What a difference a month makes. Right after the election, some voters we talked to, mostly non-affiliated voters, expressed concerns about John Fetterman’s health and questioned how he would be replaced if his health failed. Those doubts have largely disappeared. Granted, it was because, you know, they didn’t want a third Senator from New Jersey winning in November. But last week, we heard “atta boys” for Fetterman and his campaign. “Taking it to Oz,” and even people (more than one Observation Form included this label) calling Fetterman the Wizard. Now the first time I saw this (because I didn’t have the context yet) I was thinking Uriah Heep; but obviously Pennsylvania voters are thinking Judy Garland.
315 volunteers came out to knock on doors with Hope Springs from Field PAC in (northern) Montgomery, Bucks and Northampton county as well as western Allegheny county last Saturday. We continue to canvass in swingy areas of the toss-up Congressional Districts Pennsylvania, the three “toss-up” Congressional Districts (1st, 7th & 17th CDs) in grey. This was the eleventh week canvassing this year, building on our door-knocking last summer and fall, directed at trying to boost turnout among Democratic voters and like-minded independents.
We’ve been knocking on doors using the Issues Survey as guide for our discussion with voters. Normally, around 65% of the voters we talk to at their doors answer some or all of these questions, and I’ve learned that a lot of voters get sucked into answering questions because the first question (really, second) is ‘What Issue is the Most Urgent.’ Concerns about The Economy, including fears of entering a Recession, was the top Issue mentioned by voters we talked to on Saturday, and many voters spoke specifically about economic uncertainty. And isn’t that just interesting, as I sat down to write this diary, the administration announced the addition of a whopping 528,000 new jobs (200,000 more than Trump’s best month). Schools was second and Reproductive Rights was the third most mentioned issue. Pennsylvania has repeatedly been the state most interested in protection Reproductive Freedom according to the voters we meet. We also heard a lot additional comments about Reproductive Rights and Gun Violence in the “single issue” or message to Congress query.
Voter views of President Biden were stable again in Pennsylvania this week. Biden’s favorable job approval number was up one, 56% amongst the voters with whom we talked. 9% expressed disapproval in the job the president was doing. But we did hear frustration from voters that they wished Biden could or would do more about reproductive rights, gun violence and/or gas prices and people do tell us they wished the president would show more anger about the way things were going.
67% of the voters we talked to had a favorable impression of Fetterman this week. You can see that Fetterman continues to recover but he is by no means up there with the strongest Senate candidates we find among Democrats and Independent voters. On the other hand, Josh Shapiro’s numbers continue to rise. 74% of the voters who responded said that had a favorable impression of Shapiro, and 6% had an unfavorable impression. Remember, these are Democrats and independent voters we are talking to, we try to weed out Republican households when we cut turf on Fridays.
Hope Springs from Field PAC has been knocking on doors in a grassroots-led effort to prepare the Electoral Battleground in what has been called the First Round of a traditional Five Round Canvass. We are taking those efforts to the doors of the communities most effected (the intended targets or victims) of these new voter suppression laws.
Obviously, we rely on grassroots support, so if you support field/grassroots organizing, voter registration (and follow-up) and our efforts to protect our voters, we would certainly appreciate your support:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/2022senateswing
Hope Springs from Field PAC understands that repeated face to face interactions are critical. And we are among those who believe that Democrats didn’t do as well in the 2020 Congressional races as expected because we didn’t knock on doors — and we didn’t register new voters (while Republicans dud). We are returning to the old school basics: repeated contacts, repeated efforts to remind them of protocols, meeting them were they are. Mentoring those who need it (like first time and newly registered voters). Reminding, reminding, reminding, and then chasing down those voters whose ballots need to be cured.
We also ask voters who open their doors whether they want to fill out a Constituent Service Request form. And, when we start using this approach somewhere, we get a higher response rate on service requests than we do after we have been knocking for awhile. I can’t really explain why this is true, but it was true on Saturday, as well. This week, we collected 54 CSRs in Pennsylvania.
Constituent Service Requests are handed over to (hopefully Democratic) office holders with responsibilities for the area of the request. Q-slips will be sent directly to the campaigns of Democratic candidates. Comments from Observation Forms are entered into VAN, as well, and any questions we collect are forwarded to the appropriate campaigns (or elected officials).
We registered 13 New Voters last Saturday and updated (or corrected) the addresses of another 47 voters. I continue to be surprised at the latter number just because these aren’t transient neighborhoods and I wouldn’t expect that much movement. On the other hand, we knocked on 23,562 doors last weekend, so I suppose that 47 isn’t that much in relation to the number of houses we touched.
If you are able to support our efforts to protect Democratic voters, expand the electorate, and believe in grassroots efforts to increase voter participation and election protection, please help:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/2022senateswing
Thank you for your support. This work depends on you!
