Volunteers from Buffalo poured into Erie County on Saturday to bolster what is a clearly well organized Democratic turn-out effort.
Erie, Pa. – Even though the presidential polls are tight as can be in the Keystone State ten days out from Election Day, spirits were high here late Saturday morning inside the Harris-Walz campaign’s satellite office in Erie — one of the commonwealth’s most competitive counties.
Local Democratic residents are jazzed that so many out-of-towners are busing in from neighboring states to help out — even though their local volunteer list is already in the hundreds. Around 11 a.m., dozens of excited out-of-state Democrats hopped off a roughly hour-and-a-half bus ride from Buffalo, New York, to get to work. With New York uncompetitive on the presidential level, these Empire State Democrats have calculated that their volunteer efforts are more valuable here than back home in the lead-up to November 5.
“We had to do something,” says one elderly woman standing inside the cramped Harris-Walz campaign office here a few minutes before her training. Adds the elderly man and fellow Buffalo resident standing beside her: “The alternative is just too awful to contemplate.”
Saturday’s out-of-town volunteers bolster what is clearly a highly organized and well-staffed Democratic canvassing effort here in Erie, the ultra-competitive bellwether county that swung for Donald Trump in 2016 and went blue for Joe Biden four years later. Whoever wins Erie this cycle is likely to win the Electoral College vote. Hence the Democratic campaign’s robust on-the-ground effort here, which includes eleven paid staffers, two coordinated campaign offices, and more than 500 active volunteers.
The Democratic ticket has knocked more than 63,000 doors and made more than 311,000 phone calls, according to the campaign.
“People are showing up. They’re donating their time, they’re donating their money, they’re donating what they can to help out. And I think that shows how much skin in the game people have in this,” says Democratic canvasser Susie Guisto, who was born and bred in Cameron County and now lives in Erie with her husband.
Volunteers who landed here Saturday morning got a brief training from a wide-eyed young staffer named Jeremy, who is wearing a camouflage Harris-Walz ball cap and cargo pants as he delivers his first-time canvasser spiel for what’s probably the zillionth time.
He’s clear about the stakes. “First of all, I want to establish one thing, and that’s that Donald Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016 by an average of five votes precinct,” he says, before asking canvassers to shout out why this election matters to them and what they think is at stake. “ Democracy!” yells one. “Reproductive rights!” shouts another. The Supreme Court, the environment, and “humanity” also top the list for Saturday afternoon’s crowd.
Most of the voters on the Erie Democrats’ target list are “friendly” supporters who need encouragement to get off the couch and vote, Jeremy explains. “It’s not top of mind. Our job is to make it top of mind for them.” The other 10 to 20 percent are undecided, he says, meaning it’s important for canvassers to make every conversation “meaningful,” even if they only end up talking with a few folks.
Jeremy is helping the Democratic ticket run a tight ship here, and advises volunteers to stick to the script: “This is not something you have to say word for word, but this is a message that the campaign has given us to share with the voters we meet.”
The message, he says, should sound something like the following: “Our country is in a fight for its future, and V.P. Harris is giving us a new way forward. She’s running to bring down costs in groceries, housing, prescription drugs, and protect our freedoms,” he says. “Trump and his dangerous 2025 agenda would implement a nationwide sales tax, would threaten to cut Social Security and Medicare, and implement a nationwide abortion ban.”
Like many Republicans and Democrats this cycle, Harris-Walz campaign volunteer Tobi Zenker thinks the polls are just noise. “I’m a volunteer in Pennsylvania because New York is blue and Pennsylvania is a swing state, so I’m here to help in any way I can,” says Zenker, a who lives a 25-minute drive away in Findlay, New York. She’ll help canvass out in Pittsburgh before returning to Erie in the final stretch, and will serve as a poll worker in her hometown on Election Day. Her husband hands out yard signs every weekend and tells her that people have been very “receptive” to the Harris-Walz campaign’s message.
But the “vitriol” she’s seeing and hearing this election cycle “breaks my heart,” she adds. “It’s really discouraging when you drive through the countryside in any community and see all the Trump signs, and they’re so angry they have six signs or ten signs in their yard.”
“It just makes my heart sink,” she adds.
The nearby Erie Democratic Party headquarters is also bustling with activity, with loads of local residents streaming into the office late Saturday morning to attend a closed-press meeting led by the county chairman.
A few blocks away, on Saturday afternoon, United Steelworkers union members were rallying and canvassing ahead of tonight’s Bernie Sanders rally. Erie residents are being bombarded with Republican surrogates this weekend too, including vice presidential candidate and Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, as well as West Virginia’s Republican governor and soon-to-be-U.S. senator Jim Justice.
On her way out of the Harris-Walz campaign office Saturday afternoon to start canvassing, Buffalo resident Anna Klapakis says she’s “absolutely surprised, disappointed, ashamed” and “fearful” that the polls look so tight here this close to Election Day. “I’m hoping it’s some kind of a make believe fluke thing,” she tells National Review in an interview, holding dozens of campaign signs under her arm to distribute to voters when she knocks doors.
Klapakis is also convinced that some of the hesitancy about Harris from swing voters is driven by “misinformation” online, and that there’s a significant portion of the electorate that may simply not be interested in sending a woman to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. That could explain why so many Americans continue to tell pollsters that they do not know enough about her, she hypothesizes.
“I think they’re afraid to say, ‘I don’t want to vote for her.’ So then they substitute that with the phrase: ‘I don’t know enough about her.’ What more do you need to know?” she asks. Some people just don’t want a woman in the White House, she says, sighing.
“They didn’t want Hillary. They don’t want Harris.”
But this former Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton door-knocker is undeterred: “I will continue to fight for democracy, and I will go down fighting for democracy.”
Others sound more optimistic about what they’re seeing on the ground. Harris had “a little bit of disadvantage coming in late, but I think she’s doing well,” says Erie native and self-described life-long Democrat David Wagner. “All the enthusiasm I’ve seen up here in Erie, I personally think she’s going to win. She’s going to win Erie County for sure, and probably Pennsylvania,” he told NR Saturday afternoon before he went canvassing, adding that “it’s going to be really close.”