The best day of doors we’ve had didn’t look like a victory lap. It looked like a Saturday morning with new organizers crammed into my living room, double-checking VAN logins, grabbing shirts, and asking each other where to park. We knocked through a 260-house packet in a few hours. I paid for lunch—$140 I’ll feel later—and sent a follow-up text that never got a reply.

That text wasn’t about data. It was about connection—the small, unreturned gestures that make this work human. Campaigns are supposed to be about momentum. What I’m learning is they’re really about contact: the quiet, repetitive touch of one person with another, and the thousand small judgments that happen on doorsteps, in cars between packets, and over the kind of lunch where you try to make a team out of strangers.