This was our first canvass after the Fall of Roe. 86 new volunteers came out to knock on doors with Hope Springs from Field PAC last Saturday, 86 people enraged basically by what the far right-wing court had done. People who thought staying at home and stewing in their anger wasn’t exactly fit for the circumstances. In Ohio, a group of canvassers have brought in a unique pitch: “We can’t do anything about Inflation, but we can fight to save our Rights.” Or our Democracy. Or, for that matter, our sanity.
246 volunteers came out to knock on doors last Saturday in Lucas, Wood, Erie and Summit counties, as well as the Cincinnati suburbs, for our fourth canvass in Ohio. Because this is a new state for us, we start from the beginning, and training volunteers took almost an hour. Knocking on doors in this “system” is painless, and the biggest thing expected from volunteers is a smile. Even I, who has been told I have RBF, can move the face muscles to smile when a voter opens the door. But, as I have mentioned before, we train volunteers to anticipate or predict whether or not someone is home even before they open the door. This saves time, even though it is hard to learn that you can walk away and return to talk to a voter if you predicted wrong. This so rarely happens, though, that the dozens of doors basically treated as a lit-drop (because the volunteer anticipates that no one is home) saves so much time (because we learned long ago that volunteers who are not trained in this way spend way too much time waiting for someone to come to the door when no one is home) that it more than makes up for any awkwardness in the rare events that someone does come to the door as they are leaving. But it takes practice and we know that.
We asked voters who opened their doors if they were registered to vote at their current address and if they have the necessary identification to cast a vote. We remind voters that they have to be registered at their current address to conform with HAVA *and* having their current address in the Poll Book allows them more options for identification purposes.
Our major focus is the Issues Survey. Using the Issues Survey as the means for directing conversation at the door makes it easier for volunteers to engage voters. Normally, around 65% of the voters we talk to at their doors answer some or all of these questions although it was slightly lower on Saturday (I don’t think any of our results reached that percentage last weekend, though). Each week, we ask voters about what issue they think is the most urgent facing America right now. Inflation was the top Issue mentioned by voters we talked to on Saturday. The Economy was second, mostly from concern over a possible recession. Reproductive Rights was the third most mentioned issue. We also heard a lot additional comments about Reproductive Rights and Gun Violence in the “Anything to add” or message to Congress query.
We knock on the doors of Democratic and Independent voters, which means we aren’t seeing responses from anyone (yet) who identifies as Republican. 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. By our work and our presence we are trying to convey that Democrats care and we listen. The lit focuses on the things voters told us were important to them last fall, aiming to appeal to every voter. Far and away the number one issue that the voters we talked to in the Senate Swing States was inflation or price increases, and I imagine that concern has only increased since November.
But the main focus in our canvassing right now is the Issues Survey, asking voters for their input and concerns. We find that most voters who aren’t in a hurry or in the middle of something are willing to answer at least a couple of these questions, especially their top issue or concern and their views of President Biden. 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.
Collecting data about the Issues that voters actually think and talk about, though, is extraordinarily useful for Democratic campaigns, and the data we collect will be available to all Democrats who use VAN after the primaries. This may be even more important than ever before.
Support (measured as job approval) for President Biden fell to 50% from the voters we talked to on Saturday. Disapproval was at 15%. Approval for Tim Ryan was grew to 73% this week. Approval of Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur fell to 63%, while 6% disapproved.
Hope Springs from Field PAC has been knocking on doors in a grassroots-led effort to increase awareness of the fact that Democrats care about our voters and are working to protect their rights, and, in March, we will begin an even bigger effort. We are thinking about how to mitigate Voter Suppression efforts, get around them and make sure we have "super compliance," both informing and helping our voters meet the requirements and get out and vote. 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 was started by former Obama Field Organizers because field was the cornerstone of our success. But the reason we won the Iowa Caucus in 2008 was because we registered voters and then turned them out! The approach we adopted was focused on listening, on connecting voters and their story to the candidate and our cause. 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 did). 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.
Hope Springs has targeted states that have competitive Senate races in 2022 as well as districts that are remapped in ways that offer opportunities or vulnerabilities for Democrats next year. This is why we are canvassing in these specific areas of Ohio. But we know there are places we need to defend (Georgia, Nevada and Arizona) and there are opportunities. North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — even Ohio and Florida — are such opportunities. There is a lot of work to be done!
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 61 CSRs in Ohio.
back of lit
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.
Hope Springs from Field PAC has a hybrid approach. We aren’t interested in competing with regular campaign field organizing. We are in the field before they get there and then move on when the Democratic campaigns start their intensive field work. Indeed, when we wind up the typical field work by Labor Day, we will encourage all the volunteers working with us to move over to the Senate campaigns in their states (and hope that our field organizers will be hired on by those campaigns). After Labor Day, we will begin organizing our Election Protection Project.
But we are also cognizant that Democratic turnout has traditionally dropped off more than Republicans in non-presidential years. So early, frequent voter contact is more important to our side. Equally important, though, is that starting early means that we can make up for our inability to register new voters in the presidential election because we took Covid and the health of our base seriously. Registering new voters (and re-registering existing voters at their current address, in compliance with HAVA) at their door 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.
By starting early, and aiming towards super-compliance with these really, really onerous provisions, Hope Springs from Field PAC seeks to undermine that strategy, while informing voters about the new laws and regulations aimed at them. There’s a lot of work to be done, but fortunately, the three states that are making it most difficult are also states in which you can knock on doors at least 10 months out of the year. And, with your help, we will be there, getting our people to super-comply with these restrictive provisions.
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/2022senateswing
Thank you for your support. This work depends on you!
