On a beautiful fall day I travelled twenty miles outside of the beltway to canvass in Virginia's Tenth Congressional District, held by the GOP for four decades. Not after tomorrow!
In an affluent compact subdivision of narrow culture-de-sacs sprouting off secondary through-roads like buds off a branch, I knocked on 59 doors in the hope of speaking to 81 registered voters and had a response from about half the houses. The energy to vote was palpable as, unstated, a referendum on Trump two years in. The door-answerer in a couple of houses gave me guarded, laconic answers to my conversational questions about how they were inclined to vote and I got the message to back off and I thanked them for speaking with me and left, realizing the favorable contrast of polite tight-lippedness to the unhinged threat to shoot me in the initial exchange, as happened to me further west in the district on my second day of canvassing.
I ran into a lot of pockets of fervent occupants on my dedicated who had plans for the whole household to vote for the democratic challenger Jennifer Wexton against the republican incumbent congresswoman Barbara Comstock. A man who answered at one house where I was seeking four registered voters said that he was a fifth occupant of the house, and all five were voting for Wexton. Is that a signal of what's coming down tomorrow, or an outlier in this "safe" red district?
We're all Americans, and all (except for Indians) immigrants. We all work together, and get together to point towards a greater future for our country, like the great cross-pollination of southerners and northerners, city-dwellers and rural boys, easterners and westerners in the great American wave of soldiers who swept across the Pacific and the Atlantic in WW2 winning that tragic conflagration by cooperating magnificently for a more humane world by the Greatest Generation, my parents and for many Americans, their grandparents.
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