How I became a citizen after a lifetime of journalism

I have loved being a journalist. But door-knocking to get out the vote in Pennsylvania was the most satisfying thing I’ve done in years.

For most reporters, political activity is off limits — and rightly so. But when I no longer worked for a major media outlet, I took the plunge.

Hazel is my new hero.

Leaning out a second-story window at her Steelton, Pennsylvania home, she told Sam, my door-knocking partner standing on her front stoop, that she’d skipped voting because she felt flu-ish. It was about 7:45 p.m on Nov. 8; the polls would close in just 15 minutes. Soon Hazel disappeared from the window, and Sam motioned me into the driveway from where I waited with the car. Hazel, who is 76 and Black, came down the steps. We all masked up, left the windows open and sped to her polling place at a nearby church. She hobbled in at 7:57, the last person to vote there on the night of the election.

I’ve been a D.C. journalist my entire career, working for newspapers and magazines that, rightly, prohibit their reporters and editors from engaging in partisan politics. The rationale is to avoid accusations of bias. (The accusations fly anyway, but most journalists really do their damndest to be fair.) Leonard Downie Jr., the former executive editor of The Washington Post, famously wouldn’t even vote, an approach also taken by political journalists Mike Allen and Chris Cillizza.

Now, though, I work for myself, on projects far afield from politics, and with the Pennsylvania race between John Fetterman and Dr. Mehmet Oz predicted to be one of the nail-biters that could decide control of the Senate, I was free to do something. In fact, I couldn’t not do something, given that the health of our electoral system in the last few years has seemed at its most fragile since I’ve been alive. And reporters are accustomed to approaching complete strangers. I signed up for 10 days of canvassing for the Democratic Party in the Harrisburg area, leading right up to Election Day.

Armed with clipboards, candidate flyers and the phone app Minivan, which gave us our carefully delineated target addresses, we fanned out — mostly solo, sometimes paired after dark — from an office downtown to other parts of Harrisburg proper and the surrounding area: Susquehanna Township, Lower Paxton, Mechanicsburg, Middletown, Carlisle, Lower Allen, Steelton.

In this race — and in most contests these days, given the country’s granite-hard political divide — our visits weren’t about persuading potential voters of a candidate’s virtues. This was all about turnout. Our addresses were those of registered or likely Democrats, and our assignment was to convince them to cast their vote. Republicans, I assumed, were doing the same thing with their supporters, as they should.

Candidates and their backers spend billions of dollars every election cycle on TV ads, phone banks, mailers, digital ads, social media and text messaging. The total cost of 2022 state and federal elections is projected to be north of $16.7 billion, according to OpenSecrets.

But there may be nothing that gets people to the polls like having someone on their doorstep explaining how urgent it is that they vote. That’s what GOP uber-strategist Karl Rove apparently thought when he revived door-knocking, which was out of favor for much of the 20th century, in George W. Bush’s 2004 presidential campaign. It’s not in question that every vote really does count. Earlier this year a North Carolina legislative primary was decided by just one vote; other contests have been decided by coin-tosses after recounts showed the candidates literally tied.

As a longtime creature of Washington, I’m pretty jaded. But this was a personal re-set. Also, the most rewarding experience I’ve had in years.

Many people weren’t home; that’s par for the course. Many others wanted to keep the encounter brief, voicing their strong support for Democrats up and down the ballot and assuring me they wouldn’t miss voting if the apocalypse were in mid-annihilation. And then there were those who weren’t sure they’d have time to vote, or didn’t know where their polling place was, or had never voted in a midterm. Those were the encounters that felt most important. I could tell them where to vote; argue that while the presidency wasn’t literally at stake, the president’s agenda was; help them figure out a way to get to the polls.

I valued the glimpses I got, fleeting but impactful, of other people’s lives. The couple, aged 97 and 98, who sat across from each other in armchairs watching out their front window; they’d already voted by mail but were eager to talk politics. The Somali woman with just-good-enough English for us to communicate as mouth-watering aromas floated from her apartment. Another woman, fearful and probably high, who opened the door a sliver to her darkened apartment, where someone else sat amid a chaotic clutch of half-naked babies and toddlers. Modest but tidy homes, with flowers — some plastic — blooming out front. Others with dented doors, peeling paint, trash scudding by in the wind. Dogs barking, so many dogs.

But the more important return on my outlay of time and energy was a deep sense of investment in, and responsibility for, our democratic government, our flawed system that, as far as I know, still beats all the rest. When, as a journalist, I did a story that shined light on dark pockets of opportunism or wrongdoing, I relished the feeling of wearing the white hat. But that didn’t compare with getting Hazel to the polls.

Did it help that the candidates I supported won in Pennsylvania? Sure. But maybe even more satisfying is that so many election deniers — in that state and across the country — lost. Because the amount of fraud in our elections is vanishingly small, while the number of people who say otherwise is far too large. And elections are the foundation that everything else depends on: Whether cars are safe, bridges are fixed, the military is equipped to do its job, kids get a good and affordable education, health care is accessible, abortions are legal or not and so much more.

Voter turnout in Pennsylvania exceeded 2018’s total by more than four percentage points. Knowing I helped round up an infinitesimal sliver of those additional voters feels great.

It may sound trite, hackneyed, schmaltzy to say it. Oh well.

Georgia’s runoff is Dec. 6. There’s still time to sign up.