Miriam Gohara, making calls for Harris-Walz. “Hello, is Rigoberto available? I’m Miriam, a volunteer with the Harris-Walz campaign working to support Democrats up and down the ticket in Nevada.”Friday night, with her two rescue dogs Rufus and Daisy occasionally frolicking at her feet, Miriam Gohara repeated that introductory conversational gambit into her computer about 24 more times — as part of a local effort to urge swing-state Latinos to vote blue, just days before the election.Gohara, a Yale Law School professor who is on research leave and who herself does not speak Spanish (but in a couple of instances gamely read a transliterated script), was part of the ​“Latinos Con Harris-Walz” effort Friday night.That’s a crew of bilingual and monolingual callers that New Haven’s local long-time immigrant and Latino rights advocate Kica Matos, and the National Immigration Law Center​’s Immigrant Justice Fund, of which she’s president, helped to organize on the eve of the election. From her neat and brightly lit kitchen table in Woodbridge, over the course of her two dozen calls, Gohara gamely delivered the message to Hermenia, Yesenia, Luis, Jose, Antonia, David, Carolina, Paola, Manuel, Kimberly, Atilano, Maria, Frank, (last names were not provided to the phone-bankers and the app did the actual dialing) and to many others across Nevada.She called roughly between 7 and 8 p.m., an hour when people would likely be home.Depending on who picked up and the response, she asked her interlocutors if they had voted, or reminded them to do so, or found out they had already voted early (several), or got hung up on (frequently), or ran into a wrong number (“this is Carter Power Sports”), or was told by the caller that they had already voted, but for Donald Trump (twice).“I’m not a natural salesperson,” said Gohara as she sat comfortably beneath her Harris-Walz baseball cap and spoke in a professional but friendly tone, ​“but I’m doing this because it’s so important.”On the eve of the election, in fact, there has been a lot of polling and reportage suggesting potential slippage of Harris support in the Latino community, and particularly among young Latino men. Concern on that point, especially in closely contested, high Latino-population states like Nevada, was the central if largely unexpressed anxiety of the evening and the reason Spanish-speaking communities in those states were targeted for the GOTV activity.So no surprise that the Harris-Walz campaign had reached out to Matos and coordinated the effort.Would Gohara’s anecdotal experience, albeit with her small pool of 25 semi-anonymous interlocutors, shed any light on this issue?Three quarters of the way through her hour’s calling, Gohara finished a brief interaction (they all were) with someone named Gabriel. When Gabriel interrupted her identifying spiel with ​“No, I’m not going to vote for her [Harris],” she turned to an inquiring reporter and said, ​“Notably all who say they’re for Trump or not voting for her [Harris] are men.”Flyer for Kica Matos's "Latinos Con Harris-Walz" phone banking effort. Then, however, Gohara’s very next interlocutor, Mariene, declared, ​“I already voted and I did not vote for her.”“So much for that theory,” said Gohara, and continued gamely to make calls for the remaining 20 minutes of her stint.A Toledo, Ohio native, whose first memorable political involvement goes back to high school when she wrote a letter to the editor in support of Jesse Jackson when he ran for president in 1988, Gohara grew up to be an attorney representing people in serious criminal cases, trying to keep them out of prison or reduce their sentences. She’s been doing just that for the past quarter century.She got to know Kica Matos when they both were involved with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and she came to teach at the Yale Law School in 2016. She is now the director of the school’s Jerome N. Frank Legal Services organization.Among the courses or clinics she’s taught are ​“Challenges to Mass Incarceration” and ​“Criminal Justice Advocacy.”On Friday night, Gohara had rushed home from the Cheshire Correctional Institution, where she was visiting a client, in order to help get food on the table for her family (it turned out to be Indian take-out from Downtown’s House of Naan) and so that she could be on time for the phone-bank training session, and then begin her calls at 7 p.m.While she’s been an active on-the-ground volunteer in political campaigns since canvassing for John Kerry in 2004, Gohara said, ​“This is different. Everyone I know thinks there’s a lot at stake. I can’t overstate the consequences for women, for reproductive rights. Trump’s a serious threat. January 6 should have been a disqualifier. It’s shocking he’s still on the ballot. “So I feel strongly we need to do everything we can. In addition to phone banking, I’ve done post-card writing and have donated more to this campaign than any other. This is extremely serious for our country, and that’s why I’m happy to pitch in.”Matos reported that she and her group had corralled at least 60 people to join in the phone-banking effort. In addition to Connecticut, the volunteers hailed from New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Texas, she reported.In addition to Nevada, Matos’s callers also were phoning Georgia, she wrote in an email after the event, ​“because these are both swing states and the Latino vote in both states will have the power to determine the outcome of the elections.”Fellow phone bankers on Friday night. Matos herself was not able to phone bank on Friday, she wrote, because of a previous commitment, but she is phone banking on Monday and participating in three GOTV events on election day Tuesday.“Why am I stepping up this way?” she added. ​“Because what Trump is threatening to do is not just unconstitutional but morally repugnant and horrifying — mobilizing the military to carry out mass deportations, setting up massive internment camps, ending birthright citizenship, and banning immigrant kids from attending public schools… We should do everything we can to prevent all of this from happening.”