Journey to Save North Carolina: Part II

As of now, I'm posting this without a lot of proofing. Please do not take this as a professional sample of my writing ability.

Day 4:

Why don’t I start out with the most eventful thing to happen to me:
“Get the f---- away from my door lawn or I’ll get my gun.” I heard this at the very end of the night on my last house on my route and, frankly, I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner considering what I’ve heard about how Fayetteville has more guns per capita than anyone in the nation (unverified). Also, lest you think that everything can be easily explained by race, it was a young black guy.

I’ve had four stints with the United States Census since 2010 so I know that people get irritable with home visits and while you get more people home late at night, some people go to bed before 8 or 9 pm. Are they 9 years old? Anyway, last night I probably pushed it a bit far but Roni said I could go out until 8. I felt like for the amount that’s being invested in me, and that I didn’t hit my first house until four pm, I might as well push it. I ended up splitting the difference and going out until 7 pm (it felt like 8 because of DST) and hit up my final four houses. Two of the final four houses were people I had a positive impact on so it was better on the average.

Since Saturday, I’ve found more of a groove doing GOTV (Get Out the Vote) canvassing and that has been more comfortable for me. I like knocking on doors and talking to random people and I like collecting data.

We’re not knocking on everyone’s door but rather people who are already registered with the democratic party and haven’t yet voted. The first two questions I ask on the script gauge if they’re still supporting the party. If they are, we try to help them identify how to vote. If not, they’re on their own. There was one young woman who came down with mono and couldn’t get to the polls in time. She was somewhat heartbroken that she couldn’t get to the polls and I found out that she could do curbside voting and the election workers would have to accommodate her. Because Mono isn’t Covid, I’d imagine people will be thrilled to serve her. Another problem case was a guy moving to Germany who tried to vote online. This is a thing that North Carolina allows provided you ordered your ballot by a certain date.

I’ve seen both some of the really nice parts of this city and some of the poorest locales I’ve ever seen. There’s a city called Spring Lake a few miles up the road and it seems to be trailer parks and dilapidated houses (pictured below). Most of these houses look like what the big bad wolf came across before he reached the one with bricks.

This is where I encountered the angry voter but that’s par for the course. People don’t want to be bothered at nearly any hour of the night.

 

Day 5:

A glitch with my booking (mainly that I forgot to book more days, so I guess I was the glitch) led to me having to get a new air b n b. My host, Jocelyn, an easygoing single mother to a four-year-old had been a perfect host so this was a loss. She volunteered me to drive me to the airport where I picked up my rental car and this might have been our first real conversation. She said she was apolitical so there’s not a lot of insight to gleam there, and we talked about our career paths and how she wound up in the army.

She pretty much loves the army. She dropped out of college after three semesters and spent the first two years of her career in Germany where she didn’t visit home once. She’s also heavily tattooed which she says isn’t that uncommon for army folk.

After renting a car, I had a robust day knocking on doors for the GOTV campaign. 

Leaving Jocelyn’s home, I still hadn’t nailed down a permanent location for the night. Considering the password problems and phone verification system, I figured, I’d just use the computer app rather than downloading it on my phone. It was a little worrisome because I kept having to check throughout

In the last two days, I feel like I found my groove in the field although I always felt like I could have done more. Sometimes, the act of going downtown and finding my bearing pushed me far enough that it was fairly late in the day when I got my first house. On this day, it wasn’t until about 1 pm that I got out and my coordinator wanted me to go Fort Bragg where I waited in line at the welcome center to find out there was no chance in hell I had of getting on the base. While getting my bearings, I stopped at a lavish golf resort (owned by the Fort but open to the public) and bought a slice of cake while figuring out my bearings.

It was around 3 that I left Fort Bragg and realized I needed a better GPS, I think because I took two massive wrong turns and I imagined things were getting later and later. My voter disenfranchisement sign was planted on some random Biden supporter’s yard (I figured if he was for Biden, he wouldn’t mind and it was better than throwing it away) and Roni now had an answer over whether Fort Bragg accepted canvassers (answer: no).

Around 5 or 6, I finally sat down for dinner and worked the wifi there on my computer so I could get in touch with Air BnB hosts. I found out I wasn’t allowed to book two hosts at once which I thought was bad. Technology sucks most of the time, doesn’t it? Somehow, I asked one guy to call me via telephone and was able to connect with him. I got there around 9 pretty exhausting after canvassing about as late as I could.

Day 6:

I’ve gotten to know Roni who works in the central office distributing campaign materials.  Campaign workers are supposed to go downtown to check in with her every day so I get a small taste of talking to her. There are a number of people like Ruthie or Ian or Macie who are sending out a number of e-mails on a daily basis but I don’t really have much to do with them and I keep getting calls for CUREing when I’m not part of that operation. Other than that, very little social interaction. Seeing Roni's office (pictured above) is generally a good starting place.

I had time to make a visit to a park and do a little bit of tourism and even got to try some North Carolina bar-b-q while getting almost all my houses done before dark. I say almost because I didn’t quite make it, so the last 12-15 were in the 6-7:30 range as my phone was going dead. Because it was daylight savings time, that was pretty dark and I had to record some of my responses by hand. Realizing that I was going to be left with a ridiculous surplus of fliers, I dropped off as many fliers as I could to doors that weren’t even assigned to me. 

Today, I was not in the trailer park doldrums but an apartment complex on the west end of town. Judging by the people and surroundings, it seemed like it was unquestionably a lower class neighborhood. I saw a man from across the parking lot who was black and wore a military uniform. He was black, a military man, and living in the relative doldrums of North Carolina. I was extremely eager to hear his political views and I was in a unique position to intrude upon his home to find out. By the time, I made it across the street, however, he was gone.

I tried to remain festive and offered stickers to people or pins from the campaign. I was even told I could give one t-shirt away but how would I pick that one person? Because the app on my phone showed me to the doors of registered democrats, I didn’t really deal with the opposition much but I was prepared for it.

There was a gang of kids, all black, who was walking all over the complex and playing. At one point they were walking where I was walking and one of them playfully said something like “if you’re following me, I’m going to beat you up” to make his friends laugh. I reacted quizzically and he said in a way that felt like code-switching to talk to a white person “where are you going.”

These kids were a hyper-active group who felt like they were experiencing the joy of being unconstrained by adults during summer break. One kid asked me “are you racist?” which strikes me as the question of the year if you read most liberal media outlets today or hang around 22-year-olds. Was he trying to entrap me like a school yard game? For all the abstract woke literature that’s been out there floating about race and the white patriarchy that’s dominated magazine, it’s much different than being in the awkwardness of conversing in a predominantly black crowd. I know that historically they have been oppressed and micro-aggressions have more of an effect towards the black community. I’m just talking about awkwardness.

I have my own views on the futility of the word “racist” and subscribe to the song from the musical Avenue Q “Everybody’s a Little Racist” in that we all have our own unconscious biases when we see people. These kids thought I was gullible, full of white guilt, out of place, and lacking in street smarts because I was in a black neighborhood.  Likewise my parents likely educated me to be afraid of black people in subtle ways.

We’re a society dominated by a cancel culture that’s aggressive towards those with those initial intentions. What really matters,in my opinion, is what you do with those thoughts and how you course-correct to recognize that way of thinking.

So of course, I told him “I think everybody’s a little racist in that we all have our own…..” It might have been too much for a (what I imagine to be approximately) ten-year-old to rattle with, as he was like “awww…” before I could finish. I’m assuming the next part of his phrase was “I’m telling.”

The next time I saw my young friend, he seemed to have forgotten my racism and asked me for a sticker and kicked me a soccer ball. His friend asked me if I wanted to fight him. I don’t know why these specific words came out of my mouth but I said “sure, I can beat you in a fight. I’ll be done flyering at 8 if you want to wait until then or you can help me flyer.” I hopelessly thought I could channel their enthusiasm in a positive way.

This group of instigators appeared to have ADD as they never really finished that thought either but they gave me a lot of food for thought.

What was more disturbing about this day was the apathy that a lot of the people to whose doors I was knocking on.

There was virtually no way that these people were not lower middle class unless they voluntarily were choosing to live in squalor. A number of people would say something like, “the government doesn’t do much for me” or “I don’t follow that stuff”

To me, that might be the problem that got us into this mess in the first place.  These people see it as some distant corrupt mess and am wondering what the government does for them, so when any outsider comes along and echoes that sentiment they’re attracted to them.

If people were properly educated on what government can and can’t do for them and what the government is doing for them in ways they might not realize, they wouldn’t be willing to throw it all away for anyone who yells loudest.

Tomorrow is election day….It’s going to be such an emotional ride, I’m not ready for it.

Bring the Funny Season 1 (2019) Rankings

 “Bring the Funny” was a 2019 reality TV show (halted during COVID) encompassing all kinds of comedy from magic to puppetry to sketch to pretentious guitarists and mixing them with the traditional stand-up variety. And I’m obsessed with it. It’s one of those things that’s like apples and oranges but wouldn’t it be fun to judge apples and oranges (along with some cantaloupes and pistachios) along the same scale and see who moves to the next round with sudden death battles and audience picks?  

One problem, however, is the show’s three judges—Jeff Foxworthy, Chrissy Teigen, and Kenan Thompson—don’t give very much nitty-gritty critique. They likely are prevented by the rules of tact from being too harsh on the contestants (no Simon Cowells in this bunch, which is its own plus). They also don’t have very much reaction time or much time on the whole to articulate exactly what’s wrong and right with the comedian. Fortunately, I have more time to spare and don’t care.

My pick for the top twelve (where the show demarcated semifinalists out of the original 40) in order::

The Valleyfolk-(Competition winner)-The 4-person sketch group had premises that ranged from simple (an outcast at a mutant school) to pretty clever (an incomprehensible cowboy, a monster under the bed who wasn’t good at scaring) but they really had the ability to execute. The four best sketch actors in the whole competition were the four members of this group, so they’re lucky they found each other…..except six days after winning the entire competition, three of the sketch members fired the other member after working together for five years. They have a humongous Patreon and YouTube following but about 98% of it is not sketches and the band broke up so why follow?

Andrea Lopez-(Second rounder)-Fun fact: Melissa Villasenor once had an act like this on America’s Got Talent where she did a lot of voices on stage. She catapulted from that to Saturday Night Live making her (possibly) the only reality show contestant to land on the iconic sketch show. Lopez is far more clever and made complete sketches from her voice imitation talents and appears to have a wider range.  

Erica Rhodes (Semifinalist)-Somewhat reminiscent of Maria Bamford, Rhodes wraps thirty-something female singledom into a bundle of self-doubt and insecurity with a sharpness and authenticity that made her one of the strongest voices on the show. You just wanted to jump onto the screen and give her a hug. Many of these comedians who latch onto loneliness in their routines might not necessarily be lonely in real life but they do those routines because lonely people in the audience need someone to reassure them they're not the only lonely person in the audience. 

Frangela-(Semifinalist)-I’ve known about this duo since the mid-2000s with their hilarious takes on pop culture news on the VH1 show “BestWeek Ever.” With their powers combined (like Captain Planet), they are one of the best voices in comedy, let alone this show. Why they didn’t reach such high heights was because their comedy is largely reactive and they were entrusted with being the main stunt here. In their first outing, for example, they were the people talking too loud in the movie theater and while it was pretty funny, one had to wonder what the actual movie was that they were reacting to. It’s unclear why they decided to go sketch rather than stand-up where they could have killed it more, but watching them take their talents in new directions and their final sketch (possibly the best in the whole competition) was extremely well-suited for their immense talents from start to finish. 

Drennon Davis-(Second Rounder)-A manic impressionist who models his act off a shock jock with occasional hand puppetry thrown in. You have to see it to believe it. He’s a little raw but I found most of his material to be very cleverly conceived. His impressions always have a good twist to them. The best comparison might be the shock jock played by Jimmy Fallon (when he was funny) on SNL. But it's hard to find a really good comparison because this guy's a true original.

JK Studios (Semifinalist)-Originally called Studio C, this BYU-based sketch group has a popular YouTube following among the Mormon community and random people who like sketch comedy because they have pretty clean material. Six of those members appear to have broken off into a new group (including the best actors like Matt Meese and Natalie Madsen, fortunately) and showed off a proficiency in writing and performance that made them stand out. Their best sketch was a man who matched with Emma Stone on Tinder causing his long-lost father to want to reunite with him, a priest to lose faith in the lord, and a friend to come out of the closet. The sketch does a lot of zigging where you expect it to zag and adds a lot of great twists.

Kristin Key (Second Rounder)-The comedy guitarist had two catchy ditties that were great at taking things that seem pretty obvious and showing you they were under your nose the whole time like the fact that Cinderella is likely an ungrateful floozy. She really knows how to write a song. 

Morgan Jay (Semifinalist)-The comedy guitarist knocked Kristin out of the competition but it was a very close call. Morgan (who is Latino) has a falsetto and the musical stylings of a mariachi guitarist but when he sings about the traps of long-term relationships and the pain of whether to split a check on the first date, he turns those romantic tropes upside down. His tunes are a little simplistic (good parody rests on imitating the original with precision which is why I give Kristin the edge) but he also has a very good knack for crowd work which is hard to add on top of song.

Ali Kolbert (First Rounder)-She had an ingenious comedy bit comparing dating styles to Amazon and the Postal Service. The “Why can’t I find a guy” routine gets old but she found a really good spin. Check her out on the YouTubes and she’s performed on Fallon. Her comedy never hits easy targets.

Chris and Paul Show (Finalist)-This pair are masters at physical humor and can even make miming hilarious. They can also tonally shift sketches from lightweight to dark humor or chatty to a sexy dance between a man and a giant chocolate chip cookie (you had to see it for yourself, though it was a bit gross), on a dime. I felt there were slight tweaks that could have been made to not make situations as melodramatic but it was hard to deny their talent was insane.

Mandy Muden (First Rounder)-Magician/Comedian Jared Fell made it to the semi-finals and he had a certain manic energy that worked but his actual magic was a little thin. Mandy had a persona that was a little less manic but she had a faster pace to her actual tricks which moves the energy. Muden also had a strong persona described by Chrissy as something like a  sophisticated yet horny old lady. Pretty accurate. I personally wanted to adopt her as my grandmother.

1.      Matt Rife (Semifinalist)-A 23-year-old with a little bit of a douchey image who’s very clever tight with his sets. He relies a little too heavily on “oh you thought I was A, I’m actually B” but his jokes are strong, his act has a through-line, and he can talk about a lot of different things.

My Picks for the Second Round:

Michael Longfellow (Semifinalist)-Because he didn’t have a personality, he lacked a strong safety net in case a joke failed, but pretty much every joke hit. He would be my first runner-up.

Candice Thompson (First Rounder)-Had a lot of personality, the story about waxing didn’t end in a punchline but it was a tight set and most of her jokes hit hard.

Daphnique Springs (First Rounder)-A comedian talking about OCD issues. Her joke about the microwave needed more work but I found her highly intriguing

Mister Zed (First Rounder)-A robot who really committed to the bit. His work was slightly satirical of stuff like hackneyed crowdwork and made me massively curious. We also saw him in the finale.

Jared Fell (Finalist)-I probably would have put him through if there was room for two magicians

Jesus Trejo (Second Rounder)-Jesus Trejo did an extremely tight set about how their grandparents had 21 kids. I got the impression that he didn't use all the time allocated but every word was used well.

Lost Moon Radio (First Rounder)-Their full sketch about passive-aggressive Lewis and Clark was a little over 30 seconds of dialogue and that’s too short, but I was curious

Ali Siddiq (Finalist)-He made it farther than I would have liked but his act was solid and well-researched.

Ian Lara (First Rounder)-A comedian with a bit about going on a cruise that had a decent amount of energy and punctuation

Audrey Stewart (First Rounder)-She was a bit loud and obnoxious in a way that’s unusual for white comedians (I’d rate her intensity level as 60% Kathy Griffin) but I found her unapologetic energy attractive.

Armando Anto (First Rounder)-We didn’t see much of him, but I’m curious to see how a comic violinist would fare in the second round. He might even have more widespread appeal than Lewberger

Room 28 (First Rounder)-Their sole sketch almost felt like an excuse for impression-o-rama like SNL’s Family Fued. Still, the sketch followed through to the end.

Over-rated:

Lewberger (finalist)-The trio who I’ve seen before doing better stuff on Buzzfeed (history of misheard lyrics is a must) (did they quit?) are a good niche market if you like operatic parodies of musical theater with a modern twist (hence, YouTube popularity). In order to make it play to a broader audience, I would have preferred a wider range of styles

Harry and Chris (second rounders)-They were convincing enough in the opening round to show potential, but their second act performance was like a lounge act and more like an encore than a main act. Their subject was differences than British and American English and they completely missed that mates means a different thing across the pond. They used up too much of the song time thanking the audience for being there and saying they wrote a song (when I assume they write all their own songs). A major step back.

Ali Siddiq (finalist)-He was clever, but I was not a fan of the sitting down approach and it was indicative of a slight lack of energy.

Orlando Leyba (second rounder)-Comedy should be uplifting at heart. It’s ok to show miserable people to make you feel like your life could be worse. Leyba had some solid material in the second set but his comic persona felt kind of depressing

ISMO (second rounder)-This Finnish stand-up comedian has been very successful in Finland. In fact, he’s one of just 8 contestants (out of 40) with a Wikipedia page. However, in both his sets, he only had one joke. It’s a tremendous amount of set-up for a moderate punch line.

Willie Appleman (second rounder)-Appleman had two one-man sketches where he monologued and imagined the other members of the room. In the first sketch, he did some light crowd work with the judges but didn’t leave enough time in their responses to show he’s a great improviser. His second sketch lacked coherence as it combined two contradictory ideas (he’s a dentist trying to be cool and he’s in trouble with a cartel making him quite cool). It should also be noted that Upright Citizens Bridge has monologues going on all the time.

Post-election 2020 reactions and resolutions in the Post-Trump era

I have been hoping to get back to writing about films and I am working on something but I wrote this on the night of the election and want to post some of my political thoughts

I've been tuning out the news because it's so stressful. I'm praying that this country did the right thing and put in a president who respects the law and his fellow human beings.

I believe there generally can be a silver lining to every tragedy, but the universe simply has to even out this way if it makes sense.  There's really no silver lining to more years of Trump: It doesn't mobilize good people more than they've been mobilized and it doesn't serve more people in a good way. I've been begging to see how exactly this makes sense.

 

Additionally, I'm not much of a futurist and sadly so little of what people do every four years matters that our voice really only matters every two or four years in this system. 

 

I accept that some people might be better served by a Trump administration, but there are a lot of people who aren't and campaign strategists consciously misled those people into thinking that Biden represented socialism which was the root of all evils and used every smear in the book. I welcome Arizona and Wisconsin and hopefully Michigan and Pennsylvania to the side of reason, while several  other states have let us down as a nation.

 

However, this is also a wake-up call for us that democratic messaging isn't well-received by many in this country for some legitimate reasons. and that sense we had in the immediate aftermath of 2016 of outreach was lost by some of the more extreme fringes of the left in the years after 2020.

We've spent a lot of the last four years not just fighting for the rights of the "disenfranchised" but turning into bullies ourselves. It's one thing to advocate for transgender or gay rights, but it's another to want to destroy anyone who attends a church or has advocated for people on both sides to speak up about these issues. It's one thing to want to uplift black people, but it's another thing to actively rail against anyone who doesn't share your platform on affirmative action. I've been banned from forums on movies simply for having the views of a white male or for having a view on the merits of Thomas Jefferson that differed from the people in my board.

People talk about the disenfranchised in historical terms as if they're permanently affixed labels that work 100% of the time on a macroscopic level when every interaction and inequality needs to be taken in context. The terms "People of Color" and the "Patriarchy" are inherently alienating terms to disenfranchised white people and for a few years, the language of liberal people in certain self-segregated spaces has posited the world through an over-simplistic "white straight men verses everyone else" as if the source of Hispanic, South Asian, diaspora African and African-American struggles in this county are all traceable to the same root causes and consciously created by white people who wanted to maintain supremacy. 

A lot of these people think my problem is with the "disenfranchised" but it's really against jerks. Being a caped crusader for your narrow definition of the "disenfranchised" does not give one liberty or recuse from being a jerk. It was my treatment in this spaces that caused me to contribute roughly eight or nine articles to right-wing publications (alongside people I don't agree with politically) on the topics of intellectual exclusivity and misunderstandings of racism: https://thefederalist.com/2019/02/20/wont-solve-racism-blacklisting-liam-neeson/

This does not mean in any way it is acceptable to vote for someone who ignores facts, demonizes immigrants, never accepts personal responsibility, promotes incivility, and acts like he's above the law.

But it does mean that the responsibility still falls on us as the disenfranchised or as Democrats to explain our views to others if we want them to be convinced, even if that constitutes a micro-aggression or two. It also means that civility and allowing a climate of free speech still applies.

I wrote this a couple days later on how much I'm willing to forgive and forget

 

For the last four years, if you voted for Trump in 2016, I didn't hold it against you as long as you weren't still riding the Trump train. If you weren't calling out a dishonest lawbreaker who was scapegoating Americans for being dishonest, breaking rules, and scapegoating Americans, than that was a problem with me. 

 

Now, whatever you feel about Trump doesn't matter. You don't have power, so I don't have a grudge anymore. You just held some batty ideas during an incredibly unnecessarily dark period of our national history. 

 

Unless you are going to be excessive in not respecting power now (in an extreme version: hatch plots to kidnap Democratic governors or whine about how you feel scared under an administration that I'm guessing won't deport you, defy UN laws to not accept your rightful refugee status, or institute a religion-based ban, I'm not going to care about you until maybe 2024.

 

Yeah, you can tea party all over the place, and I won't like your views, but I don't think the government is in a place of existential crisis. 

 

However, if you were a politician who directly enabled this reign of terror, I will hold it against you. 

 

Every senator, representative, cabinet member, governor, campaign advisor (looking at you Chris Christie, Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani) and especially white house spokesperson who enabled Trump or didn't oppose him loudly enough is responsible for turning us into a third world country.

Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Rod Rosenstein, the McCain family, Jerome Mattis, Sally Yates, James Comey, Michael Cohen, Rex Tillerson, and Justin Amash get passes. There might be a couple others I'm forgetting but the rest don't deserve to hold public office.

My Journey to Save the Democrats in North Carolina: Part I

I am normally not a travel writer, but I thought I would share some of my work. I was able to raise $590 by crowd-funding to North Carolina this past week to work for the state's democratic party and wrote about my travels.

Post One:

The “organizer”* of our mission, Josh, has mentioned that this is a really unique grassroots movement because a lot of its members weren’t active in politics before Hurricane Trump. In fact, I’m not sure if I can remember much about my political leanings before November of 2016 and, to be entirely honest, I found people who posted about politics on their facebook walls to be irritating. But if the government is extreme enough and tangibly damaging lives, you have to react if you have empathy.

*Full disclosure, I don’t know who is organizing this mission. Josh just sent me the initial email and when I spoke with him, he denied being the organizer of anything almost as if it were a criminal liability. He attempted to explain me the hierarchy of how all this works but it was a snoozefest, so I tuned out, sorry.

At the same time, it’s another thing to get into. For about a dozen years I followed the NBA closely but as the players with whom I was most familiar retired and they kept having so many drafts where people who were younger than me kept entering the league whereas my ability to jump, dunk, and run got worse. Kind of depressing. Apparently, the people you’re voting for being younger than you will pretty much never be a problem in this sport.

In that same sense, I’ve devoted much of my energy in the past four years to learning the names of the 100 senators and familiarizing myself with where they stand, because: 1) Let’s be honest, 435 Represenatives is way too many so screw them and 2) We unfortunately couldn’t do anything about the executive branch for four years, but congress had the power to keep him in check. I also called, visited the offices of, and wrote emails to the offices of senators who sucked at their jobs (and wouldn’t you know it, they were all Republicans).

Fun fact: I was sort of kind of named for one of those 100 senators, Orrin G Hatch, and I had the pleasure of delivering a hand written letter to his staffers somewhere in 2017 about how I was ashamed to be named after him when he absolved filibuster rules to confirm a corrupt Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, who (wouldn’t you know it) resigned in disgrace.

In all honesty, following the NBA and following the Senate isn’t actually that different. Instead of box scores, you can check voting records or polls or scores. It’s also interesting to note that there are several Senators like Elizabeth Warren, Corey Booker, and Ted Cruz who the average person knows of because they make the news often, while there are several of them who get by under the spotlight. Have you heard of a guy named Ron Wyden or Deb Harris? Or maybe her surname is Fisher? She’s a Republican from Nebraska and I actually met her through Capitol Hill but I can’t remember.

In 2018, I was a member of the press club and surrounded by a more politically active group of people and one introduced me to a site called Real Clear Politics where you can follow the polls day-by-day and I started realizing that about eight states were in play in the Senate race (we ended up winning Nevada and Arizona while losing Florida, Texas, Indiana, North Dakota, Missouri, and Tennessee) and wanted to make a difference there. I originally decided to phone bank, but looking for creative ways to take vacations, I considered possibly getting employment in Tennessee or Florida and moving there temporarily. The getting-paid-to-go plans fell apart and I contemplated travelling to Florida anyway and staying in a hostel.

Not doing that was a big regret I’ve had over the past two years. And to think Floridian Senator Bill Nelson lost by 10,000 votes to a guy who distanced himself from Trump at the time and claimed bipartisan credentials but voted to deny even hearing evidence at the impeachment trial and has blamed the failure of things to get done in Washington on a leftist obstructionist agenda. Think of how the  Supreme Court battle or the impeachment trial or several other issues  would have changed in the last two years if we’d had one more Democratic seat in the house.

So I’m going to North Carolina this week. Everything is in play here. A close senate race, the governorship and more. I don’t have clear instructions of what I’m doing (I blame the orientation for being so boring) or how much of a difference I’m making, but it’s an adventure.

Darren Keeps His Distance From Us

Post Two:
If I’m going to attract people to my writings here, it behooves me to paint myself as a heroic crusader to protect the integrity of the vote, but so far I've felt pretty unheroic in the first two days.

A party organizer named Gary explained that a lot of the rural districts where things lean very red is where voter suppression is most likely to happen which is where I am not.

The main things to look for in voter suppression are lines being too long, rejecting ballots that shouldn’t be rejected, an unnecessary police presence, misinformation being given to voters, and intimidation. The “intimidation” call is a fine line that I’m not sure if I’m trained to make.

 

I’m not sure if it’s Southern hospitality or a small sample size but I didn’t seen too much of anything but civility.

On the first day, I encountered an African-American democrat named George and his white Republican counterpart Darren.

AJ told me that the Republicans lie and something like we’d be screwed if the Republicans win but he also said that Darren is fine people. I was too tired of wishing the Republicans dead at this point so I tried to make a peace offering to Darren by saying that I hope we’d have a more bipartisan country when the election is over, but he responded that he didn’t trust the other side. At the same time, he softened over time.

Because I was sitting farther away from the stream of people on the first day, I was left to hear the conversations of AJ and a security guard who had an hour break and went to go hang out with us. They talked about how the KKK was nearby and when I asked if there was a lot of fear of growing up black in this area, they said well, there is racism, but there’s just a lot of crime around here. Also, this is 2020 and the blacks have guns now. Touche!

 

More than anything else, this is an economically depressed town. Racism is alleviated a fair bit through the military presence I’m told, but the military can’t fill all the empty storefronts.

Fayetteville doesn’t have a lot of local investment in industry like the nearby research triangle (Durham-Chapel Hill-Raleigh) so it’s struggling. It does have the largest military base in the country up the road and everyone loves the second amendment no matter who you are. This metropolitan area ranks among the highest in gun ownership. The security guard is on duty (which I’m presuming grants him a gun already?) and still his own gun in his car while Mike had eight guns.

A number of people at the polls who were first-time voters were very celebratory and were taking selfies. A group of four (three adults and one kid, I’m guessing two of the adults were a couple) came out of the polls asking a poll worker to take their picture because it was their first time voting. Wanting to commemorate the occasion is more than I’ve ever done but I can get that. What I don’t understand is if you have that much excitement about voting, why didn’t you do it before? Strangely enough, many of these people were older than 22. I’m not surprised that people aren’t passionate about politics; I’m more surprised they didn’t step up to the plate when  voting itself doesn’t require a lot of effort.

I asked these people a couple questions and the general consensus is that they didn’t vote before because they didn’t feel as strongly. The missing piece of information I had is which candidate roused you to action? I didn’t feel comfortable asking that piece of information (and it might have not been legal, anyway).

 

One young woman I spoke with was pretty defiant of her mother who said “I’ll take the Democratic literature, thank you” while her mom said “don’t worry her mama’s a Trump supporter.” For some reason, being at the polls made me number than I would have been in cyberspace to see an enthusiastic Trump supporter. Maybe knowing the polls favor Biden helps? The daughter said health care was the biggest factor in her vote.

George’s niece and her family came by and they were talkative (Southern charm?) with me which was pretty surprising not just because it seemed like an inappropriate place but because, well, I read as white. To the degree that I’m scared of white Republicans, I’m also a little weary of engaging in serious talks with black people with such a climate of micro-aggression policing.

 

What everyone could agree on was that I was “way out in the country” but I was within five miles of city limits. Apparently, if it’s a small North Carolina town, there really isn’t much in the way of suburbs. I could have run a 10K race to get back to Fayetteville and they treated me like I was on the movie Cast Away when I told them I had Ubered. At the end of the night, Darren, my enemy, kept worrying about me and telling me to get an Uber back.

First-time voters taking a selfie

Post Three:
Today I stopped by the makeshift headquarters and met Ronnie. She is a young, overworked desk jockey who will give you a free t-shirt and stickers if you’re nice.  

As Trump is saying more and more ridiculous things, I keep getting the motivation to want to work and beat him, but I had a thought: What happens when that motivation is gone? If he loses, where do we put our political energy? One certainty is that as I talk to people here who have a “what has government done for me lately” attitude, I realize that the solution is to have a public who knows exactly what government does and doesn’t do, and what it is currently doing. Then they won’t be willing to toss aside a very real functioning institution for an abstract vision sold to them by a madman who yells louder than anyone else.

Today, in my quest to know “what is voter intimidation”, I had to contend with a Vietnam veteran for Trump named Mike who I didn’t know how to classify. One of the first things he said was how he wanted to rip up those  Biden-Trump signs and had torn down 250 of them this past week. Exactly what you’re supposed to not be doing! It turns out that he and his democratic counterpart at this station, AJ, had been here for almost two weeks together and developed enough of a camaraderie that they could make jokes like that. I still cautiously sent a note through the reporting system.

If you’re not sure what constitutes voter intimidation, Mike is your worst nightmare. He also is a bit rough around the edges. He engaged in some “locker room” talk about the female voters passing by and made an off-color joke about San Francisco and gay people that was probably 15 years away from being considered acceptable.

But had an interesting history. Mike was a Vietnam War veteran who illegally voted four times against Ronald Reagan and is still a registered Democrat. He enthusiastically voted for Obama because he grew up with mostly black friends, but he was disappointed with Benghazi. When I pointed out that most prominent military leaders have broken with Trump, he said that he knew Mattis and John Kelly (the DHS Chief and Chief of Staff) and they were both not well-respected (which brings the follow-up: Why did Trump hire them?). At the very least, Mike could list me some prominent generals he liked.

When I said that maybe it was best to not discuss politics, he asked if it bothered him that he was smarter than me. I wasn’t really in the mood for argument and felt the need to try to talk about how I’m for bipartisanism and talk about stuff I might politically have in common with him.  

Eventually, I saw the good in Mike. As a sign of the camaraderie between AJ and Mike, the latter offered to give the former a lift when the banks closed and asked me to distribute pamphlets of both parties. In fact, Mike and AJ agreed to distribute each other’s pamphlets when the other took a break.

I had the feeling that Mike was just an elderly extrovert who really needed to talk to people for his own health. When I started ignoring him and putting on headphones, Mike talked harder to me in desperation to have someone to talk to and asked about bars in DC or if it’s easy to see the monuments in DC. Besides he knew the rules: He never explicitly campaigned for Trump and engaged both democrats and Republicans.

On the second night, Gary gave me a ride home and said Mike was harmless. There had really been one report of a legitimate threat in the 12 polling stations that day so I missed out.

Post Two:

If I’m going to attract people to my writings here, it behooves me to paint myself as a heroic crusader to protect the integrity of the vote, but so far I've felt pretty unheroic through two days of poll observing.

A party organizer named Gary explained, while shuttling me between polling stations, that a lot of the rural districts where things lean very red is where voter suppression is most likely to happen. The other poll observers didn’t really have much to report either except for a Trump.

The main culprits are lines being too long, rejecting ballots that shouldn’t be rejected, an unnecessary police presence, misinformation being given to voters, and intimidation. The “intimidation” call is a fine line that I’m not sure if I’m trained to make.

There was a military veteran for Trump who seemed kind of mouthy and obnoxious at first and I didn’t know how to classify him. One of the first things he said was how he wanted to rip up those  Biden-Trump signs and had torn down 250 of them this past week. Exactly what you’re supposed to not be doing! It turns out that him and his democratic counterpart at this station, AJ had been here for almost two weeks together and developed enough of a camaraderie that they could make jokes like that. I still cautiously sent a note through the system alerting them to him.

His name was Mike and he was a Vietnam War veteran who illegally voted four times against Ronald Reagan and described himself as a registered Democrat who voted for Obama but was disappointed with Benghazi. When I pointed out that most prominent military leaders have broken with Trump, he said that he knew Mattis and John Kelly (the DHS Chief and Chief of Staff) and they were both not well-respected (which brings the follow-up: Why did Trump hire them?). At the very least, Mike could list me some prominent generals he liked. When A.J. spoke about how he and Mike have a good system of respecting each others views, I’m not sure what he was talking about at first.

When I said that maybe the best way to do that was not discuss politics, he asked if it bothered him that he was smarter than me. I wasn’t really in the mood for much argument and felt the need to try to talk about how I’m for bipartisanism and talk about stuff I might politically have in common with him.  He voted for some Democrats but he had a lot of loud opinions including the congresswoman incumbent that was paying AJ. He also engaged in some “locker room” talk about the female voters passing by, but he knew the laws and was pretty careful to not break them. It turned out he was joking about tearing down the Biden signs because he knew that was against the law and how long he’d go to prison here.

For the most part, he and AJ had truly gotten along. When AJ lamented that he had to go to the bank before it closed, Mike offered to give him a lift and asked me to distribute pamphlets of both parties, and the two agreed to distribute each other’s pamphlets. I had the feeling that Mike was just an elderly extrovert who really needed to talk to people for his own health. He never explicitly campaigned for Trump and engaged both democrats and Republicans about anything and everything worth talking about, including military health plans, medics, what to do about when you get old and your bones fail you, tattoos, etc.

When I started ignoring him and putting on headphones, Mike talked harder to me in desperation to have someone to talk to and asked about bars in DC or if it’s easy to see the monuments in DC.


At least things were better here than on day one where I had almost no idea what I was doing. I am not a resident of Cumberland County, NC, so I can’t be put on the official poll watchers list received by the county board of elections. I can coordinate with inside poll watchers but I’m sort of a rogue free agent.


I was told before going down that this was a seamless operation but a lot of people (most of whom are volunteering) are simply playing catch-up to a logistical reality they were never that educated on. I’m not suggesting this means that Biden and the Democrats won’t perform awesomely on election day. Nothing that’s been messed up with my logistics has really impacted any voters because I’m not seeing much disenfranchisement at all. It’s just little details. Today I’ve been outside of the democratic headquarters for an hour typing this up because my two-step verification and password won’t go into the app that is supposed to contain the script and everything for me to go GOTV canvassing (knocking on the doors of the half million registered democrats who haven’t voted yet and trying to pump them into action).