Hi. Welcome to On Politics, your guide to the day in national politics. I’m Lisa Lerer, your host.
“All I have to do is give my time.”
It’s election season and Mary Rose Brown is awfully busy for a 92-year-old.
The widowed former teacher spends her days writing postcards encouraging voters to head to the polls on Election Day.
So far, she’s sent 650 pre-addressed, pre-stamped cards out across the country from her small apartment in an Iowa Falls, Iowa, assisted-living facility.
“My goal is to send 1,000,” she told me over the phone. “I did 50 this morning.”
When you ask voters to describe our current political climate, they’re likely to come back with a word like disgusted, angry or depressing.
Heartwarming rarely comes up.
But I’d like to suggest that there’s another way to see this moment: As a period of grass-roots democratic engagement.
Bear with me for a minute. I know, it’s become fashionable to argue that the country is the most bitterly split since the Civil War.
And yes, there’s truth to that.
But we’re also engaged. A Washington Post-ABC News poll released over the weekend found that voter enthusiasm is up across the board from the last midterm contest in 2014.
A 77 percent majority of registered voters told pollsters that they are certain to cast a ballot next month, up from 65 percent in October 2014. The finding is particularly striking given that midterms have traditionally only attracted a minority of voters.
This political enthusiasm hasn’t always been pretty. There have been messy Thanksgiving dinners, P.T.A. meetings and church group discussions.
But sometimes, through all the yelling, you find people like Ms. Brown.
Born on a farm outside of Iowa Falls, she says she’s always been a proud Democrat.
“I was raised a Democrats back in the 1930s, when my dad sat with his ear tuned into the radio listening to Roosevelt,” she said, speaking over a captioned phone.
Her first job, she recalled, was connecting calls at a telephone office. Then she taught in a rural school, raised her four children and eventually opened her own income tax consulting business.
She now has six grandchildren, ten great-grandchildren (with twins coming in December), and one great-great-granddaughter. In her retirement, she volunteered for AARP, coordinating a voter education program.
Ms. Brown will be the first to admit that her postcards are partisan. They come as part of a program run by Tom Steyer, the billionaire Democratic activist. So far, the group has sent 1.5 million cards.
But Ms. Brown says her bigger goal is to convince people that their vote matters.
“What I am saying to the people on the postcards is, ‘Your vote will make a difference,’” she said. “I tell them my personal story, which is not very much. I’m a 92-years-young grandmother voting Democratic for a better future for all. Then, I just say thank you, please vote.”
Ms. Brown is busy: She convinced a few of her friends at her assisted-living facility to help write some cards, and she’s also been collecting absentee ballot requests from others in her community.
Will all that work matter on Election Day? Ms. Brown isn’t sure. But, she says, she has to try.
“I do it because I firmly believe that I have some God-given blessing here that I’m able to do this in the first place,” she said. “I just have to be hopeful that at least a few will vote.”
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Anatomy of an interview
Last night, President Trump…
