It’s been harder to keep writing these updates in the Fall, well, for many reasons. Hope Springs from Field PAC took a two week break from canvassing in Texas, Florida, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin for a Labor Day break. In North Carolina, we were asked to do emergency Voter Registration canvasses aimed at Voting Rights restoration and that deserves a whole separate diary, but I mention it here because we had people come in from Georgia, Florida, Virginia and even a car of volunteers from Tennessee to continue that work uninterrupted. But many of the people walking with our Issues Canvass/Voter Registration Drive/Election Protection/Constituent Service canvasses were super committed to this approach. I didn’t really realize how committed they were until after Labor Day. Lots of volunteers walked 3 out of 4 weeks in the hot summer months, in part because we were prepared for canvassing in the heat and in part because they believed in the deep organizing approach we had for maintaining contact with voters, even in the off-year.
But after Labor Day, things got harder. And we could see this in a couple of different ways. Volunteers who knocked on doors got a colder reception. Our repeat volunteers were much less frequent. And our Issues Canvass received a larger percentage of respondents, something that did not help President Biden when we asked what their opinion of him was. This summer, 9,932 voters participated in taking the Issues Canvass question, but even though we talked to fewer voters we had 8,311 voters agree to answer questions in fewer states (some volunteers in North Carolina continued to use the Issues Canvass approach while we stopped knocking on doors in Pennsylvania because they had local elections and organizers and volunteers there wanted to shift towards that).
Fewer volunteers. Fewer states. Fewer weekends (10 as opposed to 12). Fewer Doors. But 83% of the respondents over that time frame. People had something they wanted to say. It was a hard fall to remember.
This summer, week in and week out President Biden was seen favorably by more than 70% of the voters who agreed to respond to the questionnaire. While it fluctuated each week, it was consistently in the 70s. After Labor Day, this was no longer the case. Remember, we are not knocking on doors of Republicans. We are not talking to people who vote in Republican primaries. We are targeting Democrats and Independents. And, when we started back in the fall, we immediately saw Biden’s favorables fall. First in the mid 60s, then in the high 50s, and then in the mid 50s. And this is dispiriting for volunteers. One person who was cutting turf even confided that they were looking for turf to walk that he hoped would be more favorable.
Here, inside the D.C. Beltway, people want to blame Afghanistan and squabbling among Democrats as reasons why, but neither factored into what we were seeing at the doors. I doubt many voters remembered the fumbled pullout of Afghanistan by the time Labor Day was in the books. We certainly weren’t seeing that in our responses. And we don’t really see/talk to activists at their doors. Some, but it is pretty rare. Most of the voters we talk to (iow, who answer their doors) are just normal people, probably not as well informed as we are, just normal Americans wanted normal American stuff. Their expectations of their politicians is pretty low. It’s hard to maintain a smiling face knocking on doors of people you probably don’t know when you aren’t seeing a lot of hope in their responses.
But there is a reason why we saw a higher percentage of responses to the Issues Canvass. For the most part, even though volunteers didn’t participate week in and week out like they had in the summer, they knew the drill. They were reaching more doors in the time they did devote to this and the training we provide had become habit. This summer, I don’t recall hearing that volunteers were comfortable and successful using the approach of deciding if there was someone home before they knocked on the door. But this fall, I did get that feedback. And if I was hearing it from the organizers, they organizers were really hearing it from the volunteers. We train our volunteers to pay attention to the door and the targeted voter on their list, using visual and audio cues, age of voters, number of voters in the house and especially the possibility of children, to decide if someone is home even before they knock. If there is no evidence of someone home by the time you reach the door, then you knock and drop and leave. Maybe not even ten seconds at the door. Knock, drop and leave.
Even if you are wrong, voters tend to be happy to talk to you after you turn back around and start the pitch. This simple approach saves volunteers tons of time in canvassing. But it does have to be a habit — and really a habit they don’t even think about — to make it work. Apparently, it takes 12 weeks to get there.
Biden’s fall in our own count came mostly from those who self-identified as independent. Independents mentioned inflation or rising prices as their main concern more than self-identified Democrats did, but this was decidedly the biggest concern we heard about this fall. But not everyone was baffled by inflation. “What can you do about it?” at least one voter asked.
While we had volunteers out in Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Wisconsin, I was personally out knocking on doors in Northern Virginia for our election. So while I was seeing the results of the questionnaires, I wasn’t hearing the same thing at our doors in Virginia (not that we were using the Issues questionnaire here, but I will ask voters what they will be basing their vote on if they aren’t enthusiastically supporting, in this case, McAuliffe). Of course, the real movement away from Democrats was far from Northern Virginia.
As hard as the fall was on this project, we still had 308 volunteers show up for our last canvass on November 20th. We were up and down over the last 3 months, but people are still interested, Covid notwithstanding. In my next diary, I will go through the stats for the fall. It was a slog, though, and we need to recognize this.
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