How I Lost the Election
**Election Results Spoilers Below** Conversations on the doors for my union's campaign for Kamala
I spent the evening of November 5—election night—at the local labor council victory party for a congressman in western Pennsylvania. The congressman handily won re-election to his purple district seat, and gave a rousing speech at his party, which was emceed by the local Labor Council leader. But as they talked, all eyes were on the TVs off to the sides.
“Things are looking good for us,” the labor leader proclaimed. “We’re in for a long night, some things still aren’t clear, but what is clear is that I got word we can keep the bar open an extra hour. Make sure we show that the labor movement aren’t stingy tippers.”
Pause for applause. Then an hour later everybody is out. Looking at their phones, getting in cars, speaking in hushed, humorless tones. Things were looking differently higher up on the ballot. I went to the after party at a hotel bar. Things were starting to set in. The campaign leads brought wine, gin, and a 32 rack of Iron City. The bartender closed up for the night, told everyone that he would raise hell if anyone came behind the bar, then gave one of the lead canvassers the television remote. The group promptly turned the silent TV up as high as it goes as they broadcasted the quick death of the Harris/Walz campaign, over and over and over again.
“Malcolm, thanks for serving us,” one canvasser said. “Would have been nice if you voted.”
He looked at us like the annoying customers we were.
“I know it’s not over yet,” said one union canvasser from Butler, PA who spent over a month cutting daily turf in his backyard. “We knocked every door, we knocked every door again, we called, then we knocked the doors again. We did that. It can’t be over.”
“The eternal optimist,” one of the teachers union leaders said.
“I don’t know, I guess I just remember the work we did.”
The work we did
My first week was spent in West Mifflin and McKeesport. Our members here were mostly White Steelworkers and a few social service workers and teachers for the surrounding neighborhoods. West Mifflin is home to one of the last surviving US Steel plants in Mon Valley—Irvin Works. The 650-square foot behemoth is impossible to miss on the banks of the Monongahela River. Tiny residential subdivisions with identical red brick houses pepper the hills overlooking the plant. These company neighborhoods are among the most union dense suburbs in the country. Every other house was a member door I was sent out to knock. As the crow flies the plant could be a half mile through tick infested tall grass with no pathway but to get to work you’d still need to drive a mile out of the way to an arterial just to get to the entry-gate. While many of the worker’s houses had a view of their local high school, little league, and their employer terraced in the hills—almost none had sidewalks.
I walked by with door hangers in tow as two kids threw a football back and forth in the street with their grandma watching on from her porch to yell, “CAR!” as they zoomed past. A small staircase blocked the entrance of the doorway from the road at my first house. As I made my way up and reached for the doorbell, a pitbull lounged at me. Instinctively I swung the door hangers in front of Fido’s jowls and backed away. He was chained up, sprung from the doormat, his tether extended fully without any slack left. This is how you, politely and assertively, inform me to leave. That same week a co-worker of mine stationed in another swing state actually did get bitten. The pup broke skin and my co-worker ended up going to the ER to get vaccinated against rabies. Worse, his night off came with hours of paperwork. I marked the house “Inaccessible” in MiniVan, and marked myself lucky.
Up the street I talked through a screen door to a retired steelworker’s wife. She was 92 years old and lumbered to the door dragging an oxygen tank, her glass hands could barely grasp her walker holding herself upright. The actual steelworker I had on the list had passed away two years prior, but this hadn’t yet been marked in the system. However, her son was working a ten hour shift at Irvin Works and wouldn’t be home till late into the evening.
“Did you see if there was any mail in the box?” she asked.
I looked down the crumbling stone staircase, two of the steps needed to be skipped due to disrepair. The mailbox was by the road, full of election mailors, coupon advertisements, and some bills. I fetched them, and wondered when the last time she’d left her home.
“Thank you, have a blessed day sir,” she said. “If you got a second I have a story to tell you. My son bought me an iPad a few years back. Now, I’m too old to do what you’re doing now but I try to counter the lies I see on it. I know I’m probably not changing anyone’s minds but that’s not why I do it. Lies just can’t keep going unchecked forever. I just can’t believe people believe the lies.”
She said she was voting for Kamala, but that she couldn’t speak for her son.
There were blocks without anybody home, or at least willing to come to the door. One such house was home to a teacher, who typically aren’t home during the middle of the school day. Outside a small crew was renovating the facade.
“He’s not home, guy,” a man in a paint splattered brown Carhartt yelled holding a ladder. “Are you working for one of the candidates?”
“No, I’m with the owner’s union,” I said pointing to the dorky lanyard around my neck.
“Right, right. But you’re here for the election, no?”
“I am, who do you support?”
The man smiled ear-to-ear.
“We’re all for our man Donnie here!” The man jumped up like a spring released from its coil to sing a cheer, “Donald, Donald he’s our man, he can do it, that bitch can’t!”
The man at the top of the ladder was touching up the upstairs window sill with paint. “John, stop it, cut that shit out.”
But John kept dancing at the base of the ladder. “Who do you support?”
“Well, our union endorsed Kamala Harris, Bob Casey, and Nick Pisciottano. I think they're the best for working families…”
“Well, that’s too bad.”
John seemed disappointed, but not enough so as to stop him from dancing and cheering again, “Donnie, Donnie he’s our man, he can do it, that bitch can’t!”
Across the main road going down the hill there was another subdivision. I passed a neighborhood bar with no signage, just a neon beer stein in the window. It was the only wooden structure amidst the brick homes and while it looked less permanent it seemed like the type of place that had always been there. A few cars were parked in a dirt lot midday. There was no time to go in.
The only people I spoke with in this area were older steelworkers. A short man’s front door was wide open to let in the sunny afternoon breeze. I could see him and his dog watching the local news. No way to pretend nobody’s home. He was a few years from retirement but he wouldn’t tell me when exactly that would be. I asked him what issues he was thinking about in the upcoming election.
“Well, everything costs more these days, and I’m getting paid the same.”
“Costs have gone crazy, have you seen Trump’s tariff plan? If that goes through, things could get a lot worse,” I said. “Do you know who you plan on voting for?”
“Well, yes of course.”
“Is it Kamala?”
“That’s between me, the ballot box, and god, son.”
I marked these types of responses as ‘Soft opposed’ to our endorsements.
Next door I spoke with a woman who also worked at the mill. She had the first tiny dog I’d met in the neighborhood, but he barked with the might of a pitbull to defend her. I asked her who she’s voting for, and she just laughed.
“Don’t you worry about me and my vote.”
“Oh, are you supporting Harris/Walz?”
“No, I write myself in every year,” she proudly declared. “The only person I can trust is me.”
I wasn’t sure how to mark this, so I listed her as ‘Voting 3rd party.’ I told her I’d vote for her if she ever made the ballot.
One subdivision over there was the split ticket teacher, who is voting for Trump again but loves his local Democrats and called Rep. Pisciottano, a “personal friend and a great man,” a social worker who couldn’t stand “talking to anymore Trumpers,” a 74 year old retired steelworker who said his father voted Democrat every time and so did he. Another house, a 20-something steelworker came to the door, creaking and groaning in pain as he shushed his dog. He wore sweatpants and no shirt, and I realized I’d woke him up from a nap. He didn’t seem to hold it against me though. Through the grogginess, he possessed a singular focus on the issue that mattered to him.
“I just need the Nippon deal to go through,” he said. “The Nippon deal is my deal. All of this shit doesn’t matter if we let US Steel keep passing on empty promises. I just want a guarantee that I have a job in 10 years, in 20 years.”
A few days before I knocked doors with an IATSE member who worked on film/television crews. She’d just finished up a gig working on a television advertisement campaign funded by Nippon set to start after the election.
Nippon Steel, the Japanese company many associated with the fall of US Steel in the 1980s amidst the neoliberal economic turn, is currently in a legal fight to buy up US Steel facilities in the Mon Valley. The now multinational steel corporation is claiming they will guarantee not to ship Japanese steel into the country and opt to expand production in Western PA, but some critics point out that the shell company doing business as Nippon in the United States is not being forthright with the details of their supposed commitments. The Steelworkers Union President David McCall was an early critic of the deal, seeing it as likely cover for a private equity capital firm to further sell off US Steel for parts.
“There are clearly some people, they’ve scared the hell out of them and told them that if this deal doesn’t go through, we’re going to shut your facilities down,” McCall said. “They’re spending a hell of a lot of money on PR that I’d assume they’d put into our facilities.”
Nonetheless, this member’s mind was made up, “I know we’re pretty divided on this, but none of this matters if Nippon doesn’t go through.”
I asked him about the president.
“Oh that’s easy,” he said. “It’s Donald Trump. We’re all for Trump. The whole shop floor is for Trump, I’ll tell you that much.”
Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump said they intend to block the deal between Nippon and US Steel.
In Mckeesport I met my first true yinzer. Well, the first person to use “Yinz” in a sentence. The list of doors to knock were mostly self-selecting even at this stage two weeks before the election. All union members, around 80% of which were registered Democrats, 15% more were independent or third party, and only a few stray registered Republicans even made the list. Some of my fellow canvassers had taken on the unofficial policy of skipping them, the logic being that we don’t want to encourage people who are opposed to Harris to Get Out The Vote. The Yinzer had an R next to his name in the app. He was the last on the list, and only a couple blocks away. I figured we might as well, and my partner for the day figured it would be interesting too.
The Yinzer had a flag pole in his front yard, sporting an American flag on top and a Trump 2024 right below. His front yard had a lawn sign that read: Proud Union Home. He washed his truck while his doberman eyed me over his shoulder as I approached. I waved and he held his hand up to stop me.
“Not a step closer,” he said. “She bites.”
I froze and he walked up to shake my hand as I told him I was a union member coming to chat about the election.
“What union are you with?”
“I’m with the AFL-CIO. We endorsed Kamala Harris and Bob Casey for Senate.”
“Yeah I know they might have, but our [union] local damn sure didn’t endorse yinz.”
“Well, what are you worried about?”
“This inflation. Groceries. Gas. And yinz won’t like to hear this, I’m sure, but the goddamn border too.”
“You think Trump is going to solve that?”
“Well, sleepy Joe sure as hell won't. Kamala sure as hell won’t, and our sellout union leadership just will ignore the membership and let the do-nothing Dems do whatever they hell they want,” his voice rose and stopped to look back at his dog. “Kamala wants to get rid of coal. Our union president knows you need coal to make steel and he endorses her anyway. It’s beyond me”
“What about Bob Casey?”
“Bob Casey wouldn’t show his face in our union hall, ain’t no way.”
“How about Nick Pisciottano? Your union endorsed him too.”
“I haven’t met the guy, but I did see his sign in the union hall. I think he might be alright, but I don’t know much about him.”
“Got it.”
A neighbor drove by in a truck who’s rear window had a Blue Lives Matter/Punisher logo in it. The Yinzer nodded and the driver held a fist out in the air at him. The Yinzer held his fist up back at him.
“Why do you think your union endorsed Kamala?”
“Hell, I don’t know?” he said. “They’re out of touch? They’re not willing to fight? But let me tell you, steelworkers are willing to fight. The rank-and-file at least. And we’ll be waiting for yinz to join us or we’re fucked.”
The other canvasser in Wilkinsburg, Larimer, and Belmar
Wilkinsburg, Larimer, and Belmar are neighborhoods and close-in suburbs of Pittsburgh. Getting the turf we're told that, these are “base districts” they are working-class, highly union dense with mostly social service workers, all of which were Black. There was much hay made about Black voters shifting towards Trump in the election. On the ground the outward support didn’t strike me as super significant. These neighborhoods paled in relation to the Trump majority neighborhoods, overwhelmingly White, where streets were lined with the entire collector’s line of Trump signs. While the “base districts” were not coconut-pilled or awash in Brat themed Kamala merchandise, one could easily go an entire day of canvassing and not meet a single Trump supporter. My fellow canvassers with an eye for optimism would say that Kamala was building a new “silent majority.”
It was canvassing in Larimer where I heard maybe the most disturbing and racist comment on the trip. It actually came from a Kamala volunteer I was partnered with who told me, “Squirrel Hill is just as much a Democratic base, but we’re not uneducated.” This came after a member said he wasn’t voting due to the war in Gaza, which was actually the only time I heard anyone mention Israel-Palestine on the doors.1
In reality these were easily the most friendly and majority Harris supporting neighborhoods I knocked. These neighborhoods, like every neighborhood, said “inflation, cost of living, and crumbling infrastructure” were the most important issues. Honestly the most surprising thing, for every television ad making it seem like we live in a transphobic and xenophobic nation of fearful freaks, I could count on one hand how often these issues came up. And each time they did it was after naming other economic anxieties. Here, more often than any outward opposition people just didn’t care either way.
In one row of brick row homes every house was littered with stacks of election mailers. I knocked three doors in a row with no response before a UFCW member blasting Alicia Keys came down the stairs. I had interrupted doing her hair before her shift.
“It doesn’t matter who wins,” she told me curtly before going back inside, pointing her stereo out the window.
The building across the street was completely destroyed, literal rubble and rocks in the road. On the block around the corner a billboard hung above another pile of rubble saying, “the bipartisan infrastructure bill is coming.”
Weirdly enough Wilkinsburg was the only time I ran into a Trump canvasser in the wild. He was an older Black man who owned a landscaping business and called me over to his pickup truck in front of his house. He said he volunteered to canvas a few weeks back.
“Have you heard of Russia and Ukraine?” he asked me.
“You mean like the countries? Or the war?”
“Yeah, exactly.”
“For sure, I’ve heard of it.”
“That’s great to hear, that’s great to hear.” he said.. “There’s a lot of criminally insane people in this neighborhood who have never heard of it.”
The man started his engine, but before driving off leaned in to say one last thing.
“What do you think Biden and Kamala would do to fix all these abandoned houses and buildings in the area?” he asked. “Nothing, that’s what.”
“Yeah I can’t imagine Trump doing much either eh?”
“That’s for sure, for sure,” he shrugged. “Thank you for walking around asking people shit. It’s not that deep brother.”
“The Rank-and-File stand with me”
The night before the election Trump and Kamala both held rallies in Pittsburgh—Trump in the arena where the Penguins play. Kamala announced hers in a park Downtown a half mile away but changed it last minute to the Carrie Blast Furnace2 historic site, citing security concerns. Some of my fellow canvassers called it quits early to go to the rally, but I worked till it got dark, returned to the empty union hall and decided against going over. Kamala spoke for 10 minutes, followed by a one song performance by Katy Perry. The next morning everyone was complaining about the two hours of traffic leaving the rally. Since it was a former steel mill and not intended for massive public events there was only one way in and out.
“Waited two hours for her to go on, she gave the same little stump speech I already heard, and it was two hours getting out,” one canvasser said.
This was the only time I ever heard a volunteer speak ill of the candidate.
“What a waste of a photo opp.”
By lunch nobody mentioned the rally again.
Some volunteers joked about Trump’s dwindling crowd sizes, but at his arena show the night before the election this didn’t seem to be the case. I watched in my hotel room as he riffed for hours, realizing I hadn’t sat down and actually watched a Trump speech since 2016. It’s cliche to say but it really is feverish. There’s not really a way to capture anything in particular he says—seamlessly weaving a Chinese accent impersonating President Xi while praising his drug policies, with a rant about Baron playing too many video games but being a genius that ‘built his own computer.’
He’s also perhaps the first Republican I can recall using the phrase “rank-and-file,” as he lamented that while the “crooked Steelworker leadership may be with Kamala, the members are with me.”
Big splashes were made in the union world when Sean O’Brien and the Teamsters decided not to endorse either candidate in the election after a straw poll showed around 60% of the union’s membership supporting Trump. And at this final Pittsburgh stop the union support was hard to ignore. Behind Trump was a flank of men in t-shirts that read ‘Steelworkers for Trump.’ One man amongst them sported a hi-viz vest over his shirt—the Yinzer with the doberman.
Election Day - Are we talking to the same people?
The morning of the election as we sat around drinking coffee, waiting to get assigned our final turf. Some canvassers brought up some Iowa pollsters predicting Kamala to win the state. “She only does polls in Iowa so she’s the absolute best, she doesn’t try to claim to know everything nationwide.”
People murmured in excitement at the prospect of the Trump stronghold being “back in play.” In one man’s mind we were in for a landslide, another woman from the teacher’s union was confident that some of the White women she talked to were only sheepish since their husbands maybe listening. I know hindsight is 20/20, and I don’t mean this as a humble brag that I was a silent pessimist not buying this hype, but I legitimately wondered if we were talking to the same people.
On the doors, my last day in Western PA started just like the rest. Only this was GOTV crunch time, conversations were quick, to the point, all about making sure identified supporters actually went out to the polls. By that metric my day was a total disaster.
A young electric workers’ union woman answered the door and apologized to me for voting for Trump. Another woman thanked me for getting people out to vote, but said I shouldn’t waste my time on her house since she already voted, “you need to talk to my crazy neighbors,” she said and gave me a handful of her leftover Halloween candy for the road. Down the road I caught a woman coming back from the grocery store and ballot box, “I’m sorry I can’t support your wars,” she told me. “It’s hurt too many of my family, sending all this money so I can see my siblings die for nothing. I’m done with it.” Then another White woman union member told me, “I’m sorry but I just couldn’t do it, I’m with the union through and through, but Kamala had her shot and gave us this economy.”
I think this may seem obvious looking back, but my last day on the doors did not spark much in the way of enthusiasm. I coped. I told myself I’m a natural pessimist about these things, I’m overly critical about the campaign since I wasn’t excited about our candidate, all my experiences are inherently extremely circumstantial, I didn’t really know anything about anything. In the end my gut ended up being right, but again what does that really matter? It’s literally a coin flip, none of us knew anything about anything.
Maybe it takes MORE unrelenting optimists to win.3 As much as I’d love to say if things were run MY way, to my tastes and preferences: acknowledging that workers are losing in our economy but we can only fight that by uniting for a more egalitarian world, naming real economic enemies not the same easy political scapegoats, etc. Maybe, then we would have won. In the end I still don’t know. What I do know is that the people that lost are the ones who are still pretending that they know exactly why: woke vs. not-woke, change vs. nothing will fundamentally change, too close to Biden/too different, hard economics, cancel culture, Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, criminal vs prosecutor. These people really just need to inspect your wallet if you could kindly hand it over for a second.
The last person I spoke to on the doors in Carnegie wasn’t even a member. I walked up to an empty house at the same time as an Amazon delivery driver. He was a young Black man who noticed my lanyard and asked me who I’m out here for.
“Let’s fight right now,” he said, playfully putting his fists up like a 1920’s boxer. “Nah, I voted for Trump this morning, but I don’t really like either of them. People be taking this shit too seriously.”
Honestly I don’t know if I’m more depressed that I didn’t have to defend a genocidal status quo position I don’t agree with at all since it meant nobody really was thinking about it.
The Carrie Blast Furnace is what’s left of the massive steel rolling facility that used to make up the massive Homestead Steel Works which closed in 1983. It was made a national historic site in 2006.
Or maybe another billion dollars to dump into a campaign running as the Diet Cola version of the other party.