How One Woman's Journey to Help Elect Democrats Was Upended by the Pandemic

In early March, Patricia Suflita Wilson was preparing to put her house on the market in San Francisco and move to Arizona.

Wilson, the former CEO of the Northern California chapter of Make-a-Wish Foundation, never considered herself political. Then, Donald Trump was elected. She felt like she needed to do something.

“And I don’t know what’s in my power to do. But I read, I think on Twitter, and somebody commented, ‘I wish a bunch of Californians would just move to some of the swing states.’ And I read that and thought — I began to think about that. OK. I could actually do that,” she said.

So, Wilson, who is divorced and whose kids are grown, decided to sell her Balboa Park neighborhood home and move to a state where she felt like she could make a difference, politically speaking.

“I’m moving to Arizona to help change the course of the election,” she said in March, after California’s primary election.

Wilson’s goals are twofold: Register voters and help elect Democrat Mark Kelly to the U.S. Senate. But she says she will help wherever she’s needed.

“My view is I would rather go door to door, engage people, get them to register to vote and to vote even if it’s not for the candidate I want. I want people to become engaged. And I think everything would be different if more people felt that they were that they had a voice and it mattered,” she said. “So that’s where I am. I’m doing things that are out of my comfort zone, moving out of the state I’ve known for 26 years. I was born in California. So, yeah, I’ll do whatever I’m asked to do.”

She’s just one person, but Wilson illustrates the motivation some Democrats feel this year. Arizona has traditionally been a Republican state that in recent years has become more blue, and Wilson is hoping to help Kelly beat Republican Sen. Martha McSally in a race for the U.S. Senate.

Back in March, Wilson thought it would be a smooth transition — sell her house in the red hot Bay Area market and be on her way to the Grand Canyon State by the end of the month. Then, the pandemic started shutting down both Arizona and California.

Since then, the coronavirus has upended nearly all aspects of life in America, including political campaigns.

So now, Wilson is still listing the house (it goes on the market April 15), but she won’t be able to move to Arizona until the shelter-in-place restrictions are lifted.

Still, her commitment hasn’t waned she told KQED recently.

“If anything, my resolve to do this, to move to a swing state and to help bring about a change, ideally in the Senate and the executive branch — I’m even more resolved to do so,” she said. “If this crisis hasn’t demonstrated how important it is to have the right leadership at the state level, at the federal level … if this wasn’t the wake-up call, we all needed to say, ‘This is why leadership is important.’ This is it.”

But how Wilson will be able to help once she moves to Arizona is an open question. Like California, the coronavirus pandemic has upended how political campaigns — normally reliant on face-to-face contact — are doing business, says Phoenix-based political consultant Catherine Alonzo.

Alonzo, whose firm Javelina represents political campaigns as well as businesses and nonprofits, says that normally politics is considered recession-proof. But the current downturn is proving a bit different than the last bust in 2009, she says.

“With social distancing and the expected economic, really sort of devastating, impact on people, that it is hitting politics in two of its very fundamental areas, which is in-person outreach to start with, and then also, of course, fundraising,” she said.

Alonzo says she’s giving all of her clients a few key pieces of advice. One is to stay flexible because things are changing quickly. The other advice is “to stay true to the guiding purpose of values of why you were running for office in the first place and to serve the people that you are seeking to serve.”

For some campaigns, she says, that’s meant switching from asking people for money, or their vote, to asking how they can be of help in this moment of crisis.

Bay Area Republican consultant Matt Shupe, whose firm Praetorian Public Relations is working on several legislative and congressional races, agrees that it’s a tough time. Normally, he says, this time of year is critical to ramping up fall campaigns — and making use of volunteers like Wilson.

“This is when you do aggressive fundraising infrastructure building, you start recruiting volunteers and … you raise funds,” he said.

Shupe said that money, and those volunteers, are how campaigns lay the groundwork in the spring for turning out their supporters in the fall.

“We aggressively go door to door and make phone calls and text message and email. And we try to identify supporters and opponents and people that are on the fence,” he said.

Gathering that information now, Shupe says, will allow campaigns to focus their efforts on supporters and swing voters once crunch time hits in the fall.

“But you really can’t effectively do that at the end of the election if you don’t have that data,” he said.

So when Wilson arrives in Arizona, whenever that is, she’ll still have work to do, but it just may look a little different than it would have before the pandemic.