I signed up to canvas for the Harris-Walz campaign in Pennsylvania on a whim. My friend has a car and would be able to drive us there. We could make a road trip out of it. And, knowing that this specific trip would take place just days before the election, I anticipated that this concrete, boots-on-the-ground action would help quell the unavoidable anxiety I was bound to experience.  

When my friends and I were assigned by Yale Dems to stay with Valerie Glauser, we didn’t know what to expect. 

Valerie lives in Mt. Airy, the most liberal neighborhood in Philadelphia. She has two cats, Luna and one-eyed Ruckus. Originally, she had only planned on adopting Ruckus, but, when she found out that they were sisters, she knew that she would be taking both of them home. They are black cats, which are notoriously the most difficult to adopt, given their widely-accepted association with bad luck. 

Valerie is scared of the effects of climate change, so she joined the Weavers Way Co-Op, a sustainable market in Northwest Philly, owned, managed and run by its customers. She manages the Jar Library, weighing each reusable glass mason jar so that people can easily tare the weight of the jars when they shop in the bulk section of the store. This effort gets the Co-Op one step closer to being plastic-free. 

Valerie broke her foot two years ago and can’t walk more than two miles anymore, making canvassing impossible for her. She has pivoted and instead become a refuge and soft place to land for canvassers coming to the critical swing state; she has had guests varying from three Yale students to two women from Belgium who traveled all that way just to fight for an election in which they could not even vote. 

In many ways, she is the epitome of what JD Vance LAW ’13 would call “a childless cat lady,” but, despite Vance’s intended connotations, Valerie deeply cares about the future of this country and its citizens. 

Throughout our 24 hours with her, she frequently confessed how guilty she felt for her inability to do more for the campaign. She wished she could get out into the streets of her hometown and have the chance to share a face-to-face connection with her community the way that we could. 

After Harris lost the election, my mom asked me how I felt.
“Heartbroken.”

“But how do you  feel after being in Pennsylvania?”

I didn’t canvas to feel good about myself. I didn’t do it to brag about my selfless deed. I never truly believed that knocking on a couple of hundred doors would suddenly change America. 

I just wanted to do something.

And I’ve begun to realize that, in a way, my motive mirrors Valerie’s. She sees something that scares her. She sees something out of her control. And rather than letting fear and doubt overwhelm her, she does something. She adopts two black cats instead of one in order to keep a family together. She weighs jars in order to make sustainable shopping more accessible and convenient. She welcomes four strange college kids into her home.