NICOLAS STERGIOU
Producer, Social Media Manager, Labor Organizer, and Unofficial “Astoria Street Spectator.”
By the time you read this, the election will be over.
Somebody won. Somebody lost. Somebody is probably already talking about running on a third- party ticket. And somewhere on social media, a person who hasn’t voted in three election cycles is explaining why everything stinks.
Which got me thinking about canvassing.
I’m sure folks would rather spend their weekend doing literally anything else. A few weeks ago I would’ve put myself in that category too. But after finally trying it at age 39, I realized canvassing wouldn’t really teach me about politics. But it did teach me about participation.
Looking back, it’s kind of ridiculous that I’d never canvassed before for local elections, considering my background as a labor organizer doing basically the same thing. I also run an Instagram page called Gotham Goose which is part satire and part civic engagement and all me just trying to get free food/drinks from local businesses as an anti-influencer. I’ve spent the last year making jokes about bike lanes, local elections, apparently pissing off other leaders in the community, and pointing out political drama that most normal people would immediately scroll past. I’ve donated to campaigns, attended rallies, and wasted more hours than I’d care to admit arguing about local politics online.
The closest thing I’d done to canvassing was the Census. It was important. It was also nowhere near as fun.
My first canvass was in Woodside. I showed up because I appreciated Chuck Park’s campaign and was curious what canvassing was actually like.
We met in a park on a Wednesday around 5 p.m. Volunteers from different campaigns stopped by before everyone grabbed stacks of literature and got to knocking. I was matched with someone who had done this before. At first, I mostly listened while we buzzed buildings, climbed stairs, and knocked on doors. Some people didn’t answer. Some had already voted. Some wanted to talk. Most interactions didn’t last more than a minute but every so often I’d have a good conversation with someone who genuinely cared about what was happening around them.
Within about an hour, during and my first water break, I understood what the hype was about.
Not because I suddenly thought I was changing the world one door at a time. What hooked me was how different it felt from posting online. Here we were walking through the neighborhood, meeting people, hearing actual concerns, and participating in something tangible. It felt less like politics and more like community service with a scoreboard.
A few days later I went out again, this time by myself. No offense to having a partner, but I’m competitive and I like to move fast. As a labor organizer, one of my coworkers and I used to joke that whoever signed the most union cards would win a giant flat-screen TV. The TV didn’t exist, but the competition did.
Canvassing activated me. Not because I wanted to beat anyone, but because there is something strangely satisfying about watching a list shrink and checking boxes. One more building. One more door. One more conversation. You start with a map with names and addresses on this app called “Minivan” and spend the day trying to turn as many of them as possible into actual human interactions.
And walking block after block forces you to notice things you’d otherwise miss. By the end of the day, I didn’t just know more voters. I knew more of the neighborhood. The people surprised me too. I went into my first canvass expecting at least a little hostility. This is New York, after all. Instead, most people were pretty nice. Some were in a rush. Some politely declined. Some had already voted and seemed almost proud to tell me. A few even thanked me. The last person I spoke to on Wednesday wasn’t even asking about Chuck Park. She wanted to talk about another race in her district and asked a question I thought was fair: why support a challenger with no Albany experience over someone who already has experience in office?
What followed wasn’t really a debate. It was a conversation about two other candidates not in my district but in hers. A natural one. I told her there were things I liked about both candidates and that I’d be happy with either outcome. For me, the difference came down to leadership style. I tend to admire people who are willing to take positions before they become popular and band well together with people who will fight with them on it and who aren’t afraid to stand apart from the crowd if they believe they’re right
She listened. I listened. We talked for a couple of minutes and, by the end, she told me she was reconsidering her vote. What mattered to me in that moment was that two strangers had a real conversation about what they valued in a local leader. One thing I noticed is that people don’t always agree on solutions, but they often care about the same problems. Housing. Schools. Cost of living. My biggest canvassing takeaway is that it isn’t really about politics. It’s about community.
Many of the people who now hold office started out as volunteers. Zohran Mamdani canvassed for Bernie Sanders in 2016, and before becoming an Assembly member and congressional candidate, Claire Valdez was knocking doors herself. Campaigns don’t just find voters. They create future activists, organizers, and sometimes future politicians.
Spend enough weekends talking to neighbors and politics stops feeling like something happening on television. It becomes something happening on your block. You hear concerns you hadn’t considered. You learn which stories are real and which only exist online.
Meanwhile, another group of people is posting online that Astoria is ruined. You’ve probably seen the posts in neighborhood Facebook groups: everything was better twenty years ago. Yet many of the people saying these things aren’t involved in anything. They don’t volunteer. They don’t organize. They don’t attend meetings. They’re standing outside the community looking in and wondering why they don’t feel connected to it.
Communities aren’t spectator sports.
Voting matters, obviously. But voting has never been the entire job. You vote for a few minutes one day every year or so. Community happens during the other 364 days. It happens when you show up to something. A meeting. A volunteer event. A cleanup. A fundraiser. A canvass. It happens when you decide that the neighborhood is something you’re a part of, not just a place you live.
