SAGINAW, MI — Rosa Holliday has seen all sorts of changes in politics during her half-century as a stalwart get-out-the-vote volunteer within the Democratic Party.
There was no internet in 1974 when a Delta College class assignment hooked her up with the campaign of Bob Traxler, the former congressman, which has led to her lifetime of tireless canvassing door-to-door for Democrats national, state and local, yard sign by yard sign. Robo calls had yet to arrive. Campaign ads were nasty, but not to the degree we see nowadays and nowhere near as numerous.
Most absentee ballots went to upper-income folks on vacation in warmer climes, which is ironic because their candidate on Nov. 5 for the third consecutive presidential election, Donald Trump, says the new millennium’s voting by mail is a prime cause for his false allegations of widespread fraud.
Despite all the supposed progress in methods to communicate, Holliday says it’s more difficult than ever to get people to go to the polls.
“It’s mainly the people 50 years old and younger, some who show no interest in voting,” she says.
Then why does she operate in her senior citizen years at the same breakneck pace she has shown ever since the days when Richard Nixon was resigning and Jimmy Carter was emerging?
“I try to show the benefits they receive in their everyday lives,” Holliday explains. “It’s a matter of educating them on the issues, not only at election time, but all of the time.”
For example, she points out not only that Vice-President Harris is an advocate of child tax credits, but that the Dem candidate to replace Dan Kildee in Congress, Kristin McDonald Rivet versus Republican Paul Junge, helped increase the sums as a state senator. So you are not concerned with politics? Do you happen to have kids?
When even that type of logic fails to overcome apathy, Rosa banks on the numbers. Even if the success rate doesn’t reach 100 percent, it’s still better than not trying. That’s why she circulates in the community 24-and-7, with exceptions, of course, for church on Sundays and Bible studies on Wednesdays. In fact, a petition driven by Holliday is the reason North Second Street in Saginaw was renamed for Pastor Roosevelt Austin upon his passing.
Austin often spoke of his young adult years in Louisiana, when he volunteered with four friends to register voters for civil rights during the ultra-high-risk early 1950s. One of them was lynched for his activism, and Austin knew it just as easily could have been him. He moved soon after to Saginaw with Nurame, his wife, and pursuit of higher voter turnout was his lifetime passion. Holliday was among the voices when Zion would host election day radio marathons before WWWS-FM morphed into KISS 107.
In a Sept. 28 in-depth report in The Guardian, an independent newspaper, sentiments and frustrations similar to Holiday’s were expressed by Terry Pruitt, Saginaw NAACP president, and Jeff Bulls, founding leader of C.A.P., Community Alliance for the People. To see the feature, Google search for “guardian saginaw apathy.”
Holliday never has pursued elected office for herself, saying her main purpose is to recruit and train other volunteers to follow her organizing footprints.
With degrees from Delta and Saginaw Valley State, followed by a master’s from Central Michigan, her wage-work career was as a General Motors accounting executive in Pontiac. In retirement, she takes the former three hours a day back-and-forth on I-75 and devotes them to even more shoe leather for political action, with occasional work in Bay County schools as a voc-ed specialist and a general substitute teacher.
Recent polls show Harris with 70 percent among African American men, Trump at 20 percent, with the remainder undecided. MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart asked how anyone could support a candidate who declared President Obama an illegal alien, demanded death sentences for the Central Park Five and branded African nations as “@$%&-hole countries.”
“I don’t believe that,” Holiday says, asserting that less than 10 percent for Trump would be more accurate. “I am out there with the people, canvassing every day, and that’s not what I am hearing.”
For election preview coverage at all levels, organized by the League of Women Voters, visit vote411.org.
