I'm not naming names because embarrassing candidates or campaigns isn't the point. I'm not saying this explains any results necessarily. It might make a couple percent difference which might have candidates who lost by a whisker kick themselves, but the campaigns I could name won or lost by much larger margins. Still, why reduce our odds a couple percent? I'm referring to campaigns that chose to lit drop instead of doorknock. I thought we all knew better by now. Maybe not.
Just to avoid losing anyone in jargon, pardon this if it's obvious, lit dropping refers to going to prospective voters' doors and leaving campaign literature. Doorknocking means knocking on the door and waiting for an answer in hope of having a conversation. "Canvassing" usually is used as a synonym for doorknocking, though I've also heard it used for all direct voter contact, meaning including phoning and tabling, which means having a table at an event where you give out something and talk to whoever comes by, sometimes called a non-targeted canvass.
Shortly after last month's election, Vox had an article asking essentially the same question, "Experiments show this is the best way to win campaigns. But is anyone actually doing it?"
By far the most effective way to turn out voters is with high-quality, face-to-face conversations that urge them to vote. How do we know? Nearly two decades of rigorous randomized experiments have proven it.
Alan Gerber and Don Green ran the first of these "field experiments" in 1998. The professors randomly assigned voters to receive different inducements to vote: some received postcards, some received phone calls, some received a visit from a canvasser, and some received nothing.
The experiment found that voters called on the phone or sent postcards were not noticeably more likely to vote than those sent nothing. But canvassing was different. Just one in-person conversation had a profound effect on a voter’s likelihood to go to the polls, boosting turnout by a whopping 20 percent (or around 9 percentage points).
The Vox writers weren't writing specifically about lit dropping. They were comparing canvassing (as a synonym of doorknocking) to TV, mail, and phone banks, and wondering why campaigns put so many more resources into what research shows to be much less effective methods. They did however mention that much canvassing is ineffective, partly from poor scripts that sound like ads, and partly from canvassers hurrying to maximize the number of contacts rather than having conversations. Lit drops lack the voter contact, so what this indicates is while they're better than nothing, they're not much better.
So why do we leave campaign literature at the door when no one answers? Because we've already gone to the effort of going to the door, knocking, and waiting, so we might as well get something more than nothing for our time. We just have to remember that it's not much more than nothing.
I do get that lit dropping allows many more contacts, but do those more contacts make up for lower quality? Were that so, TV and mail would work as well as canvassing, but they don't. I get that resources are always limited, but that doesn't justify making a less than optimal choice. Either accept fewer contacts as the price of effectiveness, or plan to spend more time on it. Even just a couple percent improvement in a candidate's share of the vote will flip a lot of elections.
A side note: while searching for that doorknocker image above, I found the post where I used it before, and that post has a link I thought I'd lost, which makes a point that apparently still needs making. The link is to an article in Texas Observer about the effectiveness of a ground game. Texas Democrats were able to compare a ground game to no ground game, when Dallas Democrats did this new thing of direct voter contact and took just two election cycles to go from no county offices to all of them. Houston Democrats pretty much stuck to running ads, thus allowing a real-life comparison.
Cross-posted at MN Progressive Project