Let’s Just Go One More Block
How New and Veteran Volunteers Find Their Mojo
Temperatures reach the triple digits in the Central Valley in the summer. On weekends in CA-10 many residents prefer to stay indoors, getting relief from air conditioners. This is the best time to meet voters: knock on the door, ring a bell, look them in the eye, and shake their hands.
With four months left until the general election, Bay Area volunteers are undeterred by the heat. What fires them up?
Becca Moeller from Santa Cruz, CA, is a veteran volunteer with Swing Left. She has been coming out to CA-10 to knock on doors for over a year. Moeller is on a mission to introduce her circle back in Santa Cruz to the cause and recruit new volunteers. She strives to bring new friends on each trip, often inspiring them to become returning canvassers. Moeller reflects on her motivation to keep going: “A few months after the initial outrage after the Trump election faded, a friend posted: ‘We’ve always wondered how the people of Germany could have let Hitler and the Nazis do what they did. Well, whatever it is you are doing now to resist, is what you would have done then. It’s too easy to just go on leading our busy lives’. Reading it, I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. I vowed then to do everything I could to take our country back. Swing Left is just one of several groups I volunteer with and organize, but it’s an important one.”
Terri Cohn and Harlan Levy from San Francisco joined a canvass for Josh Harder for the first time on June 21. Although the couple has been following the work of Swing Left since its inception, their outrage at the immigration policy and the separation of refugee families finally spurred them into action. At the end of the day, Levy remarked that “eye-to-eye contact seemed like the cleanest, simplest way to exchange opinions and facts and leave an impression” with voters. After a few hours of walking in the midday sun and knocking on doors, Cohn did not want to leave. “Let’s go just go one more block,” she encouraged her partner. Would she go back? “Absolutely.”
