“Our subcontractors should never have driven their canvassers around in a U-Haul van and those involved were immediately reprimanded,” Tim Pollard of Blitz Canvassing tells WIRED.
On Wednesday, October 30, Muldrow and his colleagues were fired hours after the WIRED story was published.
At first, some people had trouble logging into Campaign Sidekick, the buggy app used by America PAC to campaign. There was confusion before they were finally told it was over: “Everyone’s fired,” Jones, who was serving as the door knocker’s manager, said in a GroupMe chat, according to screenshots obtained by WIRED.
Jones did not respond to a request for comment.
Muldrow thought Jones might be joking about everyone being fired, but some of the door-knockers noted they’d been banned from Campaign Sidekick, according to the group chat.
“I called my mom immediately,” Muldrow says. “My mom told me I was exaggerating because she’s (my) cousin, so she said, ‘Oh, maybe I’m playing a prank on you.’ Don’t take it literally. And my mom told me, ‘She sent you there in the first place.’ You went with her. In any case, you would have your flight home through it. She’s not going to let you be stranded.’”
Then, Muldrow says, Jones began asking door knockers which of them was speaking to the press.
As the arguments continued, Muldrow began to fear for his safety. Muldrow packed up his belongings and called Connor Berdy, a 29-year-old Warren, Michigan-based political consultant and 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 the school board, county commission and judicial candidates, when, by chance, one of her employees struck up a conversation with her while she was canvassing near her home on October 23. Berdy and Muldrow got lunch soon after, and Muldrow told him how his group’s door-knockers had been tricked, threatened, and driven in U-Hauls to the door-knocking locations.
Management “clearly had not prioritized worker safety or the integrity of the operation,” Berdy says.
Berdy then arrived and posed as an Uber driver to get Muldrow out of the situation. He had already bought Muldrow a flight back to Florida, paying for it out of his own pocket.
