It happens every year. Before i knock on the first door, i get butterflies. And the longer it takes for me to talk to that first voter, the more i start to question myself. Why am i doing this again?
One of the first things we do in training, especially in the beginning (because the number of volunteers who come out is manageable), is ask people why they came out. People call it an ice-breaker, but i’ve come to think of it as a resource. So as my nervousness increases, i recount those reasons that people gave for coming out to knock on doors.
You wouldn’t believe how many people have told me, “I could never do it!” Somehow, the face-to-face interaction makes some (all?) inherently afraid to come out and talk to their neighbors. I don’t know why. I just know that, after decades of knocking on doors, i still get nervous in the beginning.
And i know better. When volunteers have told me of the fears they have, they are usually things that i have never encountered. And when i hear something i think of as crazy, like, what about those kids that got shot for knocking on the wrong door?, i’ll respond, we’re not knocking on MAGA doors! To which, i will often hear back, yeah. I’m not saying there aren’t crazy nuts out there. There are. Thankfully, i’ve never sent a volunteer to one of them. Decades of experience, and it’s never happened to me. Knock on wood, but i’m confident that trend will continue.
I grew up in Florida, in Brevard County. That’s where i learned to knock on doors. It’s now MAGA country. When i was growing up, it was all about the Apollo missions and, then, as i was graduating from high school, the Cape (Kennedy) downsized considerably, in wait for the Space Lab launches. It was really hard times for the area and lots of the engineers, scientists and even technicians left the Space Coast for jobs elsewhere. Brevard went from one of the most educated areas to, eventually, not so much. So i learned to knock on doors and organize canvasses during increasingly down times economically. And, yet, i still never had a bad experience.
But i have learned a lot. Helmuth von Moltke coined the phrase, "no plan survives contact with the enemy." In (political) field organizing, the same concept applies. But you wouldn’t say "no plan survives contact with the enemy," you would say "no plan survives contact with the voter." And that was true with the Dean and then Kerry campaigns, and it was especially true with the Obama campaign in 2007. Brilliant organizing and messaging talent and, yet, when we first started knocking on doors in Iowa, we found that voters wanted to talk about things not exactly on the planner’s minds. Sure, we started with “our story,” relating it to our candidate, but after the come-to-jesus meeting, we discovered that we needed to connect *their* story to the candidate. Even the most field-organizer-friendly candidate in history had to change the campaign plan after contact with voters.
And the takeaway was, listen to voters. Listen closely.
This is the Hope Springs from Field PAC plan during our Early Organizing efforts, to listen to, and record the voices of, voters. Four years ago, the Biden campaign became increasingly leery of direct, in-person voter contact because of the rapid spread of Covid. It looked for other means to reach voters. So it hasn’t been a surprise to hear, as i have over and over, “no one’s knocked on my door in (fill in the blank).” And i wasn’t too surprised to hear that on Saturday, as i joined our Jacksonville-area canvass.
We don’t have any goals, like we do in Arizona, here. Remember that our canvassing goals have been driven by the grassroots, and that’s just our reality with volunteers here. For one thing, our Florida volunteers don’t interact with each other like the other states. In fact, the Jax volunteers have interacted more with our southern Georgia volunteers than the Orlando-area volunteers, largely because we had Georgia organizers come down to help with GOTV during the Jacksonville mayoral election last Spring. Which is fine. 8 Georgia organizers, all Albany State alums, joined me for our Jax canvass — mostly because they were bummed that their southern Georgia canvasses were postponed because of the weather.
Florida is, by any standard, a reach state for Democrats. But Florida Democrats, at least those that have spoken up to me, wish it weren’t so. Florida volunteers were quick to point out that Sen. Rick Scott narrowly leads former Congresswoman Debbie Mucarsel-Powell in Florida Senate race by 3 points, according to a new poll. Although Mucarsel-Powell is widely considered to be the favorite for the Democratic nomination, the primary is August 20th. There may be a Republican primary, as well; the candidate filing deadline is April 26, 2024.
The other thing weighing on Florida is the prospect of the courts reversing the DeSantis map. The Florida Supreme Court has taken a challenge to its Congressional redistricting plan, but it won’t be resolved before the candidate-filing deadline. But this challenge is one reason why we have continued to canvass in the Jacksonville-area, in hope that Democrats can regain the Congressional seat it lost in 2022.
183 volunteers came out to knock on doors in 4 Florida counties on Saturday. It was a beautiful day to canvass, and we started training early (we started an hour later in Arizona). They knocked on 13,304 doors and talked to 1,912 voters. 1,212 of those voters answered questions on at least part of the Issues Survey.
The Top 3 concerns of the voters we talked to last Saturday were, first, Economic Anxiety. 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.” Climate Issues was the third most cited concern. These three things are interrelated. For numerous reasons, we hear people say they can’t afford to stay there. Some of us heard complaints about the governor’s inattention to the state.
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.
Biden Approval among the Floridians we talked to was 43% last Saturday; 11% expressed some measure of Disapproval. 14% of the voters who responded Approved of the job Sen. Rick Scott was doing while 36% expressed Disapproval. This is relatively unchanged from last year. 16% of the voters we talked to thought Gov. DeSantis was doing a good job, 44% said they disapproved of the job he was doing. The Approval Rating for DeSantis doubled from last year.
68 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.
1 voter completed an Incident Report detailing what they could remember from an incident they witnessed of voter intimidation or suppression. Three 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 8 new voters and got 38 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.
Our Georgia organizers accompanied Florida volunteers to Black Churches on Sunday. They’ve become quite accustomed to talking about how important it is to make sure you are registered to vote at your current address. They’ve became great ambassadors for Hope Springs from Field and their confidence has grown immensely since 2021.
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!