This is obviously unscientific and sometimes misleading. In 1984 I rang doorbells in Manchester, N.H., and found overwhelming support for Walter Mondale. Four days later Gary Hart won the New Hampshire primary overwhelmingly.
More often I get a good sense of what’s on voters’ minds. For instance, in 1992 I went door to door in Niles, Ill., and found people talking about the high cost of prescription drugs, an issue that was being ignored in Congress and was not on the radar of most politicians.
This year I chose San Pablo, a working-class suburb of San Francisco, in order to see how Hillary Clinton’s lead among middle-class voters, especially Latinos, was holding up. To gain more cooperation on the porches of the tiny homes in the area, I brought along my preteen nieces, Isabel and Celia Alter.
The ethnic mix in the neighborhood was extraordinary. We spoke with Caucasian, African-American, Mexican-American, Salvadoran-American, Portuguese-American, Filipino-American and Chinese-American voters, all within a few blocks.
Nothing I learned gave me a fix on the contest. If it had, I would have distrusted it anyway. But you could see little straws in the wind. I was most struck by how often the voters I spoke with broke the voting patterns of their ethnic and gender identities and focused on issues outside the usual public debate.
This is important, because any winning strategy requires not just bringing out your supporters but blunting the other side’s. It’s like breaking serve in tennis, or retiring the heart of the order in baseball or holding the other team’s star under 10 points in basketball.
So If Hillary Clinton can cut Barack Obama’s support among young voters from, say, 4-1 to 3-1, or Obama can do the same among older white women, they’re ahead of the game. That’s why Bill Clinton spent his time Sunday in black churches that are heavily pro-Obama, and Michelle Obama joined Oprah Winfrey, Caroline Kennedy and surprise guest Maria Shriver in courting women.
Some of the folks in San Pablo are voting as predicted. Paula Caceles, a 53-year-old Salvadoran woman who cleans houses, will cast her first vote today. She doesn’t care about the Kennedy endorsements or anything Bill Clinton might have done wrong. She just wants the Clintons back: “They have a record. They have experience.”
But down the block the movement toward Obama is clear. Guillermo Oliveres, also Salvadoran, says, “Obama is something new—he’s not just for one race.” Oliveres can’t vote yet, but he says that many of his friends will go for Obama. He says those immigrants who have been here longer—often the ones eligible to vote—are less stereotyped in their thinking about African-Americans and will have no problem voting for him. Oliveres’s 12-year-old son says all the kids at school are for Obama.
Gilberto Seguro, a Filipino male nurse, says the experience of a female president in the Philippines has made him and others in the Filipino community comfortable with Hillary—one of those unnoticed factors that can account for thousands of votes.
Another such factor is a fear on the part of some African-Americans that Obama will get shot. In South Carolina, Michelle Obama traveled widely to urge blacks to vote their hopes, but there hasn’t been as much time in California to get that message out. “I think he’d make a wonderful president, but I won’t vote for him,” says Ashley Sims, a 21-year-old student. “I can’t protect him, and she [Michelle] can’t either. Somebody’s got to think about his kids and grandkids.”
Terah Haggin, who trains bomb-sniffing dogs, and Tim Freeman, a mechanic, will cancel each other out. She’s for Obama; he’s for Hillary. But they say their votes are hardly solid.
In that, they speak for most Californians. I’m pretty sure that if I had gone to the same block on a different day I would have heard a whole series of other reactions.
That’s what makes this election so much fun, and so hard to figure out.
