The activists moving potential voters to the polls

On-the-ground organizers are playing an outsize role in the Keystone State’s closest races.

Temple Democrats canvass voters at the TSG Town Hall in the Howard Gittis Student Center. | JARED TATZ / THE TEMPLE NEWS

Tori Kusukawa had a problem. The Utah native’s family wanted to send money to Vice President Kamala Harris’ bid for a promotion at the ballot box — a presidential campaign that has already garnered $1 billion in donations. With all that money already flooding in, they weren’t sure where it would be most effective.

So Kusakawa chimed in.

“I was like, ‘Send me to Philly,’” said Kusakawa, who was living in Maine at the time.

Within weeks, he was rooming in a North Philadelphia apartment and volunteering with the Harris campaign anywhere they needed him.

The 2024 presidential election stands to be among the most consequential in history. It has produced in Harris and Republican former president Donald Trump two candidates of a sort never seen before, albeit for totally different reasons. 

It is the first since Trump addressed a mob that tried to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021; the first since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade’s guarantee of abortion access in June 2022; the first since the U.S. military ignominiously withdrew from Afghanistan; and the first since wars began anew in Ukraine and Gaza. And opinion polls, for months, have shown the race as simply too close to reliably call.

Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes and evenly split electorate make it American politics’ Armageddon — the battlefield on which the presidential result will most probably turn. It’s also host to the close-but-likely-not-pivotal Senate campaign pitting Democratic incumbent Bob Casey against Republican Wall Street executive Dave McCormick and 17 more elections that could tip the balance of power in the House of Representatives.

All the political world knows it — and Pennsylvania’s place as president-maker has put Philadelphia, and Temple, in the eye of the storm. Trump rallied in Philadelphia for the first time at the Liacouras Center in June. Harris first campaigned alongside her vice-presidential pick, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, in the same building six weeks later. Even former President Barack Obama took Liacouras’s floor in support of Harris on Oct. 28 with musicians John Legend and Bruce Springsteen in tow.

Meteorologists say Philadelphia is in the midst of a monthlong dry spell that could tip into drought territory. But it’s raining politicians.

College students present fertile soil for political organizing, especially for Democrats. More than simply voting for the first time, students are often freshly on their own — experiencing the world and its offerings anew.

In Fall 2022, a coalition led by political science student Jared Goldberg began petitioning Temple to cancel classes on Election Day. Goldberg’s campaign exploded, drawing thousands of signatures from students, professors, celebrities and local public servants — as well as support from the Temple Votes initiative encouraging students to vote.

A year later, university officials published a poll that offered Temple Election Day off in exchange for a shortened Thanksgiving break — a provision one of Goldberg’s allies, 2024 Beasley School of Law alumnus Arlo Blaisus, denounced as “a poison pill.”

Further opening democracy’s doors to those in school, Blaisus said, could have set them up for a lifetime of service and civic engagement.

“If we teach people the importance of voting and they see, then they go out and vote,” Blaisus said. “And unfortunately, on the flip side, if we discourage students from voting, they don’t. They may never actually develop those habits of being engaged citizens.”

Electeds, guitar heroes or smooth-as-gravy soul singers don’t bear the main responsibility for pulling passersby into the political fray. The close-up work falls to organizers like Kusakawa and Temple Feminist Majority’s Jacob Saltzman.

Saltzman, a senior political science major, was closer to the sidelines himself when he ventured to the nation’s capital for a seminar with the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. An instructor there worked with the left-leaning political action committee, or PAC, marshaling support for Harris, Casey and other Democrats across the country. Feminist Majority hadn’t yet built an operation on Temple’s campus. So, the instructor asked whether Saltzman would be interested in taking up the mantle.

Saltzman already had two jobs — as a student worker with the Performing Arts Center and as a security guard. He wasn’t big on talking to strangers, certainly not about politics. Still, he took the gig, and within months rose from volunteer to organizer to on-campus coordinator.

Much of Feminist Majority’s interaction with students involves handing out pledge cards — not registrations or voting plans, but commitments to vote for the organization’s slate of endorsed candidates. The thought of asking people he didn’t know to make such a decision on the spot was far beyond Saltzman’s comfort zone. But he believed far too much in the work to back off.

“After getting that first few signatures and going up to a few people, it kind of just becomes easier,” Saltzman said.

The laws governing tax-exempt nonprofits bar many groups — from local churches to the American Civil Liberties Union — from issuing political endorsements, even when their audiences or stated principles align heavily with one candidate or party. And several others, like Temple Student Government, refrain from active campaigning as a matter of principle.

TSG is a member of the Temple Votes initiative. Its Department of External Affairs is responsible for ushering students to the polls. After its former external affairs chief stepped aside in October, officials quickly named a replacement: Temple Democrats president Lourdes Cardamone.

Cardamone, a junior political science and criminal justice double major, has been in the white-hot epicenter of the state’s politics since taking over Temple Dems late in the spring. She often mans the organization’s table in the shadow of the Bell Tower and Charles Library. When Casey and Georgia U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock gathered supporters on Cecil B. Moore Avenue, Cardamone introduced them. And a large part of her role is convincing younger voters to put their reservations about the Democratic establishment to one side.

“This is a person who will protect our rights and things that are important to young people,” said Cardamone, who grew up in the once-competitive state of Colorado, of Vice President Harris.

But TSG president Ray Epstein — in many ways a transplant from the activist world herself — never worried about Cardamone’s ability to carry out duties both partisan and neutral.

Had the dual positions fallen to someone else, TSG might have had cause for concern, Epstein said. 

“Lourdes is someone who consistently reaches across party lines to try to increase voter turnout.”

For example, Epstein said, Cardamone called Temple’s Republican chapter and asked them to attend a voter education event with Democratic councilman Isaiah Thomas. The group, which has become somewhat elusive in the campaign’s waning phases, agreed.

Did the campus GOP appear? According to Epstein, “something came up at the last minute.” But they accepted.

Kusakawa — the Harris transplant — met with a friend who attends Temple when he first arrived in Philly. They needed to have a safety talk, she had decided.

“‘Here’s Temple,’” Kusakawa, a graduate of Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, recalled being told. “‘Don’t go north. Don’t go east. Don’t go west.’” The friend even pointed to each spot on a map.

North Philadelphia’s residential neighborhoods might be the least of Kusakawa’s problems.

This is the part of the campaign where unidentified arsonists torch ballot dropboxes in three states, not unlike the sequence from HBO’s “Succession.” This is the point in American history where at least dozens of officials across several battleground states suggest they won’t certify an election they deem suspicious. 

Perhaps most importantly, this is the era of Trump’s political career where he suggests the opposition is the “enemy from within,” and that former Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney — the fiercest Republican critic of the former president’s actions in the winter of 2020 — ought to have guns “trained on her face” on a foreign battlefield.

The names of previous elections descending into carnage — “Bleeding Kansas,” “Mississippi Burning” — hearken back to scenes from a seemingly distant past, one where political organizing against slavery in the territories meant participating in guerilla warfare and registering Black Americans to vote often meant facing torture or death.

That such violence would ever return took on a near-laughability at the end of the 20th century, little more than an undemocratic bad dream for most of the U.S. electorate. But 2020 didn’t just bring the Capitol riot. It brought a flood of menacing phone calls and vicious threats to organizers, poll workers and election administrators across the country.

Now, college organizations like Temple Dems and TSG find themselves having conversations about what the after-election might bring.

“We’ve been talking about what it might look like after Election Day, or after the ballots are all counted, which probably won’t be until a bit after Election Day,” Epstein said. “We’ve been talking about what the coming weeks might look like and how to handle different situations that may arise.”

The motivation for the election-skeptic movement — the actual incidents, the actual reasoning — float at too far a distance from facts or empirical reality to be distilled into one here. Yet those who believe in the vote’s power press forward. They say their reasons are clear.

“The responsibility of being a citizen of the United States of America is to pitch in and give your part to the people of the United States,” Blaisus said. “And to try to keep this experiment of democracy and free thought and free expression alive.”

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