Then they’ll have ya phone bank ’til ya lose consciousness.
Parade season is over in the midwest, so door to door and phone campaigning have become SOP for Democratic Parties. The pro’s in the biz of advertising gave up on door to door and phone cold calling decades ago because it’s too labor intensive, but campaigns tend to be amateur hour and assume hordes of volunteers to carry and call in their message to the millions.
Doorknocking re-emerged in campaigns around the turn of the millenia when scientists and campaigns in off year local elections experimented with intense doorknocks in random precincts. The election results showed a measurable increase in turnout in the doorknocked precincts versus the control precincts, and in some cases the results were pretty dramatic. The 2004 Dean campaign adopted the strategy en masse, and I spent many a cold winter day tramping though Iowa snow in the weeks before the Iowa Caucuses… And Dean came in 3rd. But a few months later a thousand of us democrats swarmed South Dakota and doorknocked our way to a narrow 3000 vote special election victory.
So comes 2007 and doorknocking becomes the Obama campaign’s primary strategy and I spent many more weekends wandering Iowa towns. We had so many volunteers and staffers swarm Iowa that by caucus day we’d even knocked farmhouses miles from towns. But as the campaign went nationwide and spread thin we saw the ugly side of doorknocking as staffers desperate to make doorknocking quotas darn near accosted anyone coming in the campaign office door to doorknock. I was riding into North Dakota in the fall of 2008 to check out a deal on a bike and thought I’d stop by the Obama/NPL campaign offices to see how thing were going. Barely made it in the door of the Fargo office before being hit with a demand that I doorknock or phone bank, but at least got to exchange niceties in Jamestown before the push to doorknock. Would have been happy to help, but I had miles to travel. Sadly the deal on the motorcycle fell through too.
Problem is, personal voter contact may be one of the few tools in the democratic toolbox that sorta works, what with a recent meta-analysis study showing that persuasive advertising pretty much fails in partisan elections. Similar research shows that while doorknocking can boost democratic voter turnout by several percent in low turnout primaries and off year elections, in presidential elections like 2008 the effect was barely noticeable though statistically significant. To be honest, I suspect that most of our campaign strategies are ineffective, and have a sneaking suspicion that our candidates are pretty much just surfing the waves of public opinion… But we’ll need some serious stats geeks to prove that, like the statisticians who put Wall Street to shame a couple decades back with their findings that investment managers rarely even outperformed the S&P 500 index.
So here we are in 2018 with big D Democratic parties and campaigns demanding that campaign staffers and offices meet daily contact quotas. So my e-mail and FB events page is full of doorknock demands, and I drop by the local democratic party campaign office for a meeting and get handed a list of voters to phone while another candidate tries to talk me into yet another doorknock! I can understand the desperation- When you’re the only campaign office in a district of 40,000 voters behind 20,000 doors that you’ll have to hit at least 5 times to catch maybe half those voters home those 100,000 contacts would make you kinda desperate. Especially when you have no paid staffers, maybe 20 volunteers, and voting starts in 4 days!
So staffers and overbearing volunteers, back off! There is no way we’re going to knock every door, so lets prioritize and knock the doors where we can have the most impact. And let’s make this a truly coordinated campaign- I’ve had three demands from different campaigns and party groups to knock and phone what is essentially the same “turf”- Can we at least put together a coordinated campaign? And lose the “ability shaming”- I’ve doorknocked for a couple candidates this cycle and my MS addled 68 year old body wouldn’t let me finish the last one. Quit hoping I’ll “rise to the challenge” of multi mile walks, instead let me pick out a bite size turf sheet by sheet. And that “Mini Van” app on the smart phone… Do you really want this farsighted gimp trying to enter data while stumbling along? I’ll take an old skool clipboard and I’ll be happy to enter the data back at the campaign office afterward. And from the state party chair who demanded to know how many doorknocks I’d done this cycle on down, don’t disgrace your party’s commitment to inclusion of differently abled citizens by ability shaming me because I can’t walk as fast and far as your 20 something staffers!