RIVERDALE, Ga. — When union canvasser Tracey Thornhill walked up to a one-story home on a bright, cloudless day in Riverdale, Georgia, a working-class city of 15,000 people south of Atlanta, he found a receptive ear to his pitch about making sure to vote for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump in the November election.
“Trump made a lot of mistakes that his whole camp is just like, it never happened,” a young African American man said through a crack in his screen door, ticking off complaints about the GOP presidential nominee’s first term in office. “I’m not an idiot. I don’t forget things very easily,” he added.
Thornhill — one of 260 members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) knocking on doors in Georgia this month and urging voters to support Harris — thanked the man, reminded him to have a plan to vote, and then set off for the next house in Clayton County, a predominantly Democratic and majority-Black county that is the fifth most populous in Georgia.