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Democrats are Starting to Pull Away in Pennsylvania. Extremism is Hurting Republicans Here. [1]
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Date: 2022-08-16
Some things never change. Count among them the frequent, ever present even, complaint that the Pennsylvania voters we talk to “don’t want a Senator from New Jersey.” “No Jersey Boys,” was a comment a volunteer from the Pittsburgh area wrote down on his observation sheet. What’s more, voters are talking about how John Fetterman is trolling Mehmet Oz; even the stogey Philadelphia Inquirer has noticed. We’ve been hearing this at the doors from the moment that the GOP primary was decided and it was never hard to understand why Fetterman’s campaign leaned hard into it. Everybody’s talking about it. “Dislike of the state of New Jersey kinda unites Republicans and Democrats across Pennsylvania,” one GOP strategist said. Like I said, we’ve heard this at the doors since the primary was decided.
The Inquirer, in seeking to appear balanced, writes that his “wife has deep family roots in Montgomery County.” But we aren’t hearing anything about his wife or her family’s history in the state. “No Jersey Boys,” says it all. “John Fetterman is Pennsylvania through and through,” voters tell us. Hard to see how Fetterman loses his dominant positioning in the polls now.
389 volunteers came out to knock on doors with Hope Springs from Field PAC in (northern) Montgomery, Bucks and Northampton counties as well as western Allegheny county on 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 thirteenth 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 canvass with an Issues Questionnaire that allows voters to tell us what is on their minds. We use it as a conversational check to guide volunteers through their dialog at the door. It makes it easy on our volunteers as provides us with vital data that will be entered in VAN (the Democratic database) after the primary. On Saturday, 1,494 voters answered questions from the Issues Survey. I can’t tell you how much our volunteers like this technique and how much *they* learn from knocking on doors.
They aren’t the only ones. We have knocked on 214,184 doors in Pennsylvania this year, and found 461 houses that were empty when we knocked on them, 12,316 other voters who have moved and re-registered 445 voters who needed to update their voting address (as required by HAVA). Re-registering voters has given these volunteers real motivation to find and correct voter addresses at the doors who talk to them.
Which is why our very first priority in these Senate Swing State canvasses is making sure that everyone in the houses that opened their doors is registered to vote at their current address.
We ask voters whether they have a primary issue concern. What we are looking for is to determine whether they are “single issue” voters. We use open-ended questions because we are really looking for quick, immediate responses. People know what issues they will be voting on, and if they can’t think of any, that doesn’t defeat the purpose. The Economy topped our list of concerns with the voters we talked to on Saturday. Comments about a potential Recession are lower but still prominent. Schools was the second most frequent response, perhaps because of the coming school year and we do hear concerns about whether Covid will re-emerge. Fair Elections concerns was third. We still hear a lot additional comments about Reproductive Rights and Gun Violence in the “Anything to add” or message to Congress query. Pennsylvania is the state where we get the most “Reproductive Rights” response to the “Is there a single issue that will determine your vote this fall.” About 28% of those who respond to this question volunteer that answer.
Voter views of President Biden were stable again in Pennsylvania this week. Biden’s favorable job approval rating continues to rise; this week it was up one, 59% amongst the voters with whom we talked. 9% expressed disapproval in the job the president was doing. We still hear comments from voters that they wished Biden would be more aggressive and people do tell us they wished the president would show more anger about the way things were going.
73% 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. Josh Shapiro’s numbers continue to rise. 75% 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 registered 13 New Voters last Saturday and updated (or corrected) the addresses of another 48 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 31,365 doors last weekend, so I suppose that 48 isn’t that much in relation to the number of houses we touched.
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 117 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 also ask voters in the Issues Survey if they have any concerns about the upcoming elections. Voters who tell us they have experience voter intimidation or other problems with voting are asked to fill out Incident Reports. We found 1 voter who wanted to fill out an Incident Report on Saturday. We collate these Incident Reports, to be shared with local, state and federal officials in charge of voting, as well as use them to plan out our Election Protection strategy in the fall. They could also be used in court cases.
As I’ve noted previously, volunteers in Pennsylvania are feeling incredibly confident about their chances in November. They seem to like how Fetterman is pushing back and that aggressiveness seemed to take the steam out of the questions about Fetterman’s health. The voters we talked to seem to think Fetterman is in control of this race. Let’s hope so!
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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