I did a bit of election-day GOTV canvassing for Craig Johnson's successful NY state senate campaign. While I have a strong aversion to being yelled at by strangers and long ago gave up on phone banking, I was asked to canvass targeted Democratic-registered voters a neighborhood and decided to give it a try. While the experience was not without interesting moments, it was, on the whole, extremely unpleasant. It also got me wondering whether the traditional, intrusive GOTV tactics of canvassing and phone banking in a media-saturated world may be ineffective at best and strategically detrimental at worst.
I'm curious whether anyone in the MyDD community has hard, empirical evidence about the effectiveness of canvassing and phone banking. While there are a wide variety of anecdotes of individuals who seem to have responded positively to calls or visits, I wonder whether there is any data that can isolate the contribution of canvassing/phone-banking to actual votes within the context of a larger campaign effort and larger social and political forces. It's something we just seem to accept as part of politics without ever asking whether it makes a positive contribution toward the larger goal.
Update 2/8/07: I was pleasantly surprised by the positive and negative response to this diary. A couple of folks posted links to research that points to canvassing as an extremely effective campaign technique:
Get Out the Vote! How to Increase Voter Turnout is a book by Donald Green and Alan Gerber (a couple of professors of political science at Yale) that gives the general rate of votes per canvassing "contact" as 1/14. They have an associated website as well.
An Analysis of the Michigan Democratic Party's 2002 Youth Coordinated Campaign by Ryan Friedrichs (a Harvard student) looks at a specific effort and also finds canvassing to be the most effective campaign tool, in terms of bang for buck.
Since I do not have a Political Science background, I am ill-equipped to offer a rigorous critique of these or any of the myriad studies that can be pulled up by googling "campaign effectiveness". However, I do have some concerns about how dogmatically canvassing can be extolled given the difficulty of isolating its effects within the context of complex and widely differing live campaigns. Also, I have yet to see anything addressing the issue of whether canvassing as part of the increasingly frequent saturation campaigns contributes to a deeper, long-term disdain for politics within the electorate.
Aeolus shared some insight from his experiences as a candidate that seems to offer the most practical perspective on canvassing. When done by experienced neighborhood-based volunteers in an organized, targeted manner as part of a well-structured campaign effort, there's nothing that beats it as a tactic.
However, in a situation like mine this week: A novice canvasser with minimal skills, canvassing alone in an unfamiliar, insular neighborhood that had been canvassed multiple times before, canvassing late on a weekday on the coldest day of the year in a brutal media-saturated campaign only three months after an even more brutal national election...I was destined cause nothing but pain. It is an experience I will go to great lengths to avoid repeating in the future and I urge you to be similarly cautious.
In my particular scenario on Tuesday, I was assigned a list of registered Democratic voters over a five street area in an quiet, older inner-ring suburban neighborhood. The afternoon was relatively peaceful since 80% of the households were at work and the remaining 20% were generally pleasant homemakers (of both genders) and seniors.
But when people started coming home from work, the effort became much more confrontational. While there were a handful of supportive responses to my brief, pleasant greeting and reminder to vote, the bulk of the reactions ranged from resigned acceptance at best ("Yes, I voted. You're the third person that's come by.") to open hostility at worst ("Oh, all this campaigning, it's so annoying ...it's so annoying...it's so annoying"). The reception was so troubling that I decided to bail early and wait at my assigned polling spot to monitor the close out and report the precinct returns.
I assume that the perception is that canvassing still retains qualities that separate it from other outreach techniques and permit it to break through the noise and filters that characterize a culture overwhelmed by an infestation of advertising. As direct person-to-person retail politics, it adds a human face to campaigns that have largely become hours of slick television ads and mountains of shiny, content-free printed literature. Occasionally, canvassers have the opportunity to engage individual voters in meaningful discussions that hearken back to a simpler (and, perhaps, mythological) day of more robust civil discourse and engagement.
But my experience on Tuesday and at times in the past is that canvassing (and it's slightly younger sister phone banking) is perceived by the vast majority of attackers and victims as an obnoxious intrusion into personal time and space. I am concerned that rather than stirring up a reluctant hornet's nest of political involvement, canvassing simply gives the appearance of activity while yielding few extra votes.
Even worse, canvassing and phone-banking in high profile races may cause increasing numbers of voters and volunteers to develop a strong negative association of politics with annoyance rather than an opportunity to shape public policy in a positive way. This ultimately favors a Republican party that thrives on vote suppression and can redirect misanthropic rage into the dismantling of programs and institutions devoted to the common good. Voters pull up the drawbridge, leaving a widening moat that fosters an arms race in increasingly outrageous tactics, furthering disengagement by the electorate as a whole. Even if it does have some effect, like negative advertising, the long-term price paid for short-term victory may be too high.
As a fundamental campaign technique, canvassing also dissuades involvement by potential activists of all ages who, like me, find these traditional campaign techniques to be overwhelmingly distasteful. While there are many extroverts who relish the confrontation and engagement, I suspect that there are a number of good potential volunteers who never get involved because the only work available for them is activity they find offensive. This is, perhaps, even more prevalent in a Democratic party that attracts people who have a stronger sense of empathy and devotion to a quiet inner world of ideas than their boisterous Republican brethren. And people who try to live their lives by the golden rule will not canvass and telemarket when they don't want to be canvassed or telemarketed to themselves.
The prototypical canvassing effort focuses on suburban neighborhoods. Suburban residents like detached single-family housing because it allows them to disconnect from the community and have more control over their interaction with the outside world. They want to live in their artificial, isolated peace - going to work, helping the kids with their homework, and then retreating into the zombified solace of their home theatre. When armies of alien strangers descend on their enclaves with armfuls of litter-ature and forced charm, the visitors and their ideas will be greeted as invaders and rejected. Notice the militaristic, negative language often associated with canvassing - fighting the good fight, out in the trenches, you're a trooper. We've had enough war over the past four years.
Conscientious voters in highly publicized campaigns do not need a reminder to vote. The number of swing voters in highly polarized campaigns whose minds can be changed by a stranger's knock on the door is probably minimal. At best, canvassing and phone banking can only have a positive effect on a small number of undecided or apathetic voters who will respond positively to nagging. Canvassing gives the public impression of activity and vitality, but activity and progress are two different things.
I do suspect that canvassing may have value in low-profile, off-year elections for down-ticket campaigns that have a dedicated nucleus of volunteers but a limited amount of cash. In those situations, the effort may be presenting genuinely new information. But, again, many communities have become so jaded by past campaigns that they are impervious.
As with so many things in politics, it is alot easier to curse the darkness than offer creative, positive candles to light the way forward. I have no novel ideas about how to run campaigns in a way that avoids the pitfalls listed above. We are a culture that has grown more attracted to "pull" media (like the Internet or on-demand programming) that gives the target some control of the content, rather than traditional "push" media where the control of content is almost entirely in the hands of the content provider. But there are a number of low-confrontation techniques that I have found personally more pleasant, although I have no data to back up their effectiveness in actually changing or producing votes:
Kids Waving Campaign Signs on Busy Street Corners: I always feel bad for the people I see doing this, but it certainly gets more attention than yet another sign stapled to a telephone pole. The feedback of drivers honking back (and occasionally flipping you off) creates that desired illusion of public engagement. This, of course, requires volunteers with a knack for clowning and a tolerance for public humiliation. Ballyhoo is a lost art in our automobile-centric culture, but I still suspect that it retains some of it's power.
Literature Drops: It's canvassing without some of the invasive baggage. On a pleasant weekend day when folks are out in the yard, there are some opportunities for direct contact, but the target remains in control of the interaction. Many folks find fliers on their doorknobs annoying, but certainly less than a knock on the door that interrupts dinner, a video or a phone conversation. Wouldn't an early-morning flier on a car windshield reminding a voter to vote engender less hostility than a dinnertime interruption?
Polling Site "Presence": I did some of this in the Lamont primary and general and liked it. It creates the illusion of community support while allowing the voter to determine the level of engagement. While having little value as a GOTV technique (since it only targets people who are voting), I would like to think that it could have some positive effect on the surprising number of folks in closely-contested races who walk into a polling place without complete certainty of who they will vote for. It's a generally pleasant social activity as well (I had a great discussion with a Lie-berman staffer) and the feedback you get will almost always be positive (voters for your opponent will simply avert their eyes and walk past you).
Personal letters: Direct-mail is an increasing arms race with questionable returns. Since the advent of the Internet, 90% of the snail-mail I get is direct mail that goes directly into recycling with only a cursory glance. But hand-written, personalized letters supposedly have a slight edge in eyeball-time. This is labor-intensive and time-consuming, but if a campaign has the bodies, it has proven to be a pleasant activity for those folks who refuse to canvass or phone.
Personalized e-mail: I recently had some modest success in a volunteer recruitment effort using a targeted database and a simple PHP program that permitted me to send bulk e-mail that was less spam-like. The key seemed to be making it appear less like machine generated e-mail than something sent by a human being. The message was brief, direct and free from obvious rhetoric. The database allowed me to do a mail merge, appending a salutation of the addressee's first name (but no "Dear", which is a flag for spam filters). The data I was using was a target list of uncertain origin that seemed to be people who had donated to campaigns in the past or had signed up to be on candidate mailing lists. The body was plain text with no images or HTML. The customized program (rather than a traditional mailing list program) left the header free of signatures that are usually associated with bulk e-mail programs. I used a legitimate personal e-mail address as the sender. The resulting e-mails looked like they were sent by a real human being and I promptly followed up on responses with a hand-written reply of thanks for the response. (The 2% response rate was above average for direct e-mail) While the ultimate aim of the effort was recruiting volunteers for traditional campaign techniques, I wonder whether this concept could be extended to the targeting of voters.
Perhaps the holy grail of campaigning will be the construction of a grassroots social network powered less by traditional media than by direct communication between people with the Internet as a communications medium. Rove's targeting of one of the few remaining social organizations to survive American suburbanization (the conservative church) was certainly effective in 2000 and 2004 and might still be today if the product he was selling wasn't so fundamentally defective. There is a nascent effort in the progressive church that holds some promise. And a network of grassroots volunteers who are attracted by pleasant campaign activities will ultimately serve as a social foundation for building a strong, organic and durable progressive movement that can heal the wounds wrought by the conservative movement and move America into a more democratic era that is better able to handle the challenges that face us ahead.
A postscript for those not familiar with Johnson/O'Connell race: Newly elected New York Democratic governor Eliot Spitzer, in a deft political move, appointed Long Island Republican state senator Michael Balboni, an 18-year legislative veteran, as the state's new Homeland Security director. This left a state senate open in a blue-trending 7th Senatorial District, made all the more important by the fact that the Republicans held a razor-thin 33 to 28 majority in the state senate (the house is Democratically-controlled). The potential for chipping away at that lead gave hope for a future legislature in Albany that will be both more friendly to Spitzer's proposals and more willing after the 2010 census to undo the radical upstate gerrymandering that favors Republican congressmen. The 7th senate district is a aging inner-ring suburban district with majority Democratic registration. While the lesser-of-two-evils choice was between family legacy Craig Johnson and machine tool Maureen O'Connell, the larger strategic issues propelled this obscure race into unusually high visibility, resulting in a campaigning blitz that will end up costing over 1.5 million dollars. Johnson won the race 26,354 to 22,919.
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