Doing Democracy

It was a warm summer evening — a weekday after work — and my 16-year-old daughter and I were knocking on doors in a working-class neighborhood tucked under the Verrazano Bridge. I’d been crossing that bridge week after week from leafy, liberal Park Slope, in Brooklyn, to speak with voters in Staten Island, a politically and ethnically diverse borough and New York City’s only congressional district with a seat up for grabs in this high-stakes moment of the 2018 Midterm elections. I was practicing Deep Canvassing, an experiment in connecting with voters across differences in race, class and political party to come together to fight the hate politics and division currently gripping our country in the wake of the 2016 election.

I admit I was a little anxious about this particular treeless neighborhood with single-family ranch homes tightly packed on small lots in the shadow of the bridge. So far in my experience Deep Canvassing, there had been an eerie correlation between the number of mature trees in a given neighborhood, and the residents’ openness to our conversation. Our opening line — “If you had two minutes with President Trump, what would you say to him about the job he’s doing for you and your family?” — certainly got people’s attention and often sparked quick one-line responses which took the initial temperature, such as: “Stop tweeting!” and “Go to Hell” or “Keep up the good work!” These kinds of statements are where the American conversation about Donald Trump typically starts and ends, each side in our own camp, talking to our own, yelling across the divide, ratcheting up the volume and the animus.

My goal was to get to a different place — to a two-way conversation — and in Deep Canvassing the way to do that is through personal storytelling and active listening. I’d been practicing a few personal stories — about different members of my family and how my love for them forms the basis of my values and my politics — and I’d been working to elicit personal stories from voters about their lives, their loved ones and their values.

Sometimes this does not work. Early on, we met a middle-aged Asian man who was convinced that Obama exploded the deficit and that Trump’s economic policies would right the country’s course. No matter how I tried to guide the conversation from the ideological to the personal, this man was unmovable from Fox News talking points. We politely thanked him for his time and moved on to the next door.

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