Election campaiging in Pennsylvania pumped up Democrats but did not seem to change many minds

Canvassing for Kamala Harris:  

Going door-to-door in Pennsylvania felt intense and hopeful, but after Trump’s victory in the state a few encounters kept floating back. By Jennifer Egan published in The New Yorker

As several friends and I knocked on the front doors of registered Democrats’ homes around Allentown, Pennsylvania, the weekend before the election, and in Northeast Philadelphia on Election Day, there were moments that felt emblematic. The white couple whose toddler, wearing a rainbow “Girl Power” T-shirt, blew kisses to us from her doorway before the family headed out to vote for Kamala Harris. The middle-aged Latino man who turned away from the Eagles game on his TV to inform us that he was looking forward to having a female President, because “men can’t get anything done.” The woman of Central American descent who said that she’d never felt like an outsider until Donald Trump was elected in 2016, at which point people began making pointed comments, in her presence, about immigrants. Or the tall, silver-haired white man in his eighties who told me he’d never voted before the 2020 election, when he took a day off work to do so. “Not to get Biden in,” he clarified. “To get Trump out. I don’t know how anyone can support him,” he added, glancing up his quiet street.

That conversation took place in Emmaus, the first area I visited south of Allentown, a municipality that includes blocks of modest, carefully tended homes tucked against a hillside ablaze with fall colors. An actual blaze was also taking place nearby—the East Coast is in the grip of a drought—producing a strange, amorphous cloud shape that hung over the region that Sunday. There were signs of economic distress in Emmaus (one apartment I visited had an eviction sign pasted to its door) but also an abundance of garden statuary, Halloween decorations, fall wreaths, and, above all, welcome signs—on doors, doormats, banners, placards, and wire structures. “Welcome Fall!” “Welcome to our home.” “Welcome, family and friends.” I’ve never read the word “Welcome” as many times as I did during my three days of canvassing in Pennsylvania.

I went to Allentown four years ago, too, on Election Day in 2020. I recall at that time there was more in-your-face signage for both parties, sometimes duelling across the attached porches of pairs of homes. This year, the political signifying felt lower-key, as if the majority of voters had agreed to tone it down. You might go a whole block without seeing any signs of political affiliation, except in the form of canvassers like us—and we were many. 

Outreach by Democrats was intense, well organized, and hopeful. Busloads of canvassers arrived from other states on all three days that I was in Pennsylvania, reminding people to vote for Harris-Walz. We saw a group of teen-age boys hanging door tags in Philadelphia on Election Day, and, for a while, we joined up with another canvasser, a local man in a yellow reflective vest, whose list overlapped with ours. At no point did we encounter Republican canvassers—a fact that felt significant, and buoyed us.

On Election Day, the sun bore down mercilessly on parched miniature lawns in Northeast Philadelphia; the occasional oak or maple trees were vastly outnumbered by elaborate stumps and depressions where trees had once stood. It was a freakish seventy degrees outside. The blocks of identical small freestanding homes, many with aluminum awnings shading their windows, reminded me viscerally of the Chicago neighborhood where my grandfather, a policeman and a lifelong Democrat, lived in his retirement. Here we encountered voters with Slavic surnames who had “We Stand with Ukraine” signs outside their houses, and an elderly Albanian couple who spoke no English and whose family members, two registered Democrats, were not at home.

At one point, a man who appeared to be Southeast Asian informed us that neither he nor his wife, the Democrat we were seeking (but never actually saw), planned to vote. “We will not be voting,” he repeated firmly, before shutting the door. It was an odd moment, but one that has returned to me since I heard the news that Pennsylvania had gone to Trump. That encounter, along with others that felt like outliers in the moment, keep floating back. We met a white man who looked to be in his late sixties. His wife, a registered Democrat, was not at home, but he seemed open to conversation. He was a lifelong Republican, he told us. The price of gas was intolerable. The Democrats’ claims that the economy was improving were “bullshit.” Smiling, he told the two of us, both women, “I would never vote for a Black, and I would never vote for a woman.” We thanked him for his time, shook our heads, and moved on.

Directly across the street, in a house not more than eight feet wide, we encountered our only undecided Democrat: a woman in her early thirties who said that she’d spent ten years in the military. Like her neighbor, she was friendly and game for discussion, and joined us outdoors in a hooded pink bathrobe while her dog barked furiously from behind her front window. She loathed Trump, she said, but was deeply unhappy with the process that had led to Harris’s presence on the ballot. She called the pressure on Biden to leave the race “elder abuse,” and had planned to vote for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., until he dropped out. We argued for Harris from every angle, but she appeared unconvinced. She hated the system, she said. Hated her choices. Hated the atmosphere of isolation that she felt right here in her own neighborhood. We were startled to hear this; several homes we’d visited on her block had stickers on their windows indicating that veterans lived there. The houses were cheek by jowl; the polling place was a church a few doors down. There was no traffic, and hardly any noise at all apart from barking dogs. With its phalanx of silent welcomes imploring us from every side, her street looked like the very picture of American community. And yet, she told us, she didn’t know a single one of her neighbors. ♦

Published in the print edition of the November 18, 2024, issue, with the headline “The Outliers.”

Writing- we need to do it well and tell the truth in all its messy complexity

Facts still exist - an echo back page editorial in TIME by Jennifer Egan*

Online, lies and truth look the same. This has been a boon for professional liars, who take advantage of the fact that two-thirds of Americans get their news from social media, and use these platforms to market falsehoods—as moneymaking ventures (paranoid fantasies make excellent clickbait); as vehicles of personal fame; or, for foreign powers like China and Russia, as a way to spread propaganda in hopes of influencing voters and thereby our elections.

For the unwitting consumer of fraudulent news, the avoidance of hard truths is surely part of the draw. How much better it would be if the Sandy Hook massacre really were a hoax, rather than an actual slaughter of 20 kindergartners and six school staff members.

What a relief to conclude that hundreds of international climatologists are lying rather than face the perilous state of our planet—and the tiny window of time we have to preserve life as we know it. 

Scary visions of Hillary Clinton or George Soros at the center of a web of evil offer rewards of simplicity and a scapegoat. The opioid effect of these fabrications provides short-term solace at the cost of the sobriety we need to solve intractable problems like gun violence and climate change. It’s a vicious cycle: the more dire the reality, the more welcome the escape.

Cannily, President Trump has co-opted the term fake news and now lobs it freely at stories that point out his own misdeeds. 

In the minds of those who believe in him, he is able to neutralize facts. This is a basic tool of the autocrats he admires, like Viktor Orban, who recently won re-election in Hungary by claiming that the country—whose population has among the lowest proportions of foreign-born or immigrant members in Europe—is being invaded by migrants. In the mids of those who believe in him, he is able to neutralize facts. This is a basic tool of autocrats he admires. 

Likie Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, who maintains his ignorance of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder in the face of strong evidence of his connection to it. Authoritative lying debases the truth. The resulting confusion of fantasy and reality is the definition of psychosis, a perilously vulnerable mental state. The hazards of fraudulent news go even deeper than spurring violent or crazy action or opening us to foreign control. If reasonable debate devolves into my truth vs. yours, the winner is the one yelling loudest—or holding the gun. Beneath the false bottom of fraudulent news is the danger of tyranny.

It is imperative that journalists continue to call out falsehoods. But we must also understand that these exposés can help keep lies alive. “An image … becomes all the more interesting with our every effort to debunk it,” the historian Daniel Boorstin wrote presciently in 1961 of America’s burgeoning media culture. Our President’s enthrallment of the media is the source of his power; the very qualities that appall his detractors keep us riveted to the spectacle of his presidency.

A mediasphere designed for spectacle can’t be expected to fix the oversimplification it creates. We need writers for that, and we need them badly. Literature, like democracy, is built of a plurality of ideas. Poems, plays, essays, biographies, short stories and every other form of literary practice partake of the complex range of perception and thought specific to human beings. By writing and reading, we remind ourselves of the value of empathy, subtlety and contradiction. Literature is an antidote to the blunt distortions—good vs. evil, us vs. them—that are so easily exploited by those who would manipulate us. Writers have been instrumental in the overthrow of repressive regimes from the French Revolution to the Velvet Revolution, which made playwright Vaclav Havel the President of then Czechoslovakia.

Writers tend to fare badly under autocrats. Dictators understand very well that the strength of thought and analysis that literature embodies is a threat to the mind control that is an essential feature of tyranny. In countries like China, Russia, Turkey, Myanmar and Bangladesh, writers are routinely jailed or killed for creating work their governments find threatening. For American writers, the reality of such scrutiny and peril can be hard to fathom. 

We need to write now, write well—tell the truth in all its messy complexity. It’s our best shot at helping to preserve a democracy in which facts still exist and all of us can speak freely.

This story is part of TIME’s Person of the Year 2018 issue.

Jennifer Egan is president of PEN America and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author.

PEN American Center, founded in 1922 and headquartered in New York City, is a nonprofit organization that works to defend and celebrate free expression in the United States and worldwide through the advancement of literature and human rights.