New State, Big Election

Blog # 10

I moved to southeast Florida a few months before the biggest presidential election of my life. So of course one of the first things I did was register for a new voter card, in addition to a Florida driver’s license. Having moved from a “blue” state to a red (purple?) one, I wanted my vote for Joe Biden to matter in a state that could use my Democratic influence. At least that’s what I planned.

My canvassing for Biden-Harris would count a little bit more here in Florida than it would have in Virginia. So my goal before November 3, 2020, was to help in the effort to turn Florida blue. That would be my life now, as much as I could fit it in.

About six weeks after I arrived in Florida, I started a full-time copy-editing job for a company back in Northern Virginia (Tax Analysts, publisher of Tax Notes). It was remote because of the COVID pandemic, so I was able to work from my home. I had an L-shaped desk built into the corner of my living room, next to the sliding glass doors overlooking my lanai and the beautiful red, green, and yellow foliage just beyond. While I worked I had a sweeping view of this lanai surrounded by the colorful landscaping. It was a perfect setup.

My dog Lex and I felt at home in our new villa (like a row house but on one level). It has high ceilings so feels quite spacious. My house has a one-car garage, den, and guest quarters at the front of the unit, the kitchen and breakfast nook in the middle, and the master suite, living room, and lanai in the rear. So the back of the house was the best place to set up my work area, rather than in the average, more confining den. My semi-private back and side yards are just beyond the lanai, and I set up my computer at the living room desk at an angle where I could view the beautiful scenery as I worked.

This situation seemed ideal, especially in light of the home isolation needed in this time of a serious pandemic. I enjoyed being at home with my dog and having a great view during my working hours. I didn’t need to put on nice clothes and I could spend a casual, quiet day in shorts and flip flops in the cool air-conditioning of my Florida home. I worked the copy editors’ required hours of 11 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. EST, when the company needed us to read the day’s news stories as they came in from the reporters. I could play tennis or go to the community pool before my work day started, I took a lunch break mid-afternoon, and I walked Lex in the evenings after I was done working and when it was cool enough for him to march around the neighborhood.

So it seemed like a good life — for a while. I thought I would love the job, and I felt grateful to find a professional editing position that was both full-time and remote.

As summer turned into fall in those first few months of my life in Florida, I began to become more energized about the local Democrat people I was meeting and the work to be done to prepare for the November election. I joined more local activist groups, and I got excited about the activities that people were becoming involved with. I was so happy to find passionate progressives in this southern red state.

By late September 2020, however, I began to feel that my full-time job was interfering with some good opportunities to get involved in politics. There was a gathering every Thursday from 5 to 7 p.m. at an intersection in nearby Delray Beach, where Biden-Harris supporters from all walks of life were meeting on the corners (and some on the medians) to wave signs, play music, and draw attention to the upcoming Democratic ticket. I wanted to be a part of that. In addition, there were important Zoom meetings scheduled at various hours, for such things as planning election strategies, mailing postcards to voters, and setting up phone and text banks. And with the early polling places due to open soon, there would be a need for Democrats to volunteer on the ground there.

My work schedule was preventing me from participating in much, if any, of these activities. I did not want this fall campaign season to pass me by, when this election — and defeating Donald Trump — was the most important thing to me at the moment. I had chosen my new county (Palm Beach) to buy a house in because it historically voted solidly blue. I had divorced my husband earlier in the year basically because he was at the opposite end of the political spectrum from me, and was a Trump supporter. I only wanted to surround myself with like-minded Democrats at this stage of my life.

So if I was glued to my desk for the majority of the day, and I couldn’t get out and do the things that I really wanted to, then what was the point?

I suppose if I had enjoyed the new job more, then it wouldn’t have been so difficult to be tied to my computer during this time, but I was increasingly finding the job not satisfying. The work was pretty dull, the restrictive set of required editing rules that I was faced with was becoming irritating, and my supervisors always seemed to be breathing down my neck, even remotely. I was expected to turn around the editing assignments at a very quick pace, but they wanted a whole checklist of things reviewed on every story, which couldn’t very well be done in a fast turnaround. I wasn’t used to having this much micromanaging at this stage of my career, and I longed for the days of freelancing when I had a lot more flexibility with my work. The strict daily hours also were getting harder and harder to plan around.

One day, when I was especially frustrated at a critical comment that had just come in on my work computer from a supervisor, my personal computer pinged, and I saw that I had a new request for some freelance editing work. It wasn’t the first time I had received a request like this, but it was for a really interesting project pertaining to racism experienced by a Black family over the generations in the deep South. It sounded fascinating, and right up my alley.

I began to look at freelance work as an option again. It would be a refreshing way to make a living during an exciting, and increasingly important, election season. I had worked freelance or contract in the past, especially while raising my kids, and what was best about this kind of work was that I could usually do it on my own time, at whatever hours I wanted to work. As long as I turned in the edited documents by the expected deadline, I had total flexibility in my working hours. I have no problem working evenings and weekends if it means that I can do what I need to do for myself during some weekday hours.

But I needed something steady, not just a random string of temporary projects. The downside of freelance work is that it is often short-lived — you receive a request for a job, you turn it around, and then it’s over. It doesn’t necessarily lead to further work. Sometimes it does, but often it does not. So I couldn’t count on just freelance work to sustain me if I had a mortgage, monthly HOA fees, and various utility bills to pay.

I loved the idea of working on the story of generations of a Black family, and I wanted to take on other freelance projects too. It just would not be feasible unless I got enough work to quit my full-time job.

I slogged along unhappily for a while, going through the motions of my job, but I continued to apply for additional work, especially part-time steady gigs. Eventually a new opportunity popped up: becoming an on-call, part-time writer/editor for a company called Ripple Effect Communications. Because of the pandemic, they were happy to hire people remotely, so it was a good fit. At the same time, a colleague from years ago reached out to me through LinkedIn (where I had recently updated my profile and indicated that I was open to work). He had started a home-based company that helped with the writing and editing of business proposals for government contracting companies and was looking for a contract editor to add to his roster. It would also be on an on-call basis. I had experience editing proposals from the past when I had lived in the Washington, DC, area, where government contracting proposals were a big part of business there. It wasn’t my favorite kind of work – it was usually very dry and technical — but it paid well, so I said yes.

So there I had it — between Ripple Effect and the proposal editing firm, I could count on two regular gigs that, along with the occasional freelance requests, would make it possible for me to leave my full-time job. It was a risk, I knew, to quit the full-time salaried position. I would lose paid vacations and holidays and, most notably, my health insurance. But I could probably go back on Obamacare (if the Trump administration didn’t do away with it!). And it was worth it to me at the time to lose those benefits if it also meant I would lose my ball and chain — which is what my current job felt like.

With the flexibility now of choosing my own schedule during the week, I could volunteer for the Biden-Harris campaign, I could rally with my new Democratic friends, and I could concentrate on the things that mattered to me most. In addition, I hoped to work on my personal writing (like this blog). Getting involved in crucial election work and writing about my experiences of the past couple years were the two things I really wanted to do at the present time. That was a lot more important to me then a steady job with all the fixings.

I accepted the two on-call editing positions and gave notice to my supervisor at the current job. And then I signed up for all the volunteer activities I had been missing!

It was mid-October 2020, and the early voting locations in Florida were just opening up. I wanted to stand with other local Democrats outside those polls and pass out sample ballots. I planned to hand-write more postcards to voters. I also had signed up to do text-banking for the Biden campaign. And then, as it got closer to Election Day, I planned to canvas door to door, safely with face masks.

As soon as I quit my full-time job, I began attending all of the weekly sign-holding rallies in Delray that I wasn’t able to do when I was working the required hours. I fell in with a great group of people there, joined the Democrat Club of Delray Beach, and was happy to have new friends to work alongside for this big election. We all shared a single common goal — getting Trump out. It was a good feeling.

So now the presidential election was #1 on my priority list. I cobbled together time for my part-time/freelance gigs around my Democratic volunteering, and it worked out well. I could do both. I was making less money, but for now that was fine. Working on the campaign side by side with other activists was the best thing for me at this time in my life.

That fall I received the mail-in ballot that I had requested, and like many Democrats during the raging pandemic, I filled it out, signed it, and dropped it off in a box at a local government building. I went to the Palm Beach Supervisor of Elections office nearby in Delray, as soon as it opened up for mail-in voting drop-offs. That was one blue vote for Florida! I proudly put an “I Voted by Mail” sticker on the back of my car.

I continued to volunteer steadily, I attended the Biden sign-waving rallies, and as the election got closer, I started to get nervous about election night. Good Democratic friends from Virginia who have a condo in Naples told me that they were coming down to Florida for two weeks starting the end of October and wondered when would be a good time to visit and see my new home. “Can you come for election night?” I asked. “I don’t want to be alone!”

Mark and Melanie readily agreed, and we made plans for them to make the approximate two-hour drive from Naples to my Boynton Beach home on the afternoon of November 3. I bought food to make chicken enchiladas for dinner and a bottle of Prosecco for celebrating when Biden-Harris won. We planned to wear masks inside my home and eat dinner out on the lanai. They would spend the night in my guest room and return back to Naples the next day. I also was going to show them around town and along the coastal roads because they were interested in potentially selling their condo in Republican stronghold Naples and buying one here in blue Palm Beach County.

The night before they arrived, I drove over the I-95 overpass in Boynton Beach to head to a final sign-waving event for Biden on the east side of town. On the overpass, on both sides of the road, were scores of cars and pickup trucks with loud, aggressive right-wingers waving huge Trump signs and American flags and obnoxiously jeering (at least in my eyes). “Uggghh,” I muttered to myself, and gave them the thumbs down as I inched through their crowded gathering. I would never dare do anything more – it was well known in Florida that many of these “good old boys” carried guns, and flipping them off would not end well. It was also the reason I didn’t have any political or Black Lives Matter bumper stickers on my car. I didn’t need to invite trouble.

I drove on, to locate my people about a mile away, and was soon happily waving my Biden signs with the good guys.

The next day, Mark and Melanie arrived and we had a great visit. After dinner we settled in my den for a socially distanced viewing of the TV news and the exciting election results. We switched back and forth between CNN and MSNBC. Journalist Steve Kornacki, covering the constantly changing results on the map of the United States in the MSNBC studio, was a fan favorite and we enjoyed watching him work. I had a good night taking in this crucial news coverage with my longtime, dear friends.

But as everybody knows, we had no way of finding out that night who would be the next president of the United States. It would be days before all the states’ results were in and counted. My friends would be long gone by then.

On Nov. 7, 2020, I came home from playing tennis in the morning and right away turned on the TV, as I had been doing all week. Everybody, it seemed, was glued to the news those days, waiting, waiting, waiting…. And late that Saturday morning, Pennsylvania’s electoral results were finalized, CNN called it for Biden, and I whooped it up alone in my den. “Yes!!!” I shouted to my dog, sweeping him up and dancing around the room.

I immediately started texting family and friends, and continued to get contacted all day long by people excited about the win. I couldn’t do anything else that day. All the Democrats and I were hooping and hollering and celebrating virtually — it was such an awesome moment, at long last. We had waited a long time for this moment.

Melanie and I decided to finally have that toast we’d put off, and at 5 p.m. that day I got a glass of bubbly and my iPhone, and I FaceTimed with her and Mark — celebrating a little belatedly over a small screen what we had meant to celebrate in person in my den on election night. But it was a victory we had wanted to share, and so we did.

In the end, Florida had gone for Trump. But the nation, overall, decisively fired him. And, best of all for me, my newly chosen home — Palm Beach County — went blue and picked Biden and Harris. I had made the right choice in moving here. I wasn’t going anywhere.

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