Virginia Is Growing Blue Spots

Sometimes people say that Virginia is a purple state, but it really isn't.  It sounds good to say that we have a blend of opinions but it is basically not true. After Tuesday's election, the map showed that the areas of most density, more urban and suburban, those are the ones that are getting more blue all the time.  When we first moved out to Virginia, we felt like the only Democrats.  But times have changed. Northern Virginia is now full of immigrants and progressives who vote, and we are overwhelming the rest of the state, with the help of urban centers with big universities.

Usually I don't do anything political, except by being part of a longstanding farm business that lives by some strong principles. And we have taken to putting big in-your-face sized signs at the entrance of our driveway during elections.

But last year's presidential election showed me that we can't let that happen again. This year, like so many other formerly inactive people, I joined the ranks of the active.  I was late to the game, as vegetables can be very demanding, but I did make it a priority to do something real this time around.

For a good five years or so, I have been part of a non-partisan, interfaith community organizing group. This group (Virginians Organized for Interfaith Community Engagement)  takes the long view, spending a lot of energy and time on building relationships and creating connections between elected officials and clergy, mostly.  It takes a lot of patience and faith to keep going to the meetings because things seem to move at a glacial pace. Also, the jargon can be off-putting, and I think they miss a lot of opportunities to collect up some good minds and hearts by using words that don't mean what they think they mean.  We once spent a whole meeting talking about our goal of "agitating" people.  There were plenty of people in the room who didn't like that word, and didn't want to let the conversation progress until they had made their discomfort very clear.

So, this non-partisan group decided to focus on the governor's race in Virginia this year and they put all their energy into finding out what the most important issues were so we could tell the candidates what VOICE has identified as key goals.  They taught people how to facilitate conversations and they held thousands of meetings to find out what was troubling people the most.  I am not entirely certain that they didn't have the final list in mind before they even started having all the conversations -- they didn't come up with anything earth-shattering -- but the conversations were really the point, not the issues.  They were moving toward this one big event where they invited both candidates to come and hear our list of demands, based on 5000 conversations.

Even though it was the middle of October and still a very busy time for farmers, I had committed to be there for that meeting (so had my mother and Michael Lipsky who are also engaged in this) and to bring as many people as possible.  The VOICE strategy is to get public commitments from each institution (church, mosque, synagogue) for the number of people they will bring to these big "actions." Our temple had said it would bring 85, which was a stretch. I was shameless, of course, and asked my sister to come because Julia and the baby were coming, and so on. It took a lot of reminding and asking, but we did get our numbers. And on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon in the middle of nowhere (a high school in Nokesville), there were 1500+ people in a big auditorium participating in this bit of political theater.

It was the most tightly-run example that I have seen in five years.  Usually they spend too much time with the pep rally aspects, but they were on a tight schedule and they stayed with it.  We heard brief stories from people who had specific examples of bullying in schools, bad experiences with guns, fears of getting sent back to a country they had never lived in, students who couldn't observe their religious holidays if they weren't Christian, etc.  And we watched VOICE clergy members asking direct questions of both candidates, using the exact same words for each one. There was no cheering, no signage, no partisan behavior. It was actually really good.

VOICE has this entirely predictable and persistent way of getting commitments out of people and I signed a card saying I would do some thing real, like canvassing or phone banking. I couldn't imagine how I would really do it, but I said I would.

So on the last weekend before the election, for the first time in my life, I learned to knock on doors.  My mother did three shifts in three days, I think, and so did I.  The goal was to increase voter turnout in specific precincts that had historically low percentages.  We didn't talk about issues and we didn't talk about the candidates, we just told people to vote.  When we were driving to the church where we would be briefly "trained," we were talking about the non-partisan part and Michael Lipsky said, "I want to get out of this car right now" because it just felt so risky to be getting a cross-section of infrequent voters to go and vote when the election was looking so close. But it was so interesting to be in neighborhoods we had never seen, very tightly packed blocks of developer-built apartments and townhouses.  We had specific doors to knock on, registered voters only, and we took notes on our results.

On Election Day, which was rainy and cold and quite grim, I thought we would probably be making phone calls. But when I got to the church, the organizer asked if I would rather knock on doors or make calls.  I asked what would be most effective and she said she thought knocking on doors was the best use of our time.  I hadn't anticipated this, but of course I had rubber boots and a rain coat on, as I always dress for success.  So we went out to a lower voter turnout area and knocked on every door, indiscriminately, (they call this "knock and drag" for some reason) and asked if people had voted.  We kept count of people who said they had voted and we found a handful of people who said they would go now. I am not sure that we did anything very useful, except to demonstrate to a lot of surprised people that there were volunteers who were willing to walk around in the rain and nudge people into voting. And that may very well have been useful, in a long term sort of way.


The election results were better than we could have hoped for, and I still don't know if we did any good, but at least we made a serious effort.  Last year's election taught me that there are incredibly dire consequences if you let the worst candidate win.  Obviously we weren't campaigning for anyone, but it was a very interesting exercise to try to get more people to vote. I absolutely believe in that, and since we were in neighborhoods with lots of immigrants, we were probably talking to people with a similar agenda to ours.

VOICE volunteers on Election Day. After this, we went inside to pester people by phone.

We have a neighbor in Blueberry Hill who is devoted to canvassing -- he really takes the political process to heart -- and he knocks on doors every weekend for months before the elections.  Now I have a better sense of what he does, and I am even more impressed by his dedication.  It is meaningful work. And you learn so much that you didn't even know you didn't know.  I already knew this, but I really need to learn to speak Spanish.

As VOICE always says, power comes from "organized people" and "organized money."  We were organized people this time, and it felt good.

Alisa (organizer), two volunteers from a local mosque, and our rabbi Michael Holzman going door to door.