I had never campaigned in the US before but, like many people, I felt I had to do it Something. As a political writer and an academic who teaches democratic theory, I also wondered whether what has become conventional wisdom among many American political scientists is true: ‘emotional polarization‘ sentence took the public by storm (translation: people sincerely hate the partisans on the other side); What are politely called ‘low-information voters’ often decide elections. on a whim; And again, pollsters may be underestimating support for Trump because people don’t acknowledge their preferences in front of outsiders.

I naively assumed you were just going door to door. But the first thing we learned at the Democratic Party headquarters in Pennsylvania’s swing county (I was with one of my sons) was that you had to download an app and then get your house list (“That’s a good one for you!” smiled a young volunteer. You also get your script: Your own introduce it, politely ask if people are following this year’s presidential election, find out what issues they care about most. Basically: becoming a human data collection machine. I don’t think we ever quite followed the script, not because it seemed too contrived, but the conversation – If anything – because it immediately went in a different direction.

The second thing we learned: never put campaign materials in regular mail. The US Post Office insists that only things with postage can go in the box. It wasn’t clear who would sue, but fines could run into the thousands of dollars and someone might have fun going after hapless campaigners from the wrong party.

Many homes were listed as ‘unknown’ or ‘uninspected’. This meant you never knew what would happen on your doorstep. Most of the time nothing happened. Since many doorbells now have cameras, people often do not open the door even if there are obvious signs of life inside. Sometimes they would give an automated message: ‘We can’t come to the door right now, but please leave whatever you want.’ Once, after dutifully dropping off a brochure and recording the feat on the app, a man shouted at us over the intercom: ‘Take this away now!’ – as if the wrong policy would somehow infect his property.

We were also instructed that ‘No solicitation’ signs should not deter us: We weren’t selling anything, but we were exercising our First Amendment rights to talk to citizens about politics. This claim was not well received. ‘Can’t you read?’ It was always old men who shouted. or ‘You shouldn’t be on people’s property!’ or ‘Stop bothering people!’ I doubt that exercising First Amendment rights more fully with such people would result in a vote for Harris.

The tidier the homes, the more likely such encounters are. After a while, I thought I could tell from the cars and the arrangement of everything in the house that a more or less authoritarian character might be living there. In one neighborhood, this prediction was mostly correct, but the layout of the houses did not conform to bourgeois norms. If anyone was out there, the polite question was: ‘Can we give you some materials from the Harris campaign?’ It would be answered with things like ‘Damn, no’.

A man in a White Lives Matter baseball cap answered the door and immediately politely announced his intention to vote for Trump. The official instructions were to wish every GOP voter a good day and make a good impression; But this time the deliberative democrat in me came out and asked: ‘What could Harris do to make you change your mind?’ Long silence. Finally a female voice from inside the house said something we couldn’t understand and explained that the problem was that Harris wanted to give everything to the underclass and immigrants. he calls these people ‘middle class’. ‘But we’re middle class!’ We looked again: It was a nice house, but it was separated from a major highway only by a high concrete wall. There’s nothing to gain Harris’ programReally? A textbook case of white Americans Hating anything that smells of ‘welfare’ because it is assumed that prosperity only goes to black and brown people?

Things don’t go according to the script. Before we can say anything, an older, distinguished-looking African American announces: ‘I’m a conservative. ‘I am against gay marriage.’ Before we can say anything, a man in blue overalls explains that he is a car mechanic and has always voted Libertarian. I am at a loss for words, but my son intervenes and says that he, too, had big problems with the two main parties, but this time it was less bad.

As if he’s talking to people who can’t grasp the obvious, a self-proclaimed small business owner tells us that corporate America is calling the shots no matter what, so he won’t be voting for Harris. Another business owner politely complains about inflation; When pressed a little, he claims that it was undemocratic for Biden to receive 14 million votes in the primaries, and now a candidate has emerged with zero votes. Fair enough, but what about the danger to democracy from the other side? He turns the conversation back to the price of gas. We wish him a nice day.

Are there really undecided voters? What’s unknown about Donald Trump at this point? Maybe some undecided (or possibly uncaring) people will fall for Elon Musk’s plan to give a million dollars a day to a person who promises to vote Republican. The Pennsylvania district attorney went after what was clearly an illegal lottery (and a cartoonish version of how money buys votes in the US); but I’m also curious about the messages from Democrats shouting ‘A call is coming from Kamala’. The small print says: ‘give us any amount of chips now and the next time you pick up the phone our vice president could be on the other end.’

One thing seems clear: the ‘shy Trump voter’ is an extinct creature. This place is just ‘I vote guilty!’ It’s not a grotesque fairground full of yard signs designed to troll rather than persuade. – but the willingness of his supporters to explain their beliefs to complete strangers. There are occasional surprises: a large man covered in tattoos and two bulldogs roaming freely in the garden look vaguely menacing – and the silly prejudices we are often told that the ‘white working class’ are now authoritarian come into play. but he is happy to receive some leaflets and says categorically that he cannot vote for someone as crazy as Trump.

You can imagine the same thought coming to the minds of so-called business leaders. That’s right, Trump is selling policies to the highest bidders, from fossil fuel industries to crypto bros, including tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation for polluters. On the other hand, there are demands for displays of reverence and its complete unpredictability. : What happens if you fall out of favor in court? And Democrats aren’t exactly anti-business: Harris is already making all sorts of preemptive concessions, scaling back Biden’s plans to properly tax capital gains and not committing to continuing her bold efforts to go after monopolies.

Analogies to 20th-century fascism are not particularly useful for understanding our time, but one parallel is instructive: it is not ‘ordinary people’ who decide they are fed up with democracy; elites and especially economic elites. The blackshirts marched on Rome, but Mussolini arrived from Milan in a sleeping car because the leading layers of the Italian state had invited him to rule. Nowadays, people often take their cues from business leaders, especially a pop culture figure like Musk. Like the neutrality of the oligarchs, who own not only their own rockets but also their own newspapers, self-serving discourse of ‘disruption’ can be adapted to make Trump acceptable: refuse to confirm Harris is sending a signal that it makes sense to intimidate Trump.

Even more demoralizing is the comprehensive failure of the ‘norms’ and ‘institutions’ that liberals believed in after Trump’s election in 2016. Betting on norms was always risky in a two-party system where one became a cult of personality. cum family business; The GOP has long been the party of hardliners, but under Trump it has discovered that any semblance can be canceled. In a law-obsessed society suffering from a serious case of constitutional fetishism and Founding Father worship, there was hope that the courts would provide ‘adults in the room’ willing to put ‘constitutional fundamentals’ above party. But the Supreme Court’s decisions this year to keep Trump on the ballot and guarantee him immunity were shocking because here, too, all pretense was gone: no more rummaging through the 18th century in the name of ‘originality’; Only stray speculation It’s about all the bad things that could happen if things don’t go Trump’s way.

This left many Americans feeling like they were now on their own; Their betters will not come to save them. Although something like doing research can often feel pointless (so many unopened doors) or embarrassingly intrusive, that sentiment must be part of what energizes the Harris campaign. There’s something uncomfortable about walking in suburban neighborhoods that weren’t designed for walking. We were the only people outside on a gray, cold afternoon in a not-so-affluent neighborhood. As we moved from unopened door to unopened door, everything started to feel more and more frightening. I asked my son if he had seen it. last scene Easy Driving (didn’t). Finally, an old man appeared behind us, not looking very rich and looking uneasy. After a while, I noticed that he was also looking at his phone and continuing to cross the street. He was giving away Trump’s door hangers. I wish I had asked him why he did this and what he thought of Trump. But I didn’t, and now I’ll never know.

One way or another, we will find out what we are really facing in November; It made a difference whether the world’s richest man, a far-right extremist, was waving money (or at least data) in front of people to get their votes; and whether the arbitrary power of the oligarchs will be reckoned with the pathologies of US democracy. hollow nature of parties (one much more than the other, of course) and corruption in the Supreme Court – which became painfully clear in 2024.