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Shaking the Trees in Pennsylvania: Voter Contact Wins Elections [1]
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Date: 2022-07-14
It is always interesting to hear/read what biases voters have. Apparently, the voters we talk to aren’t big fans of New Jersey — or, at least, they want a Senator that lives in Pennsylvania. The “third senator from New Jersey” keeps coming up, primarily from people who are characterized as independent. In the South, the GOP nominee would be called a carpet-bagger. But that isn’t a term that gets conveyed to me. But “third senator from New Jersey?” There’s something more to that term that I can’t say I understand, but is certainly derogatory. Not that every state shouldn’t have their own complement of Members of Congress, but (from what we are hearing) it is somehow worse to have moved one state over just to run.
215 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 eighth week 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.’ Gun Violence was the top Issue mentioned by voters we talked to on Saturday, and many voters spoke specifically about Gun Violence interrupting Independence Day activities. The Economy, including fears of entering a Recession was second and 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.
I’ve been looking for evidence, when we see these Culture “War” Issues come up, for a big difference between what we see from the Philadelphia suburbs and the Pittsburgh suburbs. We definitely have more volunteers knocking on doors in eastern Pennsylvania, so you can’t really be definitive here, but concerns about Reproductive Rights and Gun Violence aren’t significantly higher than in western Pennsylvania. But we don’t train our volunteers to conduct a statistically significant poll, we are really looking for indications about what Issues will drive voters this Fall.
Voter views of President Biden were stable this week. Biden’s favorable job approval number was up one, 58% amongst the voters with whom we talked. 10% 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 guns and/or gas prices and people do tell us they wished the president would be more angry. This is in stark contrast to his service under President Obama, who was determined to never be seen as an “angry Black Man.”
Since the primary, we had seen approval of John Fetterman fall. But it rose during the holiday weekend. This week, it fell, but still above what we have seen since the primary. 63% of the voters we talked to had a favorable impression of Fetterman this week.
Josh Shapiro’s numbers are also rising. 68% of the voters who responded said that had a favorable impression of Shapiro, and 9% 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 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. Far and away the number one issue that the voters we talked to in the Senate Swing States last year was inflation or price increases, and I imagine that concern has only increased.
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 58 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).
As you can see from the very first question in the Issues Questionnaire, making sure that voters are registered from their current address is a major purpose of early canvassing. Updating addresses, both in convincing voters to re-register, and within VAN itself, helps not only the voters we talk to but the Democratic candidates who use VAN in the Fall.
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!
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