“Our subcontractors never should have driven their canvassers in a U-Haul van and those involved were immediately reprimanded,” Tim Pollard of Blitz Canvassing tells WIRED.
On Wednesday, October 30, Muldrow and her fellow door knockers were fired hours after the publication of the WIRED story.
At first, some people had trouble logging into Campaign Sidekick, the glitchy app used by America PAC for canvassing. There was confusion before they were finally told it was over: “Everyone is fired,” said Jones, who served as the door knockers’ manager, in a GroupMe chat, according to screenshots obtained by WIRED.
Jones did not reply to a request for comment.
Muldrow thought Jones might be joking about everyone getting fired, but some of the door knockers noticed they had been locked out of Campaign Sidekick, according to the group chat.
“I called my mom immediately,” Muldrow says. “My mom told me I was overreacting because, it’s [my] cousin, so she was like, ‘Oh, maybe she’s playing a joke on you guys. Don’t take it literal.’ And my mom was like, ‘She sent you up there in the first place. You went with her. If anything, you would have your flight home through her. She’s not going to let you be stranded.’”
Then, Muldrow says, Jones began asking the door knockers which one of them spoke to the press.
As arguments ensued, Muldrow started to fear for her safety. Muldrow packed up her belongings and called Connor Berdy, a 29-year-old political consultant based in Warren, Michigan and the founder of Vote For Change LLC, a consulting group in Southeast Michigan for his community organizing work.
Muldrow had met Berdy—who runs canvassing operations for school board, county commission, and judicial candidates—when, by chance, one of his employees struck up a chat with her while she was canvassing near their home on October 23. Berdy and Muldrow got lunch soon after, and Muldrow told him about how the door knockers in her group had been tricked, threatened, and driven around in U-Hauls to their door knocking locations.
Management had “clearly not prioritized the safety of the workers or the integrity of the operation,” says Berdy.
Berdy then arrived, and pretended to be an Uber driver to get Muldrow out of the situation. He had already bought Muldrow a flight back home to Florida, paying out of his own pocket.