We got rained out in Central Florida (which means, the forecast was rain) the weekend before. Which can effect how many volunteers show up, because once they start to question whether the canvass will be cancelled, it’s kinda easy to say to yourself, yes, it will. Volunteers can procrastinate, too! I have a lot of volunteers who tell me they never read our emails or texts because, “I already know what they are going to say.” The problem is, i do that, too! And it isn’t always true. But what are you going to do?
Georgia volunteers have told me that “we are just coasting” this year because there is no Senate race on the ballot. But then they will turn around and promise that President Biden will win here again. As if it is automatic. In southern Georgia and Osceola County in Florida, volunteers tell us that they continue to turn out to knock on doors because “we provide a great service!,” by which i assume they mean our inclusion of voter registration, Constituent Service Request forms and Incident Reports. Hard to for me to know because i never considered this to be a public good or service. For me, this is all about winning.
539 volunteers came out to knock on doors in Georgia last week. We continue to knock on doors of voters in the Black Belt in Georgia and the suburbs of Atlanta, and we now have more volunteers in the Atlanta area than we had out in southern Georgia. They knocked on 39,562 doors and talked to 2,998 voters. (We couldn’t find two more???) But even though we had more than 150 more volunteers out this Saturday than the prior Saturday, we had 11 fewer responses to our Issues Survey! 1,820 voters answered at least some of our questions on the survey this week.
Summer. Whatcha gonna do?
The Top Issue volunteers found in Georgia on Saturday was what we are calling Summer Concerns. Summer Jobs, Public Pool Openings, Summer Camps. The question is ‘What is the most urgent issue facing the country?’ but we see a lot of responses that are just very personal.
The second most frequent concern in Georgia this weekend was what we will call Housing Worries. One voter wanted to voice his frustration that interest rates aren’t falling faster on his mortgage. People talk about getting priced out of their neighborhoods; other voters want to buy a home and aren’t finding anything for sale (that they like, i’m sure). As Biden starts taking credit for Bidenomics, these are the kinds of things that voters still worry about.
The third most frequently Issue was Economic Uncertainty. And while this and the Cost or Availability of Housing might be related, they aren’t voiced to volunteers that way. Voters are still cognizant about layoffs, especially in the Atlanta area. One voter said her daughter had just graduated from college and still hadn’t gotten a job offer.
Biden’s Approval numbers among the voters we talked to was at 52% last Saturday, with a Disapproval number of 11%. In comparison, Approval of Governor Kemp was 43% and Disapproval was 16% last Saturday. Kemp has the greatest variation in his approval numbers that i’ve seen since we started canvassing in the state. There is no senate race in Georgia this cycle (and a number of Georgia voters have told us “Thank God” there isn’t because they are exhausted!) and while we ask if voters approve of the job their senators are doing, we are not tracking that.
Volunteers registered 28 new voters and re-registered 77 voters. We differentiate between the two because brand new voters are often ignored by campaigns and we hope to compensate for that somewhat by having volunteers send them post cards before the election and they are also getting robocalls thanking them for registering. But we are finding lots of teens who just turned legal age whose parents (primarily mothers) are insisting they register.
92 voters filled out Constituent Service Request forms. In general, we send these 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 CSR and let them know they are working on the issue. This credit-taking is enormously valuable to the Democratic office-holder.
7 voters completed an Incident Report. Two 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).
We continue to find voters who say they need a photo voter id (which is surprising since that was required to vote in the 2022 elections) — even in the Atlanta suburbs — and are already working Voter ID Days with Registrars offices and our partner Black Churches in both southern Georgia and the metro Atlanta area. We consider it a core mission to help voters in need obtain the required document to vote in November 2024. So far we have found 146 voters who need help get obtaining one before the next election. This effort arises out of the group texts among Albany State organizers who had worked with me in the first Georgia Runoff (and who have now moved on from college to young, working adults who have not given up on helping those in need “where they came from”).
Hope Springs from Field PAC has been knocking on doors since March 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 canvassing 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 and our efforts to protect our voters, we would certainly appreciate your support:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/fistfulofsteel
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 for what we are doing.
317 volunteers canvassed came out to knock on doors in 7 Florida counties on Saturday. They knocked on 22,443 doors and talked to 1,631 voters. 1008 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, Travel Concerns. Voters expressed worry about Summer travel and getting back home on time. Several voters told us they were prepared to change their plans for earlier flights. The Economy was second, and an ongoing concern. Being back in Central Florida this week, voters again brought up Disney and related-area concerns, which came in as third on the list of their Top Issues.
Biden Approval among the Floridians we talked to was at 53% last Saturday; 9% expressed some measure of Disapproval. 14% of the voters who responded Approved of the job Sen. Rick Scott was doing while 39% expressed Disapproval. Several voters asked us if Scott were going to run for president, something that people have talked about since he was in the governor’s mansion.
Speaking of Florida governors, 11% of the voters we talked to thought Gov. DeSantis was doing a good job, 38% said they disapproved of the job he was doing. In the Jacksonville area, DeSantis is clearly more popular (although one Duval voter said he was more tolerated) than in Central Florida. But it is important to remember that Florida governors have always been very popular, something that has more to do with sunshine and beach living than their governance. Until DeSantis, the partisan divide wasn’t an apparent factor.
89 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.
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.
Volunteers registered 1 new voters and 28 voters updated 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.
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. We also ask voters if they have an problems that local, state or federal governments need to address in their neighborhoods.
But the main focus of 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.
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 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. That includes making sure that out-of-state workers at Disney know to, and how to, obtain a State ID card if they don’t want to give up their out-of-state DL but still want to vote in Florida. 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/fistfulofsteel
Thank you for your support. This work depends upon you!