Volunteer Voices: Trina Doerfler
Trina traveled with Team Texas on their primary trip in March 2024
What a group! Truly truly stronger together. We spent a hot humid week marching up and down neighborhoods inn McAllen Texas, each day beautifully different, as car groups and neighborhoods changed, local orgs all with their own spectrum of strengths and spice.
We were a group that stretched all the demographics, from all over the world, from many different decades making a rich, strong, vibrant (funny, kind, generous, thoughtful and caring) group whose first priority was taking care of each other, thus enabling us all to go out to the next set of doors. Both Elizabeth and Olivia led us with extraordinary awareness both of the group and all of us individually. We felt held, seen, heard and considered, not a small feat.
I traveled with CP in 2022 to Arizona, then Texas for Midterm day (expecting a red wave) and Georgia for the run-off. I remember clinging to my carpool partner the first morning of the first day but by the third there was no fear and I was really looking forward to meeting the people on whose doors I was knocking. I was back in touch with my love for the human race. That's why I couldn’t wait to start this year.
We worked first for the campaign of Michelle Vallejos, a woman with deep roots and investment in the community, a bright spirit with star power, going places. She won the primary and will re-match with the incumbent. We are hopeful and will return this fall. And then an amazing org called LUPE, a group started by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, providing services and support for local folks, now headed by Michael, who had all the brilliance, humility and utter intensity that the “menschismo” he embodies generates.
Then there was the agitated young Mexican-A merican business owner, Republican, that Mary, Kate and I met canvassing his neighborhood. He wasn’t on our list, but just being gregarious in the street we were crossing. We naturally engaged him. When the convo started and he found out we were Dems, he backed away in mock horror and made the sign of the Cross.
He had friendly yet confounding complaints about Bidenomics (chunks lost to child support, employees’ insurance, perceived tax increase under Biden), he was sure he was better off under the last administration. I muttered that I was pretty sure his taxes had gone up under Trump.
Then Kate asked just the right questions, brought up the Cold War and how we used to be scared of Russia and its dictator. Was so genuinely curious about why he felt as he did. We listened. This drew him out and finally we heard him say that he hated Trump (although still voting for him), and agreed that the threat of Trump’s affection for a brutal authoritarian was real and dangerous.
We didn’t change his mind (only because I forgot to mention Biden’s accomplishments: reduction in drug prices, record high employment, 45,000 construction and infrastructure projects from the Inflation Reduction Act, etc) but he was left with the memory of three authentically interested (older white) women from afar, there to get people to vote. The co-inoculation changed us all. He by our open curiosity, we by contact with the real headwind facing us and all of us by intermingling our belief systems.
It may be incredibly important that the bubbles bump into each other like this. The humanity of people that I have estranged myself from came through, those committed and oppositional Republicans, (also) quarantined in their own version of reality. I need more of this.
