Erica Mah was feeling a little apprehensive. An English language development teacher in Baltimore County, she spent some previous elections at voting locations handing out information about pro-education candidates.

But she’d never gone door-knocking, and not just where she was headed — York, Pennsylvania — but anywhere.

“I’ll be honest, I originally was not going to go,” Mah said this week, as she planned to join a group of mostly educators from Maryland canvassing for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in the country’s largest swing state.

“But I feel like this election is too important,” she said. “All people in America, but especially those minority populations like women and my multilingual language families, are the two groups that I’m worried about.”

Mah, 50, and her husband were set to ride on one of two 50-capacity buses that the Maryland State Education Association, the state’s largest union of educators, was organizing for a day of door-knocking Saturday in York.

It’s one of several ongoing and last-minute efforts in which Marylanders are trying to make a difference in an election that appears already settled at home but a tossup nationally.

Four years after Democrat Joe Biden won a landslide victory over Republican President Donald Trump in Maryland, the state is expected to give Harris a solid win here on Tuesday. Polls in the more politically divided Pennsylvania show a deadlocked matchup, leaving many observers to believe the state, which is twice the size of Maryland and narrowly went for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020, could be the deciding factor.

That’s inspired groups like the teacher’s union and the environmentally focused Chesapeake Climate Action Network Action Fund to focus their efforts on Pennsylvania. Some Maryland Republicans have also spent time in Pennsylvania, at least in previous years — like with 2022 GOP gubernatorial nominee Dan Cox, who watched votes being counted for Trump in Philadelphia in 2020. But neither Cox nor several other active Republicans or groups responded to requests for comment for this story.

“It is a state where a few thousand votes, a few hundred votes, may make a considerable difference in the outcome of the election,” said Helene Groves, an early childhood special education teacher who also planned to make her first-ever canvassing trip outside Maryland with the MSEA group Saturday.

A 39-year-old mother of two from Westminster who teaches 3- and 4-year-olds at Campfield Early Learning Center in Baltimore County, Groves said she felt compelled to get involved in a bigger way because of what the presidential tickets mean for her students and schools.

Democratic vice presidential nominee and former teacher Tim Walz, in particular, brings an “in-the-trenches” understanding to the Democratic ticket, especially with his record of implementing universal breakfast and lunch for students in his home state of Minnesota, she said. Groves said she’s seen the impact that meals for hungry students can have on their health and participation in school, and she’s equally worried about conservatives who have referred to free school meals as entitlements.

Knocking on doors away from home could sway some last-minute undecided voters in a critical state, she said.

“As a preschool teacher and as a parent, my biggest charge is teaching kids how to use their voice efficiently and communicate their thoughts to others,” Groves said. “It’s hard for me to say to students, ‘Use your voice. Use your power,’ and not use my own in the same way.”

Mah said she also hopes to appeal to voters’ compassionate sides by talking about her work as a teacher at Lansdowne Elementary School and her personal experiences of growing up in a bilingual household with parents from Taiwan and China. As a teacher of multilingual students, she’s most concerned about the environment that some of the rhetoric on the political right is creating for her students and their families.

She avoids talking politics in school — she teaches elementary school, after all — but the issues can creep in. A student just this week told her that his father was “worried about Trump being elected because he wants to get rid of all the Hispanic families.”

“It’s hard,” Mah said. “I try to reassure them that they’re safe in school. I can’t promise them that all their families will be fine.”

For Matt Gresick, a world history teacher at Reservoir High School in Howard County, it’s Trump’s threats to democracy — saying, for one, that this will be the last election that Americans need to vote in — that “should scare people.”

“It is clear that what happens in these neighboring states, like Pennsylvania will trickle down and affect us all,” said Gresick, 44, of Catonsville.

Gresick said he and his 13-year-old daughter, Elle, would be going to York as part of the MSEA group but driving separately. They’ve canvassed together around Baltimore and Howard counties, too, in what’s been a really powerful experience for him as he considers the stakes of the race.

“I think about my kids and that’s why I’m bringing my daughter,” Gresick said, getting emotional at the thought. “It’s because it’s their country, right? … This is not only an election for now and four years from now, but it’s a generational election to determine whether or not we want a functional democracy to give to our kids, or a dictatorship.”

Scott Busby, 65, a retired federal official who lives in Takoma Park, has been traveling to swing states — mostly Pennsylvania — to campaign for Democratic presidential nominees for two decades. This time feels different, he said before driving back to Philadelphia on Friday afternoon after spending parts of the last two months there and in York.

“People are freaked out, justifiably, by another Trump term and I do think the level of activity is higher than I’ve ever seen it before,” said Busby, who planned to stay with a friend in Philadelphia through election night.

His work this year has been with the Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN) Action Fund, a Maryland-based nonprofit advocating for environmental policies.

Jamie DeMarco, the federal elections coordinator for CCAN Action Fund, said the organization rented a 10-bed Airbnb in downtown Philadelphia throughout October for Maryland-based volunteers to stay as they canvassed the city. They were renting another 25-capacity Airbnb for the final five-day stretch, and by the end of the race expected to have organized 317 people to have filled 1,000 canvassing shifts in Philadelphia and Harrisburg since mid-September.

“The excitement and willingness and energy of volunteers to take action is beyond anything I’ve ever seen,” DeMarco said.

Silver Spring Progressive Action, another organization of Democratic voters, has spent months canvassing around Pennsylvania and North Carolina, as well as fundraising and calling voters in tight congressional and state legislative races round the country. It planned to have more than 50 people canvassing in Pennsylvania around Allentown, Scranton and Harrisburg from Saturday through Election Day, said Dori Paster, the group’s leader.

“We look at places that we can be the most useful,” Paster said of the group. “We are tippers. We’re not miracle workers.”

Busby said he’s spent his time mostly in West and North Philadelphia talking to lower- and middle-class voters. He’s also spent time in York, a Democratic-leaning city in a heavily Republican county just over the border from Maryland.

Far more politically divided compared to Philadelphia and his hometown in Maryland, canvassing there made it clear how close the race could be this week.

“It was striking to me the juxtaposition of Harris and Trump supporters in the same neighborhoods, in the same working-class, middle-class neighborhoods,” Busby said. “There’d be a house plastered with Trump signs next to one with Harris signs.”

Have a news tip? Contact Sam Janesch at sjanesch@baltsun.com, 443-790-1734 and on X as @samjanesch.