So i am a rocket kid. I’ve worn that label proudly for almost 60 years. What’s a rocket kid? We are the children of the scientists, engineers and managers of the Apollo space program. My father was an aerospace engineer, who proudly took me to the first Space Shuttle rollout when i was in college home for spring break.
We mostly lived in Central and Northern Brevard County, an area that grew from 50,000 to 500,000 in less than a decade. Because of this explosive growth, we didn’t have “neighborhoods” like you would find in Chicago, where people lived amongst their ethnic communities. We didn’t have private schools, although both the Episcopal and Catholic Churches had religious schools. By 4th or 5th grades, most of the students in the religious schooling would join the rest of us in the public schools.
And their parents made rational choices there. In junior high, we’d be taught by teachers with their masters and by high school we had teachers with PhDs, or ABDs. In my high school, our favorite teacher was a History ABD who had to drop out because he got his girl friend pregnant. My math teacher was a female PhD whose husband also worked out at the Cape. So fond memories.
But that’s what they are, memories. When the Apollo program ended, many of the people who worked out at the Cape left. Brevard County is not full-on MAGA. The county sheriff there has, according to MALDEF, instructed his deputies to arrest Mexicans to see “if they belong in this country.” Now i grew up with this person, we attended the same church, my parents went on to co-found a new church closer to their home, his father’s company provided the steel structures that are littered throughout Cape Kennedy. But i won’t step into Brevard right now, because his threat could mean arresting, or at least detaining, my wife (whose family has been north of the Rio Grande since the 1720s). That’s bullshit.
Florida is a must-win state for Republicans. So canvassing here is probably the definition of “Good Trouble,” just not the way John Lewis meant it. Forcing Trump to have to campaign in his home state, though, keeps him out of other states he needs in order to win.
But Trump likes to sleep in his own bed, so this we are only looking out for him. It’s better if he stays in Florida, right?
Sen. Rick Scott narrowly leads former Congresswoman Debbie Mucarsel-Powell in Florida Senate race by 3 points, according to a new poll. This is surprising, since Scott has been governor of the state before becoming a senator; he’s been on the statewide ballot since 2010. This would be Mucarsel-Powell’s first time.
Although Mucarsel-Powell is widely considered to be the favorite for the Democratic nomina-tion, the primary is August 20th. There may be a Republican primary, as well; candidate filing deadline is April 26, 2024.
Most of the neighborhoods where we are knocking on doors in Florida are minority (non-white) and we endeavor to send out as many minority volunteers as possible. Obviously, i’m Caucasian and i’ve never been alone in that when canvassing in Florida. But we often knock on doors in areas that many (white?) people consider less than desirable. One of the benefits of growing up as a rocket kid is that you grew up with everyone, River Heights (where i grew up) was a panoply of Americans, and i’ve never had a problem knocking on doors of people who didn’t look like me (i’d have to admit that the rudest voters i’ve encountered have always been white, but maybe that’s just me).
Not sure if anyone has picked up on this, but i usually write these diaries backwards, with a lower volunteer turnout first and the state with the highest vol turnout last. This is not really significant, as a higher turnout means that i can get the data all in later in the week than a lower turnout. Not every volunteer has smart phones and thus walks with mini-VAN. But the point here is that Florida had the second highest number of volunteers show up last Saturday.
241 volunteers came out to knock on doors in 5 Florida counties on Saturday. It was another beautiful day to canvass, and we started training early (compared to the other states). They knocked on 17,401 doors and talked to 1,334 voters. 864 of those voters answered questions on at least part of the Issues Survey.
Hope Springs from Field PAC started knocking on doors last week in a grassroots effort to prepare the 2024 Electoral Battleground in what has been called the First and Second Rounds of a traditional Five Round Canvass. We are talking to Democrats and unaffiliated voters with a systematic approach that reminds them not only that Democrats care, but Democrats are determined to deliver the best government possible to all Americans.
Obviously, we rely on grassroots support, so if you support field/grassroots organizing, voter registration (and follow-up), GOTV and our efforts to protect our voters, we would certainly appreciate your support:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/hopemobilization
Hope Springs from Field understands that volunteer to voter personal interactions are critical. Knocking on doors has repeatedly been found to be the most successful tactic to get voters to cast a ballot and that is the goal of what we do.
The Top 3 concerns of the voters we talked to last Saturday were, first, The Economy. Voters expressed concern about Jobs, the Recovery and increased Prices. Although Spring Break was just starting up, Tourism has been a worry, because of prior Spring Break incidents. Housing Issues was the second “urgent” concern. Insurance continues to be a concern, especially since there have been, according to one voter, “5 years of major price increases in a row.” Border Security was the third most cited concern. The crisis in Haiti has a direct impact on Florida and concern about Haitian migrants is often racist.
Biden Approval among the Floridians we talked to was 41% last Saturday; 10% expressed some measure of Disapproval. 8% of the voters who responded Approved of the job Sen. Rick Scott was doing while 44% expressed Disapproval. This is relatively unchanged from last year. 11% of the voters we talked to thought Gov. DeSantis was doing a good job, 38% said they disapproved of the job he was doing. The Approval Rating for DeSantis has doubled since last year.
79 Florida voters filled out Constituent Service Request forms. We send completed CSRs to Democratic elected officials responsible for the requested functions, but if the appropriate office is held by a Republican, we still send it along. For Democrats, though, we encourage them to reach out immediately to the voter who filled out the Constituent Service Request forms and let them know they are working on the issue. This credit-taking is enormously valuable to the Democratic office-holder.
2 voters completed an Incident Report detailing what they could remember from an incidents they witnessed of voter intimidation or suppression. Seven other voters expressed concerns about the 2024 elections but did not fill out incident reports because they didn’t say they witnessed voter suppression or intimidation (they just expressed concerns or worries about them). Incident Reports are used to plan Election Protection activities, and will be combined and handed over to District and State Attorneys, Attorney Generals and the DoJ Civil Rights Division right before Election Day.
Our very first question on the Issues Surveys is whether the person we are talking to is registered to vote at their current home address. We also ask if there is anyone living there who needs to be registered as well. In Florida, given the current laws, we offer up a tablet with the Secretary of State website up so that voters can register or update their information themselves. Part of this is making sure that voters are registered in compliance to the new, confusing and frustrating Election law that is particularly onerous for people who change residences more frequently than normal. But registering new voters (and re-registering existing voters at their current address, in compliance with HAVA) at their door is also critical to our approach. Arizona has a much more friendly voter registration system, including the ability to opt in to permanent early voting. Of course, canvassing is the hard way to do voter registration, but we catch people that our voter registration campaigns can miss because of their emphasis on larger-scale or mass voter registration.
In Florida, though, the new law requires voters to provide, in addition to their date of birth, the last four digits of their Social Security number OR their driver license OR state ID card number to make an address change. Which is par for the course this year, but here’s the part that is likely to stump people who move around. You have to remember which one you provided, because you have to provide the same one every single time you interact with your local Supervisor of Elections, or your request won’t be granted. Supervisors of Elections won’t have access to other databases, so they can only "verify” a request by the information the voter has provided. But this is something we have learned to track so that if the voter registration was not successful, we can go back.
We registered 7 new voters and got 22 voters to update their voter registration addresses in Florida on Saturday. We use the Secretary of State website to register voters in Florida, in order to meet Florida’s difficult restrictions there.
We knock on the doors of Democratic and Independent voters. At every door, we leave a piece of “show the flag” lit, something that tells them we were there and hopefully reinforces the Democratic brand. The lit focuses on the things voters told us were important to them last fall, aiming to appeal to every voter.
But the main focus of our canvassing is the Issues Survey, asking voters for their input and concerns. Voter responses to the questionnaire are entered into VAN and made available to all Democratic candidates who use VAN in the state after the primary. Creating this kind of data isn’t done with a specific goal in mind but has the purpose of engaging voters and creating a dataset that any Democratic candidate can use in opposition to a Republican. (We also make Issues Surveys, Incident Reports and Constituent Service Request forms available at the churches we visit, but we don’t include numbers for those, in part because we don’t always get counts back, but also because we like to compare like to like.)
Hope Springs has targeted states that have competitive Senate races and/or the Electoral College in 2024, as well as Congressional Districts that are remapped in ways that offer opportunities or vulnerabilities for Democrats next year (specifically those where a Republican won a Congressional District that voted for Biden in 2022). There is a lot of work to be done! Especially since we have had to expand the map this year.
By starting early, and aiming towards super-compliance with some really, really onerous new voter regulations, Hope Springs from Field seeks to undermine that strategy, while informing voters about the new laws and regulations aimed at them.
We are also — this being an election year — adding the Post Cards to New Voters component back into our Voter Outreach, both New Voters we find at their doors as well as New Voters we target in the Voter File. Several of our Arizona organizers are also talking to Native American groups about replicating our Voter Matching service that Hope Springs provides for Black Churches. It’s a big year. There’s lots to be done, and, hopefully, we won’t have to suspect in-person voter contact because of a heatwave this year.
Our biggest expense is the Voter File. But it is also a fixed cost. That won’t change as we raise and spend more money. Printing literature is our second largest cost. Printing and mailing our our Post Cards to New Voters is our third cost and paying the fees for ActBlue is the smallest of our monthly costs.
Hope Springs is a seat-of-the-pants grassroots-driven operation. We don’t have employees but we realize that to formalize and professionalize this effort that will have to change. We spent less than $70,000 last year because we raised less than $70,000. But what we have raised is thanks to you!
If you are able to support our efforts to protect Democratic voters, especially in minority communities, expand the electorate, and believe in grassroots efforts to increase voter participation and election protection, please help:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/hopemobilization
If you would rather send a check, you can follow that link for our mailing address at the bottom of the page. Thank you for your support. This work depends upon you!