What Happens When You Knock on 8,000 Doors

In 2018, the district judge for our area of south-central Montana was retiring and encouraged my husband, Ray, to run to fill his seat. Ray, a lawyer with 30 years of experience in civil and criminal practice, was new to politics. He expected to be the underdog. While all judicial races in the state are nonpartisan, we were not members of the dominant Republican Party. And we had lived in Montana for only 20 years, long enough to know we would still be considered newcomers.

I told Ray: “They just need to get to know you. Then they’ll love you.”

The district covers three rural counties, too big to gather all those voters together at a campaign event, so wooing them with Ray’s barbecued brisket was out. We would, we decided, go to them.

Over six months, we knocked on the doors of over 8,000 registered voters from across the political spectrum. We didn’t know what to expect, but we certainly didn’t anticipate how eager people were to share very personal stories — not just eager, but, it seemed, compelled.

There’s an immediate intimacy in having a conversation on someone’s doorstep. It is, after all, a threshold between public and private, but who would have thought that political canvassing would be so conducive to such unvarnished honesty? Perhaps because of the fracturing of our communities, we encountered an almost universal need to be witnessed and validated, to trust.

Listening will not, alone, alleviate suffering — It has to be accompanied by, as a start, better access to public services. Neither is listening a magic cure for our political divisions. But I believe that any system in which some people feel they don’t matter is doomed to fail. I have no idea what it will take to heal our divisions, but I believe it will have something to do with sharing stories.

Instead of talking about ourselves, we focused on the people we met. We would take note of some detail around the house, most often their gardens or their dogs — there were always dogs, big dogs and little dogs, an abundance of old and cherished dogs.