Lucy Gellman Photo
New Haven’s Yarboro with Cohen in New Hampshire.
Milford, N.H. —Two divergent paths led Bonita Yarboro and Debra Cohen from Connecticut to a door on Boxwood Court, leaflets in hand on an idealistic quest to elect Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.
Yarboro lives in New Haven’s Morris Cove neighborhood. She came to the campaign after 22 years of disillusionment with the corporate world, including a stint as an insurance claims examiner.
Cohen, who lives in the Hartford suburb of Wethersfield, has spent her adult life in social services. She found her way to the democratic socialist’s income-inequality-themed campaign after 35 years working in early childhood care, then a wake-up call from the Occupy Wall Street movement.
The two paired up this past Sunday to promote Sanders in Milford, N.H., in advance of Feb. 9’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary.
By the time they reached a door on Boxwood Court, it had been a fairly unsuccessful afternoon. Only two potential voters had opened their doors, and one had done so only to ask them to leave.
Cohen climbed three steps, rapping the outer door with three succinct knocks. Two black labs barked from inside, running up to press their noses against the glass door. Cohen cooed and looked through. Nothing.
Yarboro handed her another Bernie flyer to leave on the porch.
Then, footsteps, rushing, from inside the house. A woman stuck out her head, followed by her body.
“Hello!” she said.
“Are you Falon Hurley?” Yarboro asked.
“No, Falon doesn’t live here anymore,” the woman answered. “I’m her mom. Kristen Marie Hurley.”
“Oh,” Cohen said. After a momentary deflation, she persisted: “Well, may we leave this literature about Bernie Sanders?”
Hurley paused. Then she clasped Cohen’s hands in hers, and began to jump up and down.
“I’m so happy you’re for Bernie!” she exclaimed.
Cohen and Yarboro were happy, too. They had started the day in their home towns, driving up to Milford, N.H., with Hartford-area volunteers Ken Krayeske and Urania Petit. While both women have been Sanders supporters since the senator announced his candidacy in late May 2015, and kew each other well before Leo Canty, former Windsor Democratic town chairman and coordinator of the Connecticut Road Berners, connected them through canvassing, they have become closer through the process. Now they were discussing the different roads that brought them to Sanders’ Milford headquarters, Rose Heden’s warm and coffee-scented home, and then to a single doorway on Milford’s pine-dotted Boxwood Court.
Hillary Hater
Yarboro.
While Yarboro pinpoints an August 2015 info session with the Bernie Sanders Connecticut team as connecting her to the campaign, her political road to Sanders began earlier, in the 1976 voting booth. There, the then-20-year-old cast a “yes” for Roger MacBride, the libertarian candidate running for president against Jimmy Carter. She said she feared Carter would run the economy into the ground.
That confirmed a pattern of going with her gut rather than with party. Yarboro voted for Republican George H.W. Bush in 1992 against Democrat Bill Clinton. She said she distrusted Clinton — a distrust that continued of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 president run, during which Yarboro “saw a lot of coded racism.”
In between those years, she made some big changes. She had moved east from California with plans to leave her career as an insurance company employee and become a lawyer. She earned a JD from Quinnipiac University in 2001, then another law degree, an LLM, from the University of Connecticut in 2006. She practiced as a plaintiff’s attorney, then a defense lawyer, until 2014. “I liked practicing law, but I didn’t like that I wasn’t helping the right people,” she said. So she started substitute teaching in the Morris Cove public schools, and volunteering for Sanders in her free time. She serves as a coordinator for the campaign in Connecticut’s Third U.S. Congressional District.
“I think that his [Sanders’] appeal goes across all age lines and across all races and sexes,” she said as she walked up the hilly, sun-warmed streets of west Milford. “When I think about the Clintons, I think about the three strikes law [aka habitual offender laws, which impose harsher penalties on repeat offenders, often for small infractions like marijuana possession]. I think about the fact that they took crack and powdered cocaine and put ‘em on two different sides of the scale [with higher prison sentences for selling crack, disproportionately affecting blacks and Latinos] … We know that drug use is the same among minorities and whites, but that minorities go to jail for it more often. I think a lot of that had something to do with Bill Clinton … He moved the party more towards the right, because he was trying to please all those Republicans.
“Even though she [Hillary Clinton] was not the president, she was advocating … his positions. She even went on record as calling young black men ‘super-predators.’ It wasn’t as though she just sat back … She agreed with it. And she still agrees with it. I call her “Republican lite.” I feel like if I vote for her, I might as well vote for a Republican, because she’ll just bend over backwards for them.”
With that, Yarboro looked down at her address sheet, and pressed on to another house.
A Wake-Up Call
Cohen.
For Cohen, a 64-year-old Wethersfield resident, the entry into politics — and an affinity for Sanders — crept up on her, then exploded as she prepared to retire.
A 1974 graduate of the University of Connecticut, she worked for 35 years in childcare and early education, spending 25 of them at the Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, where she served as assistant director starting in 2007. Meeting families who couldn’t afford care, she said, “was a reason for why I do what I do” as a volunteer for Sanders.
That was only the beginning of the equation. In early 2011, she found herself in a politically apathetic funk. That October, she started reading about the Occupy Wall Street movement, which sought financial reform and an assault on income inequality. “It all started to make sense,” she recalled. Upon learning that there was a Hartford Occupy chapter, she joined, attending meetings and rallies that helped her feel, surprisingly, “at home.”
“[Occupy] came along and bam! I felt newly aware. For the first time in my life, I felt like I could do more than just voice my opinion about something, so that was my entry into activism. I don’t remember when I first heard Bernie Sanders’ name, but I do remember thinking ‘Damn, he’s talking about all of the things that Occupy was talking about.’ That got me psyched. I think the biggest issue for me is money in politics, corporations running our government. We’ve had enough. It needs to stop.” Sanders has sworn off super PAC money and donations from Wall Street, which have accounted for tens of millions of dollars in contributions for the Clinton campaign.
Like Yarboro, Cohen said, she wants to see Super PACs booted from politics.
“My frustration comes from people not daring to think outside the box,” she said. “And not giving any thought to being part of the force that would push Bernie over the top rather than sitting back and saying ‘Well, it’s lost before we even start.’ What I’d really like to see if to have everybody get off the couch and work for what they’d like to see happen.”
A Phone Banker Enlisted
Hurley with Cohen.
Now that Yarboro and Cohen had the attention of Kristen Hurley on Boxwood Court, that personal enthusiasm for the candidate popped to the surface.
Hurley listened intently, as Cohen decried the influence of Wall Street money on political campaigns. Yarboro contributed her views on Hillary Clinton. Hurley agreed and added her own: education and healthcare. Sanders has called for free universal public-college tuition, paid for by increased taxes on the wealthy.
“I love the idea that education is something that everybody’s going to be privy to,” Hurley said. “How are you going to get anything done in this country if you’re not educating people? If they can’t afford it, then it’s a real Catch 22 situation.
“I would be much happier to see Bernie in there. I don’t think he’s going to follow through with the Obamacare, which I don’t think is working really well … [Clinton has called for improving Obamacare; Sanders has called for switching to a single-payer government-run health insurance system]. I can see how this is affecting everybody in healthcare … and it’s a huge impact on not only those people or their families. I don’t have the answer for it, but I don’t think the way it’s going is working.”
Cohen asked if she would be willing to phone bank the following weekend.
Hurley hesitated, then gave a yes.
Cohen she had an extra Sanders sign in the trunk of her car, parked just down the road.
Hurley gets her sign.
“That would just make my day,” Hurley said.
Lucy Gellman and Thomas Breen are spending the week in New Hampshire with canvassers, campaign staffers and volunteers, and candidates. To listen to some of the voices from the Sanders camp, click on or download the audio above. This is the third installment in a Soundcloud playlist of many political voices from the road.
Thomas Breen contributed reporting to this story.