 It's the 12 o'clock block here on Thursday. This is Think Tech and more specifically, this is Community Matters. Today we're talking about how Hawaii is going door-to-door in the mainland with some people who really aren't doing that, Lorna Strand and Debbie Strand. They visit the mainland and they go to door-to-door and they talk to people about politics, which takes a certain amount of fortitude and courage. So Lorna, let's begin with you. Why do you guys do this? This is, you know, not everybody does this. I wish more people would do this. Why do you do it? Well, I guess it kind of got into us when we were college kids, because Jay, we started this about 55 years ago. And it seems like yesterday, but we started when we were both at Case Western Reserve University. Davey was in law school and I was an undergraduate. And we volunteered for- Well, 55 years ago, that's a long time, you guys. Look, he's so young. And I was there, I was around at that time. And I know that 55 years ago, a Hapa Hale marriage was really special. So you guys were pioneers from the outset. Wow, kudos to you. Actually, it was illegal in some states, but we made it happen. We met because we were at Case Western Reserve, but then we volunteered for a man named Carl Stokes, who was a candidate for mayor of the city of Cleveland. And we did, we learned everything about politics through that campaign, real grassroots politics. We learned about the importance of having block captains in a community. We put together coffee hours with neighbors in a community. We helped to host busloads of college kids who came from all over Ohio over the weekend to sleep in church basements to go knock on doors during the weekend. And we walked around neighborhoods, putting up signs in key places where we know the neighbors would talk about the candidates. And so we really got to feel what it was like to have boots on the ground and how a campaign can be run that way. And fortunately, he won and became, Carl Stokes became one of the first African-American merits of a major city. So we were rewarded in our work. And I guess that experience, that real life training helped to form who we are. Okay, so it was a project that two of you worked on together, it brought you together. It was, it defines you, doesn't it? Over the years, eh? It's certainly not for everybody, but we gained such insight into who we are and what we believe in through this process. And then also 55 years ago, we were involved in other things that issues and events that were formative as well. And Davey went down as a law student to help try to get folks out of jail in the civil rights movement. And I was an anti-war marcher, so I marched my feet off in Washington and Chicago and all kinds of other places like that too. So that was kind of part of our upbringing, I guess, in our formative years. And as a result, we firmly felt that we believe in face-to-face encounter when we're talking about issues and politics. We believe in communities banding together to support candidates. And we believe in supporting candidates who listen to the people. And it really formed us as who we are and why we do this crazy thing that we do, which is basically after raising our kids and having careers in the Bay Area, San Francisco. We moved to San Francisco and raised our families in the Bay Area. And we got involved in politics there too. But it was not until 2008 that we decided that we're gonna go outside of communities to other states. And it was Barack Obama who inspired us to do that. And so from 2008 and through the time that we retired, we both retired in 2012. And afterwards, we actually have gone to about 16 states knocking on doors. Hmm, do you fund yourself when you make these trips or does somebody help you? We did it, we just did it all ourselves, but Davey can tell you a little bit more about it. I have some questions for Davey. You're a lawyer and you have to get up on your feet as a lawyer. Whether you're a litigator or a negotiator, you still have to speak. And this is different just kind of speaking because you're now speaking to a stranger who may or may not like you. You can't control exactly what kind of reception you're gonna get in the door to door. So I just like to hear your advice, your interpretation, your mindset when you knock on the door. How do you approach this total stranger? What do you say to the stranger? It varies tremendously because when you do go door to door or when you're registering voters, you have a specific, going door to door, you have specific people that you knock on doors. There's targeting you. You don't just go to every door. You usually there's a theory behind what doors. For example, you're trying to get out the democratic vote so you're going to the doors of registered Democrats. But sometimes it's very challenging. And I'd like to mention three different kinds of challenges, all that have to do with voter suppression. Today it's very, about 30 states, Republican legislators have introduced legislation that the Democrats consider voter suppression and Republicans consider voter integrity. And we witnessed a lot of that kind of thing going door to door. For example, we were doing voter registration on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, which is, we were doing it at the campus at different facilities of the local community college. And we were doing it with a local Lakota woman. And we registered every other person we talked to. These students were in their 20s and 30s. That's great for a voter registration campaign, but why were they not registered? It's because the state of South Dakota made it so darn difficult to register. The state of South Dakota said, every organized county needs to have a place where people can go to register to vote. But the counties weren't organized on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, the second most expansive reservation in the country where there's a lot of poverty. And so there were, and we've worked on other Indian reservations and there's tremendous state governments have done a lot to make it very, very hard for Native Americans to vote. We were going door to door in Cleveland, Ohio in an African American neighborhood in the second Obama campaign. For 25 years in Ohio, it had been possible to vote on the weekends at the board of elections, the weekend before election day. The Republican Secretary of State had just cut that out before the second Obama election. So we were going door to door talking to people. And they say, yeah, we're gonna go vote for Obama and we're gonna go to church because what they would do that they call it souls to the polls. They go to church, the church would arrange for a bus to take everybody down to vote. They'd cut that out. That really got people mad, really got people mad. And as a result of the voter turnout in that election in the African American areas of Cleveland exceeded the predominantly white area vote turnout for the first time ever. Those were both racially motivated voter suppression, but even that more sophisticated, about two weeks later, we were in Colorado going door to door for Obama again. And about half the people in Colorado voted by mail, absentee voters. Just before the election, the Secretary of State, the Republican Secretary of State in Colorado said, okay, if you voted in 2008, but not in 2010, we're not gonna mail you a ballot. So as we would go door to door, it's hard to in today's world to get this kind of information out. But the Obama campaign, very Akamai, very really a good campaign, they figured out people who would vote in 2008 and not 2010. And we went to those doors and knocked on doors with our Obama shirts and people say, we'll vote, we'll get our ballot in the mail and we'll vote for Obama. And we said, you're not gonna get a ballot in the mail this time, but nobody's gonna tell you, it's for people who've never gone to the polls. So it was another insidious voter suppression effort. And we had to deal with that kind of thing time and time again around the country. When you go to these states, so how do you choose the states? Which states are the ones you put on your itinerary? We try to go to states that have competitive races. In other words, it's a close race between Democrat and Republican for Senator or in congressional districts. We try to go to those districts where we can make a difference. Blana, when you go out and do this, do you find you're in good company? I mean, are there other people from Hawaii, other people from other states who do it alongside of you? Do you find that there's an effective movement? And I'm talking about recent years of people who do go to door to door just the way you do. We have organized groups to go with us. And one, for example, we were working in this little town in Nevada in Mineral County called Hawthorne. And also on the Walker River Paiute Reservation, which is right next to Hawthorne in Mineral Valley. And we were working on behalf of a person running for Congress to flip a seat in Nevada. And we got so involved with the Democrats in the community that we invited some friends of ours from California to come and join us, and they did. And we put them up at the little casino that was there in Nevada. And we all went out and knocked on doors in both the reservation and in Hawthorne. And we covered basically the entire place. You never run into situations where you really have to engage in a colloquy with them. And they have questions, the resistance, they don't like you, they don't like the Democratic Party, they don't like what you're selling. Whatever their orientation is, they don't like you. And then you have to make your case, or is it just one side clapping? Well, you know, as I said, there's targeting. So you tend to go to places that you're really trying to get out, people that think like you or not. However, that's true, that's true. In North Carolina, my favorite campaign place of all was in the Western North Carolina in the Southern Appalachian Mountains, near the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, where we went and we recruited a bunch of people from other states, from Vermont and from Maryland and from California and from Hawaii. And we were there and I emailed all the people before they came to that community to say people are gonna be a little bit different here than you folks on the coast. For example, you know, most people born along the coasts have been, are in families that have been here for two or three generations. For example, three of my four grandfathers were born abroad in Europe. And in this part of Western North Carolina, the most people are Scott Trayvish and their family's been there 10 or 12 generations. And the people that are out, the next biggest group are Cherokee Indians, whose people have been there, you know, from time immemorial. So I warn the people if they come, you gotta think that when these people are gonna be different than people you know, they're gonna be proud of their guns, for example. They're gonna go to churches where their ministers are saying that abortion is something like murder. They're gonna be people are a little uncomfortable with gender on security and insecurity and so forth. So keep that in mind. But on the working class, economic issues, they're Democrats and they think like Democrats and you gotta keep that in mind. So what we did there was that, so that was kind of a warning on how to be sensitive to the kinds of feelings people will have. What we did there was put together local Democrats with people from out of state. And we developed walking lists of doors to knock on around the local person's own neighborhood and everybody from Maryland or California or Colorado, I mean, or other states who came would go with the person around their own neighborhood. And one of my great experiences there was going door-to-door on the Charity Reservation. The reservations are different than in the West. It was more like a working class suburban community knocking on doors. And everybody I talked to was a Native American. And I was with a woman who was a Native American. And one of the guys said, I like your candidate so much, just a minute. He went back and he came out and he gave me a check for $250 made out to my candidate. I tell that because it's not what you might expect on an Indian reservation. So there's always surprises. Yeah, well, what about, you know, I mean, I think you're trading a needle there in a sense because you don't know what you're gonna run into. You could find the family is democratic, but they like guns. Well, they don't like abortion. So you have to skirt that carefully, don't you? You have to be very careful in a state which it has a sort of a mixed issue, a mixed issue population. And if you wind up talking about guns and discouraging gun ownership or encouraging gun control with somebody who's a Democrat, you may lose him instead of gain him, no? Well, that's why we talked about it first. We don't wanna talk about issues that are gonna be controversial. We want to, you know, the focus, for example, in this particular campaign was just going to Democrats and trying to get them off the boat and telling them that the sky that we were campaigning for was a Democrat. You don't really wanna engage too much with issues if you think that you're gonna disagree with people where this is not a debating society, but sometimes it comes up and you have to do it. I've had people who, you know, said, I've been a Democrat all my life, but, you know, the Democrats are gone crazy. All they care about now is killing babies and having men use ladies' bathrooms. I mean, that happens and you say thanks, ma'am, and walk on to the next house. Yeah, you know, I've done this myself only here in Hawaii and I've found here in Hawaii that a lot of people will shut the door in your face, even if they would be inclined to agree with my candidate, my party. And they will say to you something like, you know, I don't wanna talk about it. You know, leave me alone. I don't, or I don't, my favorite one, I don't vote. I'm not gonna discuss this. I don't wanna register. I don't wanna vote. I don't wanna pick a candidate and shut the door in your face. That's right here in Hawaii. It's really surprising, actually. But I found that, yeah. Yeah, so when you guys go together, I mean, when you go, do you go together side by side? Do you address them? How do you handle the person who wants to, you know, it must be kind of a tag team thing. You share the burden of trying to convince somebody who doesn't care, to care, right? Some people go in pairs and partners and we always partner together, but we generally take our own lists and we go on two sides of the street or we'll take a turf on our own because we don't go up to the house together. We're kind of like to do our own stuff like that. But in any case, one of the great things about modern campaigning is that what Davey talked about in terms of targeting was is really essential. And the campaigns are so well trained now to help volunteers address these issues. And what do you do? How do you approach a house? How do you know, what's important and when do you leave the house and go away? And how to keep safe. Do they invite you in? Do they invite you in? Do you get to sit in their living room or do you stand at the door? There have been some times where we've really wanted to go in. They tend to say, the staffers will tell you that don't go in the house, but there have been times when we've helped people. For example, in Nevada, we did helping people to the polls. And so we would go into the house to help somebody who needed help actually getting into our car to drive them to the polls, that kind of thing we could do. So, but it's, I think to answer your question, Jay, that we have learned so much from the staffers and the Obama campaign, I think, was the cutting edge in terms of how to be careful and train staffers. We met staffers all around the country who gave up like a semester of college to go work in some place, very different from their own home, to manage an office for Obama. Well, you were the group very successful for Obama twice, but I really want to get to the point of how this worked in the Trump era. Did you go out in, what was it, 2015? And was it different? And you guys touched the grassroots. You were right out there where the people live. So maybe you can explain to me what in the world happened in 2015, or 2016, whatever it was, 2016. What happened? How did Trump get elected? He was really a dark horse, so to speak, and he managed and you were there. What were people saying and doing and thinking to support him? Well, I can tell you one of my experiences was in Michigan, in suburban Michigan, where the Republican candidate didn't run again because it was a Republican district, because when he advised his girlfriend to have an abortion, neither she nor his wife nor his church thought it was a very good idea and he lost all his support. And our candidate was a Obama appointee who was in charge of trying to keep the automobile industry in Detroit. And I went door-to-door for her. She was running against the Trump, the co-chairman of the Trump campaign in Michigan. Anyway, the targeting really mattered. We were in suburban Detroit and we were targeting Republican women going door-to-door. And one of our targets was Republican women because Republican women were turning away from Trump. This was big Trump years and this district had voted for Trump, but our candidate won. And part of it was this very intense, thoughtful targeting of what doors we were knocking on and what we were talking about. Well, you must have been involved in the 2020 campaign just recently. And that's even more interesting in the sense that whatever happened on that one because by then Trump had achieved maybe a greater cohesion of his base and the country was so divided about so many things. And it's like going door-to-door has had greater risks in 2020 than it did ever before, I would guess. In Georgia, one of the things that they discovered which is still a very key state for all of us to watch, one of the little things that they very successfully did that helped Ossoff and Warnock win that seat, their seats in the Senate, was that there was a very determined effort to bring Asian language speaking folks from around the country into Georgia to knock on doors very specifically to Vietnamese families, Chinese families, Korean families, Indian, East Indian families and talk to them about why it's important to register as well as to vote Democratic. And it becomes so specific in the way that folks are working now to talk to people, to get to people, to communicate with people. And it is on the media, on social media but also door-to-door. And even with the pandemic, there were folks who came from Chicago and New York to Georgia to do this work because they could speak those languages. And we're going to say, I'd like to segue now a little bit to what we're gonna look at in the future because Oahu Democrats are now building a program of doing postcards. Dave has been managing a postcard writing campaign for Oahu Democrats Blue Wave. But we are also building a language core of folks to do postcards to Georgia in Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese so that we can try to encourage them to register to vote. And that'll change to texting and then also change a switch later on to hopefully phone banking. And we're supporting, we're really helping working with a woman. Her name is V Nguyen who is running for the secretary of state position for the state of Georgia. And she's helping us link into Georgia so that we can do this program with Asian language folks. So what about the Republicans? Did you see them down the block doing the same thing? Did they meet you in this competition or are they somewhere else not committed to this kind of door-to-door approach? David? I think that they, yes, we do run into Republicans. The Republicans are organizing hard and we have to keep organizing hard too. It's absolutely true. We haven't actually gone to the mainland since the pestilence started a couple of years ago. So my last trip was to North Carolina with a group of people from Hawaii but we hope to do that again. In the meantime, we're really pushing on this postcard campaign and getting people ready for telephoning and so forth. We've now had, we're working on a postcard campaign with a group called Fuel Team Six in LA which identifies names and addresses of people who aren't registered to vote but will likely be Democrats if they do through a variety of methods. And we've now had a hundred people on Oahu who have written these postcards to people a way to help them to vote, to get to register to vote. And so we're trying to do all, but we hope that we can move into actually moving crews of people onto the mainland again maybe starting in the summer. That's the most effective way. I mean, postcard, you know, people can just throw that in the trash instantly. Talk about phone banks. They can hang up the phone on you. Although it's cheaper to do it from Hawaii and then you have a photo registration list of telephone numbers, you can call anywhere in the country without standing up. That's really very efficient. But the person at the other end can hang up on you. And that's a problematic in the sense that it discourages you. I mean, I've done phone bank work and it's discouraging when they just slam the phone down before you get three words out. But if you're at their door, that seems to me like the most effective way to actually engage with a voter. Am I right? It is. It is absolutely the most effective. It has been shown that that has more impact than anything else. The other things are good to do too. I mean, we travel around a lot because we like traveling on the mainland. We've traveled even when we're not doing politics. We like, you know, we hitchhike through Asia on our honeymoon, for example. So we like this kind of thing and it's fun, but you do run into challenging situations, but it is the most effective way that you can possibly campaign, I think. Lord, have you run into anti-Asian sentiment when you go into some of these cities, particularly in the South? I mean, there aren't any laws anymore about misogyny, but the fact is that there are people still in some places feel that way. What kind of reaction do you get from the people who do feel that way? I've had anti-Asian responses all my life after I moved to Ohio for college and on the mainland, but it takes a minute, but after a while people start to understand who I am and yes, there have been situations. So I guess I really wanna talk about what's gonna happen this year. This November, first of all, a lot of people will actually vote by mail and you won't have much to say to them unless you're there early. So if you wanna talk to those guys, you gotta get out early. Now, the other thing is I believe and I would like your thoughts about this is that given the suppression activity in so many battleground states, which is really horrendous, people are going to be confused. They're gonna be confused about how you can get the vote and how you can avoid all the barriers that are being imposed. And then after they're confused and they find that they've been suppressed, their votes have been suppressed in some way, before, during, or after the actual voting experience by these Republican led states, they're gonna be angry. And I wonder how are you coping with that? And how do you think this election will be different than special because of all the GOP activity in so many states? David? I believe that if people become aware of what's happening, they will turn out in greater numbers and with more enthusiasm. I mentioned the black vote in Cleveland, for example, and there was an attempt a couple of years ago in North Dakota to change the law between the primary and the general election. There was a change in law. You had to have a physical address on your driver's license to be able to vote. And on the Indian reservations in the West, there aren't very many physical addresses. There aren't streets and stuff. There's paths out in the desert kind of where people live. And an organization in North Dakota was able to come up with new cards for people with physical addresses, not 1 22 10th Street, but descriptions and so forth between the primary and the general. And there was a huge voter turnout. So sometimes the effort to suppress the vote, if it can be communicated to the people who are the victims thereof, they will get very angry and have the best voter turnout ever. And I've seen that happen in various places. I hope that happens. Yeah, well, the story of it is important for that because that's the main way you can get the people because everybody has different sources of information. Yeah. So a lot of people, Laura, a lot of people say that the Republicans with all of their suppression and their campaigns, this and that, and their appeal to the base, will take both the House and the Senate this year in the fall, before election day and on election day. And then in lawsuits after election day, capitalizing on confusion and lies and the big lie for so many races kind of thing. So what are your thoughts about that? How do you factor that in? Do you think that with efforts like you and Davey are putting out visits and door-to-door efforts that you do, you can avoid that result? Or is that inevitable? Oahu Democrats started our blue wave committee in June. And we've been talking about this possible reality since then and are looking at different things that we can do here in Hawaii to address exactly what you're saying, Jay. And so our postcard program is going violently. We're gonna begin texting. We're gonna hopefully, I don't know, but I hope that we can do a Asian language phone banking system here. And then hopefully just go. We wanna go and start talking to people about it because that's how they get the message. That's how they, and that's all we can do. I mean, we, those whom we elect are trying to do their best in Congress, but that's all we can do here on the ground. And that's how we're made. We're on the ground people. Yes, you are. You are very special people doing it all these years and being completely committed. So I wanna offer you both the opportunity to leave whatever message you wanna leave with whoever views this video about what you're doing and your thoughts about the nature of our democracy and how it will evolve over the next few years. Davey, what are your thoughts about that? Well, there are things that we cannot control that will have an impact on the upcoming elections. We can't control what happens internationally. We can't control what happens with inflation and so forth, but what we can control is trying to reach out and get those people that we know are Democrats, get them to be sure that they get out and vote. And it's a great experience doing it and seeing all the different kind of communities around the United States and learning a lot about it. Just an example of that is in the John Ossoff campaign, when he was running for Congress to fill a special seat, I was going door to door trying to get vote on voting day and we were in the neighborhood and all these people were in the suburban Atlanta walking around with Yama Kazan. And it was an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood and they couldn't vote because it was the last day of the Passover. And so a couple of them had already voted by mail. So it was very interesting. Everybody was there because they had to be in walking distance of the synagogue. So you learn a lot of things along the way like if there's a group like that and the election is going to be on Passover, you better get people to vote by mail. A lot of things like that. Really? Yeah. So interesting, you guys. So this is a depth of experience that few people have and I admire you for it. Lorna, what are your thoughts about the future of our democracy? And I'm hoping that you could also talk to people about how they can get involved and do what you do, join you in some way or at least follow your footsteps. Throughout our entire experience, we've always been Democrats. So the one thing that I truly believe in is the Democratic Party. And I hope that those who want to continue to save our democracy will join the Democratic Party and become active in whatever way they can to support candidates and to support efforts on the ground to maintain our democracy because that's what I believe and I think that we can do it. There've been so many times in our lives that we thought, oh God, no, let's leave. Things are just gonna be awful in this country and somehow we come through it and the way we come through it is because we keep working at our democracy. Yeah, Laura Strand, Debbie Strand, thank you so much for joining us. You guys are true national heroes and we admire you greatly. Thank you so much.