Door-Knocking in Door County - The New Yorker

In the scheme of Wisconsin’s highly coveted electoral vote, Door County doesn’t bear much weight. Often called the Cape Cod of Wisconsin, it juts into Lake Michigan like the thumb of a mittened hand. It has a population of thirty thousand people, the median age is fifty-three, and more than ninety per cent of its residents are white. Tourists from within the region visit the county’s picturesque and semirural towns on weekends, and senior citizens from Milwaukee and Chicago move to it to retire. But, despite its size, Door is a place that politicians, and the media, watch closely. Known as a bellwether county, it has voted for the winning candidate in every Presidential election since Bill Clinton’s victory in 1996, oscillating between Republicans and Democrats in step with the Electoral College. In a season of neck-and-neck election polls, Door County seems like a good place to find out which way voters are leaning.

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Sturgeon Bay is the county seat of Door and also, with a population of about ten thousand people, its biggest city. Occupying both sides of the Sturgeon Bay Ship Canal and crisscrossed by bridges, the city counts a shipyard, a hospital, and several small manufacturing firms among its major employers. I visited the farmers’ market on a recent Saturday morning in mid-October. A family sold apple-cider doughnuts at one stall; another stall had a tableau of decorative gourds. It is tempting, perhaps, to think that the polls have got it wrong, that the Presidential race couldn’t possibly be so close in one of the most contested places in the country, and that there must be some subtle indication of support for one candidate or the other which can only be perceived on the ground. If walking through the Sturgeon Bay farmers’ market and chatting politics is any indication, neither party can harbor such hope. Each conversation was like flipping a coin over and over, heads or tails, Kamala Harris or Donald Trump.

Just beyond the farmers’ market, Dave Bontempo, a retired futures trader who now serves as a pastor at a local church, was on his way to try to get some stuffed chicken wings at a stall before they ran out. He told me that the most important issue to him was opposing abortion and that he would be voting for Trump. A couple of blocks later, Rosemary Stuebi, who had retired to Door County after a career as an English teacher in Chicago, said that she would be voting for Harris. She hazarded a prediction about which way Door County, and the country, might go: “I’m seeing more Democratic signs,” she told me. That said, she was worried: “I just donated fifty dollars to Tammy Baldwin,” she added, the Democratic senator from Wisconsin who is in a tight race to be reëlected.

Next, I met Bob Cozby, a Republican who moved to Door County from Waco, Texas, in 2019, to be closer to his grandchildren. He wore a baseball cap that said “I’m Bob Doing Bob Things,” which, that morning, included running a model train through his yard for the amusement of passing children. He was most concerned about the border, particularly undocumented immigrants who receive benefits from the government. “It doesn’t leave a lot of money to take care of the people that need it when you’re taking care of the health care, housing, and food of people that did not come through the front door,” he said.

Down the street, I had a conversation with two guys in their mid-sixties, Bob Shogren and Steve Johnson, who were at a d.j. booth that also advertised a local nonprofit offering music education. They had known each other since they were kids in Door County, although Shogren had lived in Arizona for many years, where he worked as an educator and with the state’s AmeriCorps program. He was a former Young Republican, but he said that he started voting as an Independent after the Presidency of George W. Bush, and is now a registered Democrat. Johnson, who works for a commercial laundry that services restaurants and hotels, described himself as blue-collar and said that he had inherited his politics from his parents, who were New Deal Democrats. I asked if he had a guess about who might win. “The political signs are about as divided now as they were four years ago, as they were eight years ago, and probably twenty-four years ago,” he said. Shogren had put a “Vote Democratic” sign in his yard. Johnson had not. “If I had a ‘Vote for Kamala’ sign in my yard I would be the only one in my neighborhood,” he told me. He said that he lived in a neighborhood of small houses built for shipyard workers. As I walked away, they put on a song called “Edgar Allen Polka.”

In Sturgeon Bay, both political parties have their county offices downtown within a block of each other. In the Democratic Party’s office, there was a cardboard cutout of Harris and a list of the Biden Administration’s accomplishments that included “Once-in-a-generation infrastructure investments” and “First major gun safety legislation in decades.” In the Republican Party’s office, there was a cardboard cutout of Trump and brochures from the conservative advocacy organization Heritage Action for America, featuring headlines such as “What Americans Should Know About GENDER IDEOLOGY” (“The rise in mandatory ‘drag queen storytime’ in schools takes away valuable learning time’”) and “What Americans Should Know About IMMIGRATION” (“Fast Fact: The influx of immigrant children places a significant strain on the public education system”).

“I feel like we’re hitting our stride at the right time,” Stephanie Soucek, the chair of the Door County Republican Party, told me in the Party’s office. “Of course, in Wisconsin, with how close things are, usually, we don’t want to take anything for granted or get too confident or comfortable.”

Both sides knew better than to fully claim Door County. “All the actual voter contact suggests that it is a perfectly even split,” Ben Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, told me at a rally with Tim Walz in Green Bay, about an hour’s drive from Sturgeon Bay, a few days later. “I would be more comforted if I felt like there were a huge secret groundswell on our side, but at least I don’t feel like we’re seeing one on the other side.”

Inside a crowded bar called the Red Room, where I stopped by after the farmers’ market, people were eating chili, drinking dollar-fifty Budweisers, and watching the Wisconsin Badgers beat the Rutgers Scarlet Knights in football. The bar is co-owned by Nick Hoffman, who was bartending that day, and his brother; they inherited the place from their parents. I asked how the mood was around politics. “It’s been getting fucking heated!” he said. He declined to share his own views—which seemed to be the default strategy for getting along in Door County. Bob Cozby, the Republican voter, had told me that he didn’t talk politics with his ex-girlfriend, who voted Democratic; Dave Bontempo, the pastor, said that he and his wife, who is also a pastor, discourage their congregation from talking politics at church; Rosemary Stuebi told me that she knows better than to bring up politics with others, since she’s so opinionated.

I sat down at the bar next to Bill Teich, a Trump supporter who had grown up in Sturgeon Bay. He suggested the county’s see-sawing was possibly due to outsiders. “People move from other areas to get away from where they live because they hate it, and they bring their politics with them,” he explained. But there were plenty of local people who disagreed with him. One of them was Candy Olson. The two hang out at the bar to watch games together. Olson is a homemaker. Teich is retired but picks up work as a handyman. Olson had voted for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, but she was not exactly a strident Democrat—nor was she convinced about Trump.

“I don’t like what Trump and the Republicans are doing about this abortion thing,” she said to Teich. “You got women that are dying because of this, bleeding out in a parking lot, which is a known fact.”

“Listen, Donald Trump has not said he’s against abortion, period,” Teich replied.

“But he’s also said he’s going to leave it up to each state,” Olson said.

The talking points of both parties had clearly sunk in. I asked if they usually discussed politics.

“No, because I’d punch her lights out,” Teich said.

“I might win though. I’m a little younger than you,” Olson countered.

“There’s no animosity,” Teich said.

Olson listed off some of the political concerns on her mind: Trump’s recent comments insulting Detroit; the war in the Middle East; Trump’s poor handling of the coronavirus pandemic and the uprisings that followed the murder of George Floyd by the police in 2020, a year in which she had been bedridden while undergoing cancer treatment, which left her in medical debt. But her views were heterodox, and she had not yet decided whom to vote for. “As a voter I’m worried about this immigration crap,” Olson said. “Kamala Harris and Biden, they’re letting everybody and anybody in.”

“See, do you want abortion or do you want immigrants?” Teich, who had also expressed worry to me about immigrants, asked. He thought that Democrats were more open to immigration because they wanted to get more votes.

As this went on, a man on Candy’s other side was looking at me and making a cutting-off motion with his hand. He was a Trump supporter. When I asked for his opinion, he told me there was no point in trying to discern anything of national importance from Door County. “It’s just a coincidence!” he said, of Door County’s tendency to vote for the winning President.

I had been told that Sturgeon Bay tended to be more conservative than the small touristy towns to its north, although driving through them one wouldn’t necessarily know it. The Harris-Walz signs and the Trump-Vance signs often faced one another along the highway. I drove past dairy farms straight out of “Old MacDonald,” with red barns and white-and-red hens and black-and-white cows. A bar at a rural intersection had a sign that looked political at first sight but on closer examination read “Support the Day Drinking Party.” My general impression of northern Wisconsin was that if the Day Drinking Party were on the ballot, it would probably win.

I stopped in the village of Egg Harbor, where a pumpkin-patch festival was under way. Couples wearing checked flannel shirts waited in line for brats and cheese curds, and danced to a band playing covers of dad-rock songs. There was no politicking in sight. I bought some Swedish meatballs from a roadside stand run by Victoria Linstrom, who manages a family-owned café called Fika. She is a Democrat, and explained the county’s political split in terms of a cultural divide. “Door County in general can be pretty red, but Door County is kind of this microcosm of liberal arts,” she said. “Tons of artists have moved up here, so you have this kind of liberal element to it, and then you have the farmers or the more blue-collar working class down there.” Her co-worker, Carolyn Hardy, hearing our discussion, chimed in, “I have heard, kind of on the wing, that a lot of people who would normally be voting for Kamala aren’t going to because of her stance on Israel and Palestine.”

The next day was dominated by regional N.F.L. games—the Bears versus the Jaguars in the morning; the Packers versus the Cardinals in the afternoon. I had arranged to accompany some Democratic volunteers who planned to go door-knocking in Sturgeon Bay. They knew better than to go out during the Packers game, so we would be meeting at three, after it ended. I waited out the second half at a bar called Poh’s Corner.

Romeo Doubs scored a touchdown for the Packers; the bar cheered when he caught what had initially looked like a weak pass. Conversation turned to politics. The national polls indicating that 2024 is a “boys versus girls” election, as some in the media have started calling it, anecdotally rang true in Door County, although, like Candy Olson, not all the women unhappy with Trump were sure votes for the Democrats. Molly Brauer was there with her boyfriend. (“He’s very much right-wing, so we have to keep it very quiet, because I’m emotional inside about it,” she said.) She told me that she was going to sit this election out. “I’ve always voted, but this time I’m so pissed off,” she said. “Nobody’s willing to work together anymore.”

At the Democrats’ office, I met with a Party volunteer, a retired educator named Carol Jensen-Olson. She was joined by a volunteer named Eric Perlman, who splits his time between New Paltz, New York, and his wife’s home town of Sturgeon Bay. Another volunteer, Amy Carwile, drove us to a small enclave of houses near the Sturgeon Bay Industrial Park, following the addresses on a printed list of voters provided to the canvassers. Each door was another flip of the coin: in Wisconsin, voters don’t register by party, and there were no political signs here.

The Republicans also have a door-knocking operation, although Stephanie Soucek, the local Party official, wasn’t sure how it compared in size to that of the Democrats, who claim to have hit more than seven hundred and fifty thousand doors in Wisconsin since Harris started campaigning, in July. “I have really worked hard to try to get people out knocking on doors,” she told me. “Between the state Party and other organizations, they’re offering to pay people, which helps, because usually we’ve relied on volunteers.” (Early in October, two Republican political-action committees, Turning Point Action and America PAC, which is funded by Elon Musk, combined forces to turn out the Republican vote in Wisconsin using contractors, who pay canvassers an hourly rate.)

The Democratic volunteers were unpaid. Drizzle fell intermittently, and the air was bone cold. Jensen-Olson was a brisk, no-nonsense presence, good at knocking on strangers’ doors because of her confidence in her mission. When people answered, their numbers were nearly evenly split between those who said they would be voting for Harris and those who politely declined a conversation with the Democrats, a sign that Jensen-Olson took as their leaning Republican.

The confirmed Harris supporters were happy to chat. “I can’t stand Donald Trump,” a voter named Bruce Townsend, who answered the door with his wife, Karen, said. A slow cooker of chili was on the kitchen table, and a pair of cats wandered around. “I’m retired. I watch CNN, CNBC, Fox. I watch it all every day. They’ve all got their little falsehoods and quirks and stuff like that, but there’s no way I want Trump to run our country into the ground.” They didn’t have signs in the yard, because they didn’t want to antagonize anyone. “There’s just too many angry people out there,” Karen said. “If you bring it up with the wrong person, they just shout at you.”

At another house, a woman answered, holding back her dog by the collar. “Like many people, I personally don’t believe in abortion, but I certainly don’t think it’s the government’s business,” Christine, who declined to give her last name, said. “Donald Trump frightens me. I was a Republican for many years, and I couldn’t vote for him ever.”

Down the street, a man answered with his two small children peering out from behind him. When Jensen-Olson asked if he knew whom he was voting for, he said yes. When she asked if he might share who it was, he said no.

That afternoon, as we went from door to door, it was not possible to discern who was on which side without asking: from the street, the single-story ranch homes all looked the same. They almost all had fall tableaux of pumpkins, skeletons, and corn in their yards. When the doors opened, the same football game played on the television. The people answering the door, dressed in their weekend loungewear, looked mostly the same, too. It was a Sunday in Wisconsin. It was not possible to predict who would win.♦

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