2 weeks Ago
Down Home North Carolina is a non-profit organization focused on rural communities. They say their platform is "survival" – helping poor and working class people get basic needs met like housing and education. As Consider This host Scott Detrow witnessed while spending an afternoon with the group, they are committed to turning out every voter they can.
He and the Consider This team tagged along with Down Home NC Regional Field Director Adon Bermudez-Bey and other door-knockers, watching them spring into action when they met a registered voter who wasn't planning on casting a ballot this year. Down Home NC volunteer Alex Cook started peppering him with questions about the issues he's facing in his life. "You need health care, though, right? You get SSI, so you need your health care," Cook said.
"Yes I get SSI," replied Jakai Britton, the unaffiliated voter who was in his car, about to pull out of the driveway. "So, do we have a vote from you?" Cook asked. "Yeah, you got a vote from me," said Britton.
And that, according to Bermudez-Bey, was a sign of success: to get just one voter to go from driving away, to a conversation, and from a no to voting to a maybe – all in the span of just a couple minutes. You're reading the Consider This newsletter, which unpacks one major news story each day. Subscribe here to get it delivered to your inbox, and listen to more from the Consider This podcast .
Vital rural Democrats In an election season like this one, Down Home NC is mostly focused on local races, but they endorse candidates up and down the ticket – usually Democrats. Most of their time is spent urging residents, especially residents of color, to get out and vote. Nash County is in a rural part of this key swing state.
It is near-evenly divided between white and Black residents, and in recent presidential elections, it was near-evenly divided by its results. President Joe Biden won the county by two tenths of a point in 2020, and four years before that, former President Donald Trump won it by the exact same razor-thin margin. Driving around the tiny town of Nashville, where the Down Home NC group was canvassing, it didn't feel that way, with plenty of Trump and MAGA signs all over.
Still, Bermudez-Bey and his team of volunteers found Democratic doors to knock on. "What I noticed is that there's a lot of people [who] want to stay out [of] the way. They see the Trump signs.
They see what's going on, in school boards, in the city council. They're just like, 'I'm going to stay out of it,'" said Bermudez-Bey. "We're trying to tell them, there's an organization that specifically focuses in rural areas to pull those folks out.
" Undecided voters With two weeks to go before Election Day, finding a true undecided voter feels like a rarity. But the Down Home NC team says it meets them all the time. The Consider This team encountered a few too, like Nashville resident Sean Jones, who said he planned to vote.
He hadn't quite made up his mind on the presidential race, but said he's leaning toward Vice President Kamala Harris. "I just recently went to go see my brother in prison this weekend, and he was kind of like on my head about it, like voting. He wanted me to vote for Trump," Jones said.
"But I still wanted to vote for Kamala. So, I'm still trying to look into the politics as far as what's what and who's who." Adon Bermudez-Bey, speaking only for himself and not for Down Home NC, told Consider This he's also still undecided – even as he led a group of canvassers for an organization that has endorsed Harris.
"I don't know if I'm voting for Kamala. Just full transparency. But I know that I'm definitely not voting for Trump.
" Bermudez-Bey cited his concerns about Harris' time as a prosecutor in California, and her support for Israel during the ongoing war in the Middle East. He's set a deadline for himself: November 2nd, the last day of early voting in North Carolina, to decide between Harris or a third-party candidate. But he said he still sees the merits of a Harris presidency – at least for Down Home NC's goals.
"No, it's not going to be perfect, but it's going to be a lot easier for us to organize under her presidency than Trump's." This episode was produced by Kathryn Fink and Tyler Bartlam. It was edited by Ashley Brown.
Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun..
