Which is why we continue to build a database of voters who signed the petitions our volunteers circulate and add them to those who have self-identified as Abortion Single Issue voters. Everything we do is directed at GOTV (Get-Out-the-Vote). Early Organizing allows us to be that pro-active, to continue to expand our knowledge of the electorate to help elect Democrats and win votes for the things the grassroots supports.
That ballot initiative would enshrine abortion access in the state constitution and ensure that no law shall “prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.”
If approved by voters, it would roll back Florida’s abortion ban to viability, which is considered around 24 weeks of pregnancy. The initiative would need 60 percent approval to pass. The proposal would not alter the state legislature’s authority to require parental notification for a minor seeking an abortion.
Passage requires 60% of the vote and the South Florida Sun Sentinel released a poll today that “The measure that would enshrine abortion rights in the Florida Constitution, Amendment 4, has support of 49% of those surveyed and opposition from 19%. About one-third of voters, 32%, said they didn’t know.” But this is why we are working so hard.
432 volunteers came out to knock on doors in 6 Florida counties last Saturday. They knocked on 31,708 doors and talked to 2,432 voters. 1,590 of those voters answered questions on at least part of the Issues Survey.
Hope Springs from Field PAC has been knocking on doors since March 2nd 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/hopemobilization2024
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, (Rising or High) Prices. Reproductive Rights or Freedom was the second most frequent Issue. Crime was the third most cited concern.
Biden Approval among the Floridians we talked to remained 46% last Saturday; 11% expressed some measure of Disapproval. 7% of the voters who responded Approved of the job Sen. Rick Scott was doing while 38% expressed Disapproval. This is relatively unchanged from last year. 9% of the voters we talked to thought Gov. DeSantis was doing a good job (we think this sudden drop has something to do with the Abortion Amendment, as well), 39% said they disapproved of the job he was doing.
152 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.
4 voters in Florida completed an Incident Reports. 5 other voter expressed concerns about the 2024 elections but did not fill out incident reports because she didn’t say she 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 with other, historical incidents and handed over to District and State Attorneys, Attorney Generals and the DoJ Civil Rights Division right before Election Day as a precaution against Election Day Incidents in November. Past polling place activity is a predictor of future voter intimidation or suppression activity.
Many of the neighborhoods where we are knocking on doors in Florida right now are minority (non-white) and we endeavor to send out as many minority volunteers as possible. Some of our volunteers have expressed surprise that we have been successful in finding abortion single issue voters in these minority neighborhoods. But this reflects national trends.
The 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.
Front of Lit
We registered 13 new voters and got 44 voters to update their voter registration addresses in Florida on Saturday. 8 of the new voters we registered were African-American. 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.
2023 Hope Springs expenses
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.
But here’s the reality: Identifying Single Issue Voters and Constitutional Amendment supporters and doing GOTV (Get-Out-the-Vote) costs us more money than our regular canvassing because this issue drives volunteer turnout higher and higher. Which means we have to buy more lit to distribute and other minor expenses (like water for volunteers). We just paid off the printers for last year’s Ohio lit that we distributed. So please:
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/hopemobilization2024
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!
