Notes from the Road–Final Push
by Gil Pimentel ‘84
I came to North Carolina on what felt like a fool’s errand…trying to pick up a Senate seat from a retiring Republican incumbent. The first day of canvassing strengthened the perception of my own foolishness. Most people weren’t home, and those who were had either already voted or were planning to do so. But over successive days I encountered more and more voters who hadn’t voted. Voters to whom I could say, with the fabulous materials Crimson Goes Blue provided, “Here’s where you can go. In fact, if you have time, here’s where you can go RIGHT NOW.” Several people took me up on that. (North Carolina’s early voting is extremely convenient, and allows for in-person voting almost every day before election day.) Today, I teamed up with Lisa Ulrich to drive people who don’t have transport to early voting sites. I helped a man who emigrated from the Central African Republic navigate the complexities of his first vote as a US citizen...and did so entirely in French. Another man also requested my help…and as I read out the names of the candidates on the ballot, it dawned on me that he was quite possibly illiterate. The cashier at a dollar store did not know that there was an early voting station a three-minute drive away, and when I gave her the location and the hours, she made a plan to go there before work the next day, and to take her voting-age children with her. She thanked me profusely for the help…and that moment of connection--as well as many others--are what have made this trip worthwhile. Today in particular, as we canvassed voters in Durham’s central bus station, the early voting flyers we offered strangers by way of introduction offered an entrée into a kaleidoscopic array of North Carolinian lives: busy, well-dressed professionals who had already voted; homeless people who wondered how they could do so without fixed addresses; earnest college students striving to build a better America; immigrants looking for their place within the American dream; an ex-con for whom that dream had evaporated, and another who had found redemption after prison…and would be voting republican.
So after five full days of doing this, am I moving the dial? Yes. People are voting (who may not have otherwise voted) because of me. Because of all of us who have canvassed. Will it make a difference? I don’t know. Like Georgia, North Carolina is so evenly divided that a few hundred votes could mark the difference between a win or a loss in statewide elections where millions of votes are cast. Think of that…the fate of the US Senate (and by extension, the nation) could be determined by the number of people present at a typical Broadway theater. So every vote is worth fighting for. And in that effort, I’m recalling the last time I thought I was on a fool’s errand: in 2020, I spent all of a very lonely Covid Thanksgiving weekend writing letters to Georgia voters, thinking it would be impossible that they would ever elect TWO Democrats to the Senate. But sometimes, even fools get it right!
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