Lucy Gellman Photo
Ganong at New Hampshire Dems dinner before hitting doors.
Webster, N.H. — Making her way through the windy, snow-covered curves of Deer Meadow Road, Sarah Ganong of New Haven trudged down a long driveway, sidestepping patches of thick ice from a winter storm. Perhaps most challenging of all, Ganong and fellow canvasser Angie Parkinson were approaching the door of an independent who has voted Republican in the past.
Three knocks on the front door. A cat meowed loudly from inside. Slowly, a patter of footsteps, and a man opened the door.
“Are you Alan?” Ganong asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“Well, we’re here for Bernie Sanders …” she began.
No need to continue, interjected Alan (who wished to be identified by only his first name). The 69-year-old is registered as an independent in the state of New Hampshire. He voted Republican as recently as Mitt Romney in 2012. But this year he and his wife Marilee both support Democratic presidential candidate Sanders.
Ganong had traveled from New Haven with 25 members of the young, relatively new activist group called CT Progressives for a five-day canvass and get-out-the-vote effort running through Tuesday’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary.
Alan.
She asked Alan why she had switched sides for Sanders.
“Bernie is honest,” Alan said as the cat wound around his legs and took new interest in the volunteers. “To me he’s honest about the things that should be changed and the corruption that’s in the country … I’ve liked Bernie since he ran as an independent [U.S. Congressional and Senate candidate] in Vermont, so I’ve listened to him for years. I wish there was more people like him. I don’t care for Hillary ‘cause she’s kind of … wherever the wind blows.”
“Good man,” Marilee added.
Ganong helped found CT Progressives as a staging ground for Sanders support and grassroots activism in December 2015. In this tiny, snow-blanketed suburb of Warner, N.H. — where a Bernie Sanders satellite office has popped up for the final leg of the primary — most voters have already declared their support for the candidate. But here was a most-of-the-time-conservative who had swung left in response to Sanders’ promise to limit corruption by getting money out of politics, the same issue that had brought Gangong into the Sanders fold a year ago.
It was one of two surprises her band surprised on the stump, offering some hints of why Sanders has soared far ahead of fellow Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire polls.
Sanders, Via The Environment
New Haven’s Ganong, at left, at Door #1.
Raised in Ledyard, Conn., Ganong, 25, has always considered her values Democratic. At Dickinson College that she developed a taste for grassroots activism. As a kid, she’d loved having the Long Island Sound close to her. Her family had an environmental and community-oriented ethic that she ascribed to living around nature and attending a United Methodist Church in Gales Ferry. Her parents talked to her about voting. But they weren’t political people.
“When I was a freshman or sophomore [in college] I was invited completely by chance to a climate change, activism conference in D.C. by an acquaintance, a coworker,” she said while navigating a slippery New Hampshire driveway, ice crunching and sliding beneath her boots. “I went to that and really realized that working on climate and climate change was what I wanted to do with my life. What I needed to do. It felt like where I should be working … As I’ve gotten more involved in climate activism, I’ve become more and more aware that the political process is one of the biggest ways that we can do that.”
From that conference, she committed herself to environmental activism, connecting with the sustainability-themed co-op on campus and working on a team at Dickinson dedicated to reaching climate neutrality goals, like a 25 percent reduction in its emission of greenhouse gases, by the year 2020. After graduation, she joined the Highstead Foundation’s conservation efforts in Redding, Conn., working on its Wildlands and Woodlands campaign before moving to Connecticut Fund for the Environment/Save The Sound in 2014 as a media coordinator, and activist group Connecticut 350 as a volunteer in her free time.
A uniting theme in that work: getting money out of politics, and out of the environment.
Sanders came onto the presidential scene around the same time she was presented with an opportunity to attend the Paris Climate Talks.
“Just being there and seeing all the world leaders not really being held accountable by the people, and not feeling like they needed to be held accountable by their constituents made me realize that one way to fix that is electing better world leaders,” Ganong recalled.
For her, that meant — and still means — a candidate independent of the fossil fuel lobby, which she argued receives tax breaks, subsidies and discounts on extraction equipment in return for huge campaign contributions.
“It’s the vicious cycle of big money in the political system circling around. I think that Bernie is a way out of that, which helps the climate process too. Getting money out of politics — it’s the one thing that unites all other issues,” she said. Sanders has sworn off Super PAC money and large corporate contributions; his typical campaign contributor gives $27 on average.
At door #2.
A Surprise Single-Payer Advocate
A few houses the road, Ridgefield resident and fellow CT Progressive Callie Jayne was in discussion with another independent who offered the second surprise of the day: She works int he insurance industry. And, she said, she supports Sanders — because he supports a government-run single-payer health care system and expansion of Social Security.
“I like the fact that he doesn’t think that Social Security is an entitlement program,” she said. “I’ve been paying into that all my life. That’s my money. I’m furious at the government.”
“That’s what the problem is,” Jayne cut in. “There have been so many things that happened while we weren’t paying attention. NAFTA happened to protect all the corporations. There are people who are making millions and millions of dollars, and they’re not paying a dime into taxes. Bernie’s the only one who has the guts to stand up to it. For him it’s not a political move. He’s really paving the way for progressive politicians.”
The voter nodded and picked up the thought: “My neighbor cannot retire because he’s not eligible for medicare and his insurance premiums, because him and his wife both have heart conditions, they can’t retire because their premiums are going to be over $2,000 a month. So they won’t be able to live.”
“I hope that we go to a single-payer plan,” she added. “I really do. I’m a very strong believer that the government should take care of its people. I think we have a huge immigration issue, but the people that have and paid taxes and all that kind of stuff, I really believe that we should have a national healthcare plan … I might lose my [insurance] job, and that’s OK.”
With that, the Sanders crew soldiered on, in search of more welcome surprises and seeding hopes for change.