Jakai Britton was not planning on casting a ballot this election season. When a group of door knockers came to his neighborhood, he wasn’t planning on having a conversation, either. But in the span of a couple minutes, he’d agreed to both.
Britton, a 28-year-old non-affiliated voter in Nash County, North Carolina, was pulling out of his driveway in a black SUV, airport bound, when a canvasser from the organization Down Home North Carolina approached his car.
“Can we get five minutes of your time?” door knocker Alex Cook asked. Her plea for five minutes turned into a plea for two minutes, and Britton said yes. From the passenger side window, while Britton’s car was still running, Cook made her case for why he should vote for the Democratic down-ballot candidates the organization had endorsed. She focused on the way the local races would impact health care, an issue that resonated with Britton.
“So, do we have a vote from you?” Cook asked.
“Yeah, you’ve got a vote from me,” Britton said.
To Down Home North Carolina, the stakes of the 2024 election are too high to let a potential voter like Britton go. Nash County is near-evenly divided between white and Black residents, and in recent presidential elections, it was near-evenly divided by its results. In 2020, President Joe Biden won the rural county by two-tenths of a point. In 2016, former President Donald Trump won it by the exact razor-thin margin.
In the small town of Nashville, where the group canvassed that day, it did not feel evenly divided. There were Trump signs everywhere, and plenty of MAGA flags. Still, Down Home found plenty of Democratic and non-affiliated doors to knock on.
“What I noticed is that there’s a lot of people who want to stay out the way,” said Adon Bermudez-Bey, Down Home’s regional field director. “They see the Trump signs, they see what’s going on in the school boards, city council. They’re just like, ‘I’m going to stay out of it.’ We’re trying to tell them there’s an organization that specifically focuses on rural areas to pull those folks out.”
