gonna be a landslide," he says, "but I think we're on track to win it." Carlos opposes Bush because his best friend is in Iraq, and because, "He can't say evolution with a straight face." I ask him who could possibly still be undecided. He says that they're mostly just "apolitical." "These people are just persuaded by commercials and slogans," he says. Although we won't have an official count until tomorrow, Carlos says that most of the bus trips reach people "in the five digits."

Towards the end of the trip I get in an interesting conversation with Mike Parker, the bus driver. He is a Kerry supporter because at age 48 he is worried about the state of social security. "I'm worth more dead than alive," he says.

Parker has driven for Kerry groups and Bush groups, and says that "everyone is nice and cordial, and opinionated." He says that the Republicans are more high strung and "too egotistical and conceited about themselves and the country," and that the Democrats are "fighting for everyone's cause." "The elephant is grounded," he says. "What does the mule do? All the work."

We get back to DC around 9:30p.m. From what I've seen today, the Democrats are doing an enormous amount of work to GOTV. With an election that will be decided by voter turnout, it's hard not to feel Carlos's optimism unless, of course, you're an elephant. I can't stop thinking about "the mule."