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CERES — Before Donald Trump was elected president, Scott Carlson would have been hard-pressed to find the Central Valley town of Ceres on a map. The 63-year-old writer from Palo Alto had rarely set foot in the Valley before, unless you count driving through on the way to Yosemite.
But on the Saturday before Memorial Day, Carlson found himself walking up and down residential streets here, knocking on locals’ doors and telling them why they should vote for a Democrat for Congress.
He was one of dozens of people from the Bay Area who made the one-to-two-hour drive over the Diablo Range to canvass for Democrats that weekend — part of an army of fired-up volunteers who have focused on the Central Valley in an unprecedented bid to help Democrats win competitive House seats.
“It gets you out of your Silicon Valley bubble,” Carlson said as he prepared his clipboard. “This is the real California, in some ways — Joan Didion’s California.”
The Bay Area has always exported its surplus of Democratic activist fervor. In presidential election years, a steady stream of volunteers make their way up Interstate 80 to knock on doors in swing state Nevada.
But Central Valley Democrats say they’ve never seen this scale of outside assistance in their local congressional races, which for years have received relatively scant attention from the state and national parties. During past elections, “we had a couple college students coming out,” said Jess Self, the president of the Central Valley Democratic Club. “This is a hundred-fold of that.”
For most Bay Area volunteers, that newfound enthusiasm was fanned by Trump’s victory, and harnessed by a network of local progressive groups that have sprung up to combat his administration over the last year and a half, including Swing Left and Indivisible.
“I got involved because I was so disgusted with Trump,” said Mary Trounstine, a retired molecular biologist who now goes canvassing regularly in the Fresno area with her local group, Swing Left San Leandro. “I came to the conclusion that our only option was to take back the House.”
That Democratic dream hinges on a handful of competitive races in California, including two or three in the agriculturally rich Central Valley. The party is targeting Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Turlock, and Rep. David Valadao, R-Hanford, whose districts both voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Also on the list, although a steeper challenge, is Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Tulare, whose leadership of the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation transformed him into a bogeyman for liberals.
Hundreds of carpooling activists, armed with clipboards, fliers and talking points, have encouraged Democrats to get to the polls in these districts, where turnout has lagged in the past. And they plan to keep up the pressure before the general election.
But some local voters aren’t thrilled about outsiders coming in.
“They don’t live here, so they don’t have any right to try to manipulate the vote,” said Arlene Avila, 70, a Republican in Turlock whose family goes back four generations in the area. “What upsets me is the Bay Area is just the opposite of us politically, and they seem to control the entire state.”
And GOP strategists are ready to paint the activists as San Francisco liberals who just don’t fit in the less-affluent region of close-knit small towns and sprawling dairy farms.
People in the Bay Area bubble are “so far to the left they don’t know how far out of touch they are,” said Jim DeMartini, a Stanislaus County supervisor and the chair of the county Republican Party. “Hating Trump is not going to resonate well out here — it might work in Berkeley, but not here.”
The visitors don’t advertise the fact that they’re from out of town when they go door to door, instead describing themselves as volunteers for the Democratic Party — but they won’t hide it if asked.
“It usually doesn’t come up,” said Carole Flores, 69, a retired first grade teacher and activist with Swing Left Peninsula. “We’re not going there trying to tell people what to do — we’re there to assist and give them more manpower.” She and other volunteers stress that they always take direction from local organizers.
The manpower boost they deliver is impressive — at last weekend’s canvass in Ceres, 45 of the 52 people who showed up were from the Bay Area, organizers said. The volunteers went house to house armed with clipboards and smartphones running an app that told them which doors to knock on and which people to talk to. They focused on Democrats, urging them to send in their ballots early, while staying neutral about which of the half-dozen candidates running against Denham they should support.
Carlson, the Palo Alto writer, was in the Valley volunteering for the 11th time since Trump’s election. He teamed up with Sophie Winfree, a 16-year-old from Turlock who helped organize a pro-gun control walkout at her high school this year. Deployed to a mostly Latino neighborhood, the duo navigated their way down cul-de-sacs filled with squat homes, connecting with voters in English and Spanglish and chatting over yapping dogs and whirring lawnmowers.
Most people on their list had only the vaguest idea of who was running in the upcoming congressional election. Xochilt Guzman, who’s been living in Ceres for almost a decade, told Carlson and Winfree she thought Denham was a Democrat. She was surprised when they informed her that her congressman is a Republican who voted in line with Trump’s positions 97 percent of the time.
“Anything that comes out of (Trump’s) mouth is nonsense,” Guzman said, vowing to vote against Denham.
That confusion is common, Winfree said as she walked to the next house: “People might not know Denham, but they know Trump. The most effective way you can tell voters about him is comparing his record with Trump’s.”
Carlson and Winfree registered two new voters, including Noemy Lopez, 37, who spends three hours on the road each day commuting to her job as an office assistant in Hollister. She said she simply hadn’t had time to think about the upcoming election or registering to vote until the volunteers showed up at her doorstep.
“I’ve never seen someone come here to talk about elections,” she said. “That’s cool.”
One reason Carlson says he volunteers so often is that the decisions of the Central Valley Republicans affect people in the Bay Area too. Last year, for example, Denham and his GOP colleagues helped delay almost $650 million in federal grants for a project to improve Caltrain service.
Meanwhile, Bay Area volunteers are also connecting with Central Valley voters without having to cross the hills. One of the region’s nerve centers of liberal activism is the Democratic Volunteer Center, an office associated with the Santa Clara County Democratic Party that’s tucked behind a Highway 101 off-ramp in Palo Alto. It’s become a busy hub for phone banking to Denham’s district and other competitive seats around the country.
On a recent Tuesday evening, about 30 volunteers — mostly women — sat at folding tables diligently writing postcards to voters in the 22nd District, urging them to cast their ballots for Andrew Janz, the top Democratic candidate running against Nunes. The volunteers signed their first names, highlighted their handwritten messages in bright colors and slapped on stickers to make them stand out from the typical political junk mail.
“We try to make them personal and eye-catching if people are on their way to the recycle bin with it,” said Johanna Schmid, a 72-year-old retiree from Sunnyvale. “They can tell a real person wrote it.”
After some postcard-making events, although not this one, a package of hundreds of postcards is hand-delivered to the Central Valley and mailed to voters from there, organizers said — in order to avoid a Palo Alto postmark going to a voter in Visalia.
Activists also plan to ramp up their efforts before November’s general election: Swing Left San Francisco brought in a Spanish teacher to give a session on political vocabulary, in order to help volunteers communicate better in the Latino-heavy districts. Other activists have planned multi-day trips to the Valley, sleeping in the spare rooms of their local counterparts.
Beatrice Von Schulthess, 59, who was also at the Memorial Day weekend canvass in Ceres, decided to retire from her job at a San Francisco bookstore the week after Trump won to devote more time to political activism.
“I thought they were going to seem almost foreign to me,” Von Schulthess said of the Central Valley voters. “(But) we all share the same concerns… People open their doors and really want to talk to you.”
Update, 6/2: This story was updated to clarify that postcards from the recent postcard-making event were not sent from the Central Valley.
