After Election Day, democracy will depend on all of us

Time has been moving slowly for Linwood Holland. Daylight saving time didn’t help; he bemoans the extra hour that he’ll now have to wait to know the results of the 2024 election. This morning, he and his wife were first and second in line at their polling place in Philadelphia’s 35th Ward.

In a city where Republicans are outnumbered by a margin of 7-1, Holland — a 64-year-old GOP ward leader in this overwhelmingly Democratic city — is a rarity.

Yet, each Election Day — no matter how dim the prospects for victory might be for his party’s chosen candidate — he dutifully embarks on what he knows some might consider a Quixotic odyssey: providing support for Republican poll workers in communities where the number of actual GOP voters can be vanishingly small.

I woke before dawn to meet Holland outside his home on a block shaded by sycamore trees in Lawncrest. A neighbor languidly raked the leaves. I rode shotgun in his white Mercedes, zigzagging across Rising Sun Avenue as Holland dropped off envelopes at four different polling places in the 35th Ward for poll watchers for the Republican Party.

Inside each manilla envelope was a certificate. The most dramatic thing he’s triaged: In 2020, an election worker ate a Republican poll watcher’s certificate. Holland recalled the incident and laughed. “We had to go to the commissioner’s office and get another one.”

At each stop, a steady trickle of voters came through the gymnasium and church doors. “Nothing compared to the crowds of 2008, 2012,” Holland said, referring to the city’s response to the candidacy of Barack Obama in those years. The smaller crowds he attributes to the proliferation of mail-in ballots, rather than a lack of enthusiasm about Vice President Kamala Harris.

In the 35th Ward, where he works on behalf of the GOP, relations are cordial between Democratic and Republican voters. While the results of the election may yet be uncertain for days, one thing seems certain: The future of our democracy depends on not just paying lip service to bipartisanship, but on actively having conversations across the political divide.

When we dare to do this, it can be strangely nourishing: an antidote to despair, malaise, and whatever else meets us on the other side of this election.

I don’t have a party affiliation, but I would describe my own politics as center-left, and in the four hours we spent together, I was surprised at the unexpected common ground between us.

Twenty-first-century problems need 21st-century solutions — on this much, we agree. Holland wishes there were younger Republicans on the ballot instead of Donald Trump. “I would vote for a younger person in a heartbeat, because why would you be taking rules from a person who is pretty much set in their ways and doesn’t see the world as transforming?” he asked. I, too, am exhausted by Trump’s form of leadership.

We disagree on abortion. “Roe v. Wade was put in place, in my opinion, to settle a score, just to make everybody even,” he said. “I believe everybody has their own uniqueness,” Holland added, “so now with it turned over to the states, people don’t realize how much power they have ... You have the power to go after your elected officials and make sure that they make it the way you want it in your state.”

Hearing this, I couldn’t help but think of Josseli Barnica, who died in 2021 in a Texas hospital after being told it would be a crime to intervene in her miscarriage. She doesn’t have the power to call her elected officials from the grave. Nor can Amber Thurman and Candi Miller in Georgia. Pregnancy is dangerous, and the future of access to lifesaving reproductive health care is on the ballot. (Still, even on abortion, a topic I care about deeply, it was helpful to hear a different perspective.)

I might be in the minority of liberals here, but I genuinely love listening to people whom I disagree with. It helps me pressure test my own arguments, and interrogate my own beliefs. It allows me to ask myself not just what I believe in, but why I believe it.

Holland, who retired from the Philadelphia Parking Authority in 2018, has lived in the 35th Ward for a quarter century. He told me it was a primarily Republican neighborhood until about 10 years ago.

At one point during our visit, Holland leaned close and whispered that he thinks Tuesday’s result will be a landslide ... for Trump.

“A lot of people are quiet about voting for him because of cancel culture, and because they work downtown,” he said. When people look at Holland, a Black man, they are quick to assume he is a Democrat. He’s used to this. Many of the people he works with at Philadelphia Federal Credit Union don’t know his party affiliation, and he doesn’t bother to correct them.

Some of Holland’s friends who had voted early spent Election Day at Topgolf, perfecting their swing. He can’t join them, he said wistfully, but civic duty is more important. He’s motivated by “the need to help people. If we can help people, then that’s helping ourselves, too.”

It’s easy to think that if our chosen candidate loses, the world as we know it will end. Yes, everyone is anxious. Yes, we won’t know the results of this chaotic election for days. But now is as good a time as ever to practice showing up for our neighbors, no matter how they vote.