Gabrielle Gurley
Harris canvasser Chris Tuck drops off Harris-Walz campaign leaflets in West Philadelphia.
This story is part of the Prospect’s on-the-ground Election 2024 coverage. You can find all the other stories here.
PHILADELPHIA – “I feed the voters!”
The older Black woman behind the screen door pointed at a nearby church. She had that 100 percent exasperated cadence that African American elders take on when delivering a “why is this even a question?” message to a young person, in this case, canvasser Chris Tuck, who was asking her about her “plan to vote.” Not only did she plan to vote, she intended to cook for people voting and working at the local polling place. Party affiliation? “Democrat!” What about everyone else living there? “Everyone in this house votes!”
I’d met up with Tuck, a Working Families Party canvasser, at the party’s office on South 60th Street late last Friday morning, as he prepared to head out to his assigned streets in the predominantly Black Haddington/Cobbs Creek neighborhoods in West Philadelphia for the traditional staple of presidential election-year organizing: knocking on doors to get registered Democrats to the polls. By pure coincidence, I landed back in my old neighborhood—I’d grown up across the street from Cobbs Creek Park.
Every single corner of West Philadelphia seemed to have its quota of “Defend Choice!” “Defend Democracy!” and “We Won’t Go Back!” posters up on street poles, reminding people to “Vote Early!” These two sections of West Philadelphia are working/middle-class areas of small rowhomes, some of them well maintained but more than a few fallen into disrepair, owned by frail elderly people who can’t keep them up or those without the time, interest, or money to do so. The neighborhood is in the throes of gentrification, but like a number of shopping districts deep in West Philly, South 60th Street is gritty.
Right off the Market-Frankford Line elevated subway stop, there’s a midsized market, a large beauty supply store, and small eateries. At the next corner, there’s a day care center with a large green tree mural painted on the side, across the street from the Swank Bar and Cafe, which has been there for just about forever. Between the two blocks is a desolate and dirty bank building with large arched windows, still empty after decades, a testament to America’s disinvestment in Black urban spaces.
Philadelphia, the sixth-largest city in the country, is an old-school Democratic stronghold. Despite the prognostications of the national media cognoscenti holding up innumerable polling data, short of aliens invading with mind-altering technology, some significant swing to former president Donald Trump among Black voters is, shall we say, dubious. President Biden secured 81 percent of the 2020 vote in Philadelphia to Trump’s 18 percent. While that was a nearly three-percentage-point increase for Trump over his 2016 showing, a mid-October NAACP poll of 1,000 registered Black voters released on Monday found support for Trump among Black men under 50 slipping and Kamala Harris’s support increasing.
The Harris–Tim Walz ticket will win in Black neighborhoods and the rest of the city. But the question is, how many votes will that yield? To keep Pennsylvania in play, one of the canvassing imperatives here is to stop the erosion of Black voters by getting as many of them to vote as possible. The concern is that the stay-at-home vote, if there was such a measurement, is likely to be much higher than the number of Black voters that Trump could peel off.
In 2024, the “Kamala vs. the couch” syndrome is real.
THE NATIONAL MEDIA THAT HAS BEEN MUSING about Trump’s appeal to Black men must have skipped over Philadelphia. Trump is still unpopular among older voters here for his role in Atlantic City casino bankruptcies—“A.C.” is a recreation destination, and during the height of the casino gambling era in the 1990s and early 2000s, it was an attractive job center. Most Black voters are well aware of Trump’s recent remarks about “Black jobs,” the Black-Asian vice president being “a very low IQ person,” a certain comedian joking about “carving watermelons” with a buddy for Halloween at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, and most of all, his lies. Walking down 60th Street, I overheard one senior jawboning with a friend about why Trump couldn’t stick to “one lie” (“He’s got, what, 30,000 lies?”) and how his comments about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, were “bullshit.”
WFP canvassers have been confronting one striking piece of misinformation. Chris Tuck found that some Black men like Trump because they believe he was personally responsible for the COVID-relief dollars they received in 2020, since he had signed the checks. The bill authorizing the checks passed Congress on a bipartisan basis; in a bid to take credit, Trump bullied the Treasury Department into allowing him to sign the checks. “The Trump supporters are just people who are uninformed,” he says. “It’s just insane.”
Tuck, 22, is an African American from West Palm Beach, Florida, who had been a student at the city’s University of the Arts, a nonprofit college that suddenly shut its doors in June. He told me that 15 to 20 percent of people on his lists answered the doors. Usually they were older folks, or people at home with kids, or remote workers.
One of his first stops was a Haddington side street, empty and quiet except for workers hauling long planks off a pickup truck and headed into a home. The block had that mix of run-down places and cute ones with outdoor porches, decorated in either traditional fall red-and-yellow leaves, pumpkins, and scarecrows, or in Halloween kitsch—skeletons, witches, and spiders in webs. Halfway down the block, a friendly, stray green-eyed tabby cat followed us, checking out trash cans along the way. Neither of us had anything for the tabby to snack on.
Gabrielle Gurley
The first person Tuck talked to was a Trump supporter. The short, older, balding man took his time coming down his porch steps. He feared Kamala Harris’s “position” on mandatory gun buybacks (PolitiFact rated the Trump claim that Harris supports a gun ban in 2024 “mostly false.” In her 2019 Democratic presidential primary run, Harris supported a mandatory assault weapons ban.) The voter said a ban meant that ordinary people would fall prey to criminals who can get guns easily. “He’s for the Second Amendment, she’s not.” He then went on to spin a hard-to-follow tale about Harris’s family lineage after seeing some online photos of various Harris “relatives” who did not look like her.
Gun violence and crime are among the top issues that canvassers hear on the doors. More than a few houses had Trump-Vance mailers tucked into doors and sticking out of mailboxes that dealt with immigration, promising harsh sentences for rapists and “human” and child traffickers.
A few doors down, a heavyset Vietnam veteran in gray sweats didn’t seem eager to talk, but he stepped out on his porch. “All the things that Trump is saying? I can’t go along with that.” Yes, he had a plan to vote, but he then winced and turned around to head back inside. “I’m suffering, I’m sick.”
There were more than a few Ring doorbells with “please leave a message” recordings on them. One woman listened to Tuck’s questions on her Ring. “I’m working,” she said, before cutting him off. Another Democrat only answered a couple of questions before being “done” with talking about his election intentions. “Don’t worry about it, I will walk my ass around here to vote.”
Back at the office several hours later, the canvassers reviewed their afternoons before they went out for an early-evening round on the doors. Rasheeda Bagwell-Hyland, a parent in her forties, has found that misogyny is a big obstacle for Harris. Many Black male voters, she says, don’t believe that a woman should be in a race to run the country, let alone win, even though women raised them and have worked hard both inside and outside the home. “A lot of Black men are taught that women are less and not as mentally strong,” Bagwell-Hyland says.
As for Trump and the COVID checks? “I’m going to scream if one more person says they think he’s responsible for it because he signed the check,” she says.
“HAVE YOU VOTED YET?” THE DJ SHOUTED. The fast-walking Black female student didn’t miss a step, looked over her shoulder, and smiled. Not yet, but she planned to.
The day before the residential canvassing, I went to another West Philly neighborhood, University City, home to University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University campuses, for a Women for Harris/Working Families Party early-voting party. A DJ wearing a blue jacket covered in pepperoni pizza slices and yellow eyeglasses topped with palm trees interrupted people’s walks to raise awareness about the official early-voting center and other options in an unremarkable block of storefronts. The pizza was plentiful, as was the Harris-Walz swag: “Pennsylvania for Harris” buttons and posters in all flavors of outrage, from mild (“Workers for Harris”) to hot (“Trump Wants To Rip Away Your Health Care”). Some drivers honked, and a firefighter sounded their siren as they passed by.
Democratic state Rep. Rick Krajewski represents sections of West and Southwest Philadelphia. He’d been handing out literature to residents, and found “a lot of excitement and energy” around the centrally located, “super busy” early-voting location. He’s skeptical that disillusioned voters will vote for Trump; he sees them likely not voting at all. The narrative about Black voter shifts to Trump is “a misdirection,” he says. “We should turn out the vote in Black communities,” he says, “but at the end of the day, it is white people who vote for Trump.”
Gabrielle Gurley
Outreach to incarcerated Black men about their voting rights has been a special focus for Krajewski. Under Pennsylvania law, people on parole or probation, under house arrest or pretrial detention, or even serving time for a misdemeanor can vote by absentee ballot. Anyone with a felony conviction who is released before the election can also vote. All told, the state lawmaker says, there are some 30,000 eligible voters in county jails across the state. Those numbers could mean the difference between Democrats winning and losing in Pennsylvania.
Standing in the doorway of a furniture store with dressers and chairs at the entrance, Randy, an African American veteran, tells me he plans to vote on Election Day. He is aware that Harris’s history as a prosecutor in California has alienated many Black voters. “Holding on to bitterness like that is not going to change anything in this country,” he says.
Voters have choices, he acknowledges. “But if you don’t vote for anyone, you might as well vote for Donald Trump. That upsets me as a Black man,” he adds. “If you knew your own history, you wouldn’t be saying ignorant comments and stuff, especially about her being an African American woman. In my life, the most powerful force in my house was a woman.”
Another voter, Cecilia, believes that the focus on Black men is designed to divide Black men and Black women and set up “a scapegoat” if Harris loses.
At one point, a store worker who didn’t want “politicking” at the entrance moved the three of us along. “I’m trying to sell furniture here,” he says.
WHERE ONE STORE OWNER SEES VOTERS nibbling on pizza and blocking potential customers, another retailer sees opportunity. Anthony “Munch” Steele is an African American small-business owner on his way to celebrating one year in his “booming” business downtown, blocks from City Hall. He approached WFP about holding a Friday evening happy hour in his Free Press streetwear boutique, where Gen Z shoppers could browse his fall collection of pants, sneakers, and T-shirts emblazoned with everything from graffiti art to a golfer taking a swing. “I’m not going to be biased, but I would love to see a Black woman be our president,” says Steele.
Salaah Muhammad is the organizing director for the Working Families Party of Pennsylvania, which co-sponsored the event with Steele. Statewide, the WFP has knocked on roughly 545,000 doors; adding in phone and text contact attempts, those numbers add up to the low millions. He sees a small event like a happy hour as a unique way to meet people doing what they like to do—shop—to help establish more energetic and trusted relationships around voting and politics.
Black voters, Muhammad says, “have a very interesting relationship with the political discourse,” even “frayed,” as he describes it. “We’re used to being used and then discarded, so trust has to come from a genuine place.” The focus on Black men is just “clickbait” and “sensationalism,” he adds and emphasizes that Black men and women are core constituencies for Harris.
For African Americans, there is a persistent frustration with politicians for their inability to address endemic problems like gun violence and crime, the school-to-prison pipeline, substandard education, and the economic inequalities that affect Black lives and hamper achievement. Some of these issues can be addressed by a president, yet many more of these are responsibilities that state and local leaders have long ignored or avoided.
This fraying is central to the torpor and disillusionment that descends over Black communities like in Philadelphia when presidential candidates come calling on residents for their votes. The narrative surrounding Black men is devoid of any of the nuances that define urban challenges. It’s the latest diversion from the inability of politicians to craft workable solutions once officials count and archive the votes. That’s the narrative that Kamala Harris is up against.
