[Braving guns and threats, smoke and a pandemic, hotel and
restaurant union workers are rallying voters in Arizona. And they are
finding a surprising number of people want to talk about an election
they see as the most important of their lifetime. ]
[[link removed]]

GUNS, GERMS, AND SMOKE: UNITE-HERE! CANVASSERS TAKE ON TRUMP IN
NEVADA  
[[link removed]]


 

Rebecca Gordon
October 20, 2020
TomDispatch [[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ Braving guns and threats, smoke and a pandemic, hotel and
restaurant union workers are rallying voters in Arizona. And they are
finding a surprising number of people want to talk about an election
they see as the most important of their lifetime. _

UNITE-HERE workers, facing guns, germs, and smoke, prepare for Take
Back 2020 voter mobilization in Phoenix, AZ October 12.,
UNITE-HERE/Facebook Photo

 

“Look, folks, the air quality is in the red zone today. The EPA says
that means people with lung or heart issues should avoid prolonged
activity outdoors.”

That was J.R. de Vera, one of two directors of
UNITE-HERE!’s independent expenditure
[[link removed]] campaign
to elect Biden and Harris in Reno, Nevada. UNITE-HERE! is a union
representing 300,000 workers in the hospitality industry -- that world
of hotels and bars, restaurants and caterers. Ninety percent of its
members are now laid off because of Trump’s bungling of the Covid-19
pandemic and many are glad for the chance to help get him out of the
White House.

“So some of you will want to stay in your hotel rooms and make phone
calls today,” JR continues. Fifty faces fall in the 50 little Zoom
boxes on my laptop screen. Canvassers would much rather be talking to
voters at their doors than calling them on a phone bank. Still, here
in the burning, smoking West, the union is as committed to its own
people’s health and safety as it is to dragging Donald Trump out of
office. So, for many of them, phone calls it will be. 

My own job doesn’t change much from day to day. Though I live in San
Francisco, I’ve come to Reno to do back-room   logistics work in
the union campaign’s cavernous warehouse of an office: ordering
supplies, processing reimbursements, and occasionally helping the
data team make maps of the areas our canvassers will walk.

Our field campaign is just one of several the union is running in key
states. We’re also in Arizona and Florida and, only last week, we
began door-to-door canvassing in Philadelphia. Social media, TV ads,
bulk mail, and phone calls are all crucial elements in any modern
electoral campaign, but none of them is a substitute for face-to-face
conversations with voters.

We’ve been in Reno since early August, building what was, until last
week, the only field campaign in the state supporting Joe Biden and
Kamala Harris. (Just recently, our success in campaigning safely has
encouraged
[[link removed]] the
Democratic Party to start
[[link removed]] its
own ground game here and elsewhere.) We know exactly how many doors we
have to knock on, how many Biden voters we have to identify, how many
of them we have to convince to make a concrete voting plan, and how
many we have to get out to vote during Nevada’s two-week early
voting period to win here. 

We're running a much larger campaign in Clark County, where close to
three-quarters of Nevada’s population lives (mostly in Las Vegas).
Washoe County, home of the twin cities of Reno and Sparks, is the next
largest population center with 16% of Nevadans. The remaining 14
counties, collectively known as “the Rurals,” account for the
rest. Washoe and Clark are barely blue; the Rurals decidedly red.

In 2018, UNITE-HERE!’s ground campaign
[[link removed]] helped
ensure that Jacky Rosen would flip a previously Republican Senate
seat, and we helped elect Democrat Steve Sisolak as governor. He’s
proved a valuable union ally, signing
[[link removed]] the
Adolfo Fernandez Act, a first-in-the-nation law protecting workers and
businesses in Nevada from the worst effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Defying a threatened Trump campaign lawsuit (later dismissed
[[link removed]] by
a judge), Sisolak also signed an election reform bill that allows
every active Nevada voter to receive a mail-in ballot. Largely as a
result of the union’s work in 2018, this state now boasts an
all-female Democratic senatorial delegation, a Democratic governor,
and a female and Democratic majority in the state legislature.
Elections, as pundits of all stripes have been known to say, have
consequences.

DOOR-TO-DOOR ON PLANET A

_“¿Se puede, o no se puede?_”

“_¡Sí, se puede!_”

(“Can we do it?” “Yes, we can!”)

Each morning’s online canvass dispatch meeting starts with that
call-and-response followed by a rousing handclap. Then we talk about
where people will be walking that day and often listen to one of the
canvassers’ personal stories, explaining why he or she is committed
to this campaign. Next, we take a look at the day’s forecast for
heat and air quality as vast parts of the West Coast burn, while smoke
and ash travel enormous distances. Temperatures here were in the low
100s in August (often hovering around 115 degrees in Las Vegas). And
the air? Let’s just say that there have been days when I’ve wished
breathing were optional.

Climate-change activists rightly point out that “there’s no Planet
B” for the human race, but some days it seems as if our canvassers
are already working on a fiery Planet A that is rapidly becoming
unlivable. California’s wildfires -- including its first-ever
“gigafire
[[link removed]]”
-- have consumed more than four million acres
[[link removed]] in
the last two months, sending plumes of ash to record heights, and
dumping a staggering amount of smoke into the Reno-Sparks basin.
Things are a little better at the moment, but for weeks I couldn’t
see the desert mountains that surround the area. Some days I
couldn’t even make out the Grand Sierra Reno casino, a quarter mile
from the highway on which I drive to work each morning.

For our canvassers -- almost every one a laid-off waiter, bartender,
hotel housekeeper, or casino worker -- the climate emergency and the
Covid-19 pandemic are literally in their faces as they don their N95
masks [[link removed]] to walk the streets of
Reno. It’s the same for the voters they meet at their doors. Each
evening, canvassers report (on Zoom, of course) what those voters are
saying and, for the first time I can remember, they are now talking
about the climate. They’re angry at a president who pulled the U.S.
out
[[link removed]] of
the Paris climate accord and they’re scared about what a potentially
searing future holds for their children and grandchildren. They may
not have read Joe Biden’s position
[[link removed]] on clean energy and
environmental justice, but they know that Donald Trump has no such
plan.

BRAVING GUNS, GERMS, AND SMOKE

In his classic book _Guns, Germs, and Steel_
[[link removed]],
Jared Diamond suggested that the three variables in his title helped
in large part to explain how European societies and the United States
came to control much of the planet in the twentieth century. As it
happens, our door-to-door canvassers confront a similar triad of
obstacles right here in Reno, Nevada (if you replace that final
“steel” with “smoke.”)

_Guns and Other Threats_

Nevada is an open-carry
[[link removed]] state and gun
ownership is common here. It’s not unusual to see someone walking
around a supermarket with a holstered pistol on his hip. A 2015 state
law ended most gun registration requirements and another allows people
visiting from elsewhere to buy rifles without a permit. So gun
sightings are everyday events.

Still, it can be startling, if you’re not used to it, to have a
voter answer the door with a pistol all too visible, even if securely
holstered. And occasionally, our canvassers have even watched those
guns leave their holsters when the person at the door realizes why
they’re there (which is when the campaign gets the police involved).
Canvassers are trained to observe very clear protocols, including
immediately leaving an area if they experience any kind of verbal or
physical threat.

African American and Latinx canvassers who’ve campaigned before in
Reno say that, in 2020, Trump supporters seem even more emboldened
than in the past to shout racist insults at them. More than once,
neighbors have called the police on our folks, essentially accusing
them of canvassing-while-black-or-brown. Two days before I wrote this
piece, the police pulled over one young Latino door-knocker because
neighbors had called to complain that _he_ was walking up and down
the street waving a gun. (The “gun” in question was undoubtedly
the electronic tablet he was carrying to record the results of
conversations with voters.) The officer apologized.

Which reminds me of another apology offered recently. A woman
approached an African-American canvasser, demanding to know what in
the world he was doing in her neighborhood. On learning his mission,
she offered an apology as insulting as her original question.
“We’re not used to seeing people like_ you_ around here,” she
explained.

_Germs_

Until the pandemic, my partner and I had planned to work together with
UNITE-HERE! in Reno during this election, as we did in 2018. But
she’s five years older than I am, and her history of pneumonia means
that catching Covid-19 could be especially devastating for her. So
she’s stayed in San Francisco, helping out the union’s national
phone bank effort instead.

In fact, we didn't really expect that there would be a ground campaign
this year, given the difficulties presented by the novel coronavirus.
But the union was determined to eke out that small but genuine
addition to the vote that a field campaign can produce. So they put in
place stringent health protocols for all of us: masks and a minimum of
six feet of distance between everyone at all times; no visits to bars,
restaurants, or casinos, including during off hours; temperature
checks for everyone entering the office; and the immediate reporting
of any potential Covid-19 symptoms to our health and safety officer.
Before the union rented blocks of rooms at two extended-stay hotels,
our head of operations checked their mask protocols for employees and
guests and examined their ventilation systems to make sure that the
air conditioners vented directly outdoors and not into a common air
system for the whole building.

To date, not one of our 57 canvassers has tested positive, a record we
intend to maintain as we add another 17 full-timers to our team next
week.

One other feature of our coronavirus protocol: we don’t talk to any
voter who won’t put on a mask. I was skeptical that canvassers would
be able to get voters to mask up, even with the individually wrapped
surgical masks we’re offering anyone who doesn’t have one on or
handy. However, it turns out that, in this bizarre election year,
people are eager to talk, to vent their feelings and be heard. So many
of the people we’re canvassing have suffered so much this year that
they’re surprised and pleased when someone shows up at their door
wondering how they’re doing.

And the answer to that question for so many potential voters is not
well -- with jobs lost, housing threatened, children struggling with
online school, and hunger pangs an increasingly everyday part of life.
So yes, a surprising number of people, either already masked or quite
willing to put one on, want to talk to us about an election that they
generally see as the most important of their lifetime.

_Smoke_

And did I mention that it’s been smoky here? It can make your eyes
water, your throat burn, and the urge to cough overwhelm you. In fact,
the symptoms of smoke exposure are eerily similar to the ones for
Covid-19. More than one smoke-affected canvasser has spent at least
five days isolated in a hotel room, waiting for negative coronavirus
test results.

The White House website proudly quotes
[[link removed]] the
president on his administration’s testing record: “We do
tremendous testing. We have the best testing in the world.” Washoe
County health officials are doing what they can, but if this is the
best in the world, then the world is in worse shape than we thought.

THE POWER OF A PERSONAL STORY

So why, given the genuine risk and obstacles they face, do
UNITE-HERE!’s canvassers knock on doors six days a week to elect Joe
Biden and Kamala Harris? Their answers are a perfect embodiment of the
feminist dictum “the personal is political.” Every one of them has
a story about why she or he is here. More than one grew up homeless
and never want another child to live that way. One is a DACA
[[link removed]] recipient
who knows that a reelected Donald Trump will continue his crusade
[[link removed]] to
end that amnesty for undocumented people brought to the United States
as children. Through their participation in union activism, many have
come to understand that workers really can beat the boss when they
organize -- and Trump, they say, is the biggest boss of all.

Through years of political campaigning, the union’s leaders have
learned that voters may _think_ about issues, but they’re moved to
vote by what they _feel_about them. The goal of every conversation at
those doors right now is to make a brief but profound personal
connection with the voter, to get each of them to feel just how
important it is to vote this year. Canvassers do this by asking how a
voter is doing in these difficult times and listening -- genuinely
listening -- and responding to whatever answer they get. And they do
it by being vulnerable enough to share the personal stories that lie
behind their presence at the voter’s front door.

One canvasser lost his home at the age of seven, when his parents
separated. He and his mother ended up staying in shelters and camping
for months in a garden shed on a friend’s property. One day recently
he knocked on a door and found a Trump supporter on the other side of
it. He noticed a shed near the house, pointed to it, and told the man
about living in something similar as a child. That Trumpster started
to cry. He began talking about how he’d had just the same experience
and the way, as a teenager, he’d had to hold his family together
when his heroin-addicted parents couldn’t cope. He’d never talked
to any of his present-day friends about how he grew up and, in the
course of that conversation, came to agree with our canvasser that
Donald Trump wasn’t likely to improve life for people like them. He
was, he said, changing his vote to Biden right then and there. (And
that canvasser will be back to make sure he actually votes.)

Harvard University Professor Marshall Ganz pioneered
[[link removed]] the “public
narrative,” the practice of organizing by storytelling. It’s found
at the heart of many organizing efforts these days. The 2008 Obama
campaign, for example, trained thousands of volunteers to tell their
stories to potential voters. The It Gets Better Project
[[link removed]] has collected more than 50,000 personal
messages from older queer people to LGBTQ youth who might be
considering suicide or other kinds of self-harm -- assuring them that
their own lives did, indeed, get better.

Being the sort of political junkie who devours the news daily, I was
skeptical about the power of this approach, though I probably
shouldn’t have been. After all, how many times did I ask my mother
or father to “tell me a story” when I was a kid? What are our
lives but stories? Human beings are narrative animals and, however
rational, however versed in the issues we may sometimes be, we still
live through stories.

Data can give me information on issues I care about, but it can’t
tell me what issues I _should _care about. In the end, I’m
concerned about racial and gender justice as well as the climate
emergency because of the way each of them affects people and other
creatures with whom I feel connected.

A CAMPAIGN WITHIN A CAMPAIGN

Perhaps the most inspiring aspect of UNITE-HERE!’s electoral
campaign is the union’s commitment to developing every canvasser’s
leadership skills. The goal is more than winning what’s undoubtedly
the most important election of our lifetime. It’s also to send back
to every hotel, restaurant, casino, and airport catering service
leaders who can continue to organize and advocate for their
working-class sisters and brothers. This means implementing an
individual development plan for each canvasser.

Team leaders work with all of them to hone their stories into tools
that can be used in an honest and generous way to create a genuine
connection with voters. They help those canvassers think about what
else they want to learn to do, while developing opportunities for them
to master technical tools like computer spreadsheets and databases.

There’s a special emphasis on offering such opportunities to women
and people of color who make up the vast majority of the union’s
membership. Precious hours of campaign time are also devoted to
workshops on how to understand and confront systemic racism and combat
sexual harassment, subjects President Trump is acquainted with
[[link removed]] in
the most repulsively personal
[[link removed]] way.
The union believes its success depends as much on fostering a culture
of respect as on the hard-nosed negotiating it’s also famous for.

After months of pandemic lockdown and almost four years of what has
objectively been the worst, most corrupt, most incompetent, and
possibly even most destructive
[[link removed]] presidency
in the nation’s history, it’s a relief to be able to do something
useful again. And sentimental as it may sound, it’s an honor to be
able to do it with this particular group of brave and committed
people. _Sí, se puede. _Yes, we can.

_[Rebecca Gordon, a __TomDispatch regular,
[[link removed]] teaches
at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American
Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War
Crimes
[[link removed]] __and
is now at work on a new Dispatch book on the history of torture in the
United States. Copyright 2020 Rebecca Gordon. Reprinted with
permission. May not be reprinted without permission from TomDispatch.
xxxxxx thanks TomDispatch for sending this article to us._]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web [[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [[link removed]]
Manage subscription [[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org [[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]