I Knocked on Hundreds of Doors Ahead of the Midterms. Here’s What I Learned

By Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben

I have spent most of the time since Labor Day out across the country, campaigning, knocking on doors, speaking at rallies ahead of the midterms. I’ve been in upstate New York and eastern Pennsylvania, in northern Montana and the Central Valley of California, on the Kansas-Missouri line and southern Maine, in eastern Iowa and south-central Michigan, in Austin and in Dallas. And I’ve been online more nights than not, helping with phone banks into every part of America. At every turn I’ve been joined by my Third Act colleagues, hundreds of older Americans deeply engaged in this fight — so I feel as if I’d had a pretty widespread exposure to what’s happening in the swing states in this most tumultuous of political years.

Which is different from saying I know who’s going to win Tuesday’s elections. I’ve got no clue — most of the doors I was knocking on belonged to Democrats or independents, and perhaps the ones we walked past were bulging with eager Republicans just waiting to go out and vote for more MAGA. (I will say, though, that on all those streets I didn’t come across any GOP doorknockers out doing the same thing as we were; perhaps the enthusiasm gap some analysts have described is real.) But I did come away with a few basic conclusions, reminders of where we are as a nation in 2026.

First, and perhaps most mundane: this is one hell of a big country. I’ve wandered the streets of Bakersfield, California, in 103-degree record heat, and the neighborhoods of Lansing on gentle autumn afternoons, and the suburbs of Portland in a nippy New England breeze. I’ve “talked” to voters who spoke only Chinese, and to Hispanic Americans who were clearly wary I might be ICE. Though this isn’t technically a national election, it has sure felt like one: people everywhere were clear that, as Donald Trump has insisted, he is “on the ballot.”

Second, though politicians of all stripes constantly insist that this is the “richest nation on earth,” that really isn’t true at anything other than a statistical level. Yeah, I wandered up the long, long driveways of a few McMansions to leave literature, but most of the houses I stopped at were modest at best, and it was very clear that people were having trouble getting by. In apartment districts, transience was the rule — voting lists were hopelessly out of date. The signs of a certain kind of regularized chaos — strewn toys, blaring TVs — were standard. There were well-kept small bungalows, but there were also an awful lot of properties edging toward squalor. In some places, we were helping with canvasses organized by an excellent group called Seed the Vote, and the question they suggested we use when people opened the door was: “What’s the issue that worries you most?” And the answers were very clear: the price of food, the price of gas, the price of healthcare.

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Third, and likely because of this, it’s an angry country. It wasn’t hard to get people talking, and very few of them were this side of pissed. Interestingly, most of that anger seemed to be channeled at Trump — but also at the “oligarchs,” a word that has come into wide usage since the last election. If you’d surveyed people a few years ago about figures like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg I think opinions might have been mixed — they’d brought wonders of a sort into our world, and Americans have traditionally had a species of respect for those who managed to amass great fortunes. But now, at least among these voters, they were figures of scorn and contempt and even hatred, broadly believed to be using their wealth to corrupt the system on the road to more wealth. Musk, of course, is dumping money on these elections, but he’s not doing it in his name, instead funneling the money through conservative groups and his own PAC. Figures like Texas Senate candidate James Talarico are doing their best to connect the spending splurge directly to him, precisely because he understands just how hated the tycoon has become.

Fourth, interestingly, this means that in many areas the election has become in part about “data centers,” something that literally no one was discussing two years ago. In some rural areas where they’re actually being built, people are upset about land, water, noise and air pollution. But the upset stretches into those suburban and urban quarters where no one is going to erect one of these colossi. And there it’s a proxy for rising electric rates, but also for the ever-greater control by the aforementioned oligarchs. (“Tech bros” is another relatively new coinage that seems to have spread widely.) Opposition to data centers is literally shorthand for standing up to concentrated power, especially since that power is loudly proclaiming the point of their new technology is to take away our jobs (and perhaps to extinguish all life on earth, but hey).

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All of which combines to make me think that if the Democrats emerge from these contests with the momentum some pollsters imagine, then they have a real opportunity to reframe the national debate. It’s not left or right — I didn’t hear anyone on any stoop blessing or blasting socialism. It’s, as Talarico has been eloquently insisting, “top versus bottom,” a vertical axis that could make it easier for Americans to, for once, center their anger on proper targets instead of the various culture-war diversions the Republicans have been throwing up for years.

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