Today the Stansbury Forum’s co-editor Peter Olney pens a reflection on door knocking for our future.

Many friends, family and comrades are heading to election work in battleground states where the Presidential election will likely be won or lost. As it was in 2020, the difference between winning or losing will be by a few thousand votes!

I was in Maricopa County, Arizona in 2020 knocking on doors for Joe Biden in 95-100 degrees. He won Maricopa, and so goes Arizona. and so went the Presidential election.

This year, as in the midterms of 2022, I am headed to Orange County, California – the OC – where we have the chance to  pick up two House seats: CD 45 and 40. Because  Katie Porter (D) (CA) vacated her seat to run for Senate, now we need to defend that seat (CD 47) as well. My principal focus will be on the 45th CD, a seat presently held by MAGA partisan Michelle Steel. 

In 2022 we were able to motivate a substantial number of members of my union, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) to work on the campaign of her opponent Jay Chen. Steel caught our attention and our ire because she sponsored legislation to put the ILWU and other maritime unions under the Railway Labor Act. She did this during our negotiations for a new contract signaling that union strength should be handcuffed in the “national interest”.

We lost by 6% in 2022 in a district that Biden carried in 2020 by 6%. This time we have new energy at the top of the ticket and a Vietnamese American lawyer and small businessman named Derek Tran as a candidate. This district, which feathers its way down from southern LA County east of the beaches, west of Anaheim and Santa Ana, is the home to the largest concentration of Vietnamese outside of Vietnam.

In November of 2023 and July of 2024 the ILWU sponsored day long trainings on door knocking and direct contact for our members. Now those volunteers will be deployed to the OC as part of flipping the House of Representatives!

One of our retired longshore members was kind and committed enough to provide Christina Perez and I an apartment in the  City of Signal Hill. This is a “short” LA commute to campaign HQ in Placentia and Westminster in the OC.. Signal Hill is a fascinating place. As its name suggests it is on a hill completely surrounded by the City of Long Beach. There are a little over 10,000 residents and there are still active oil derricks pumping black crude. The derricks are surrounded by residential neighborhoods, and some of the luxury housing would put Beverly Hills to shame. Oil was discovered here in 1921 and the City was incorporated separately from Long Beach to avoid pesky and bothersome corporate regulation. (For a modern day riff on this idea read “A Libertarian Fantasy in the Tropics” on the Stansbury Forum.)

LA never disappoints. On Labor Day there was a big union/labor march in the harbor with contingents of over a thousand workers from the Carpenters and Laborers unions, both Latino immigrant powerhouses, and smaller yer impressive contingents from the ILWU and Teamsters. 

Here is the class and demographic diagnostic. The next day, the LA Times published a photo of SAG AFTRA members marching with a caption and no story. The Spanish language paper La Opinion, a subsidiary of the Times published a giant front page photo of the Laborers’ contingent with a headline: “Fuerza Sindical”. Inside there were three pages of photos and story. Can we guess the demographic targets of the two papers?

The dynamism of LA labor captivates me and of course this is the 2nd largest Metro region in the country and it is an economic and political power house. How ironic that the Governor, the Speaker Emerita, a first class Machiavellian  pol, and  last but not least, the Presidential nominee, all hail from the small City of 800,00 and 49 square miles by the bay: San Francisco! 

We have already scheduled a phone bank for our ILWU retirees to call ILWU members in the OC. (For how it worked in 2022: The Union Difference Behind the Orange Curtain – Working the Mid-terms in Little Saigon.) Two Saturday mobilizations are scheduled for the Tran campaign.The work begins in the midst of a brutal heat wave. Drink lots of liquids, brave the freeways and let’s bring home a victory in November, 2024

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