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Canvass Report for Florida, Georgia & Virginia: Grassroots Organizing Starts in the Spring! [1]
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Date: 2023-05-24
Just like the weekend before Easter weekend, we asked our canvass volunteers whether they wanted to knock on doors this weekend, Memorial Day weekend. When we say Hope Springs from Field PAC is grassroots driven, this is part of what we mean. It’s an off election year (except for Virginia, where there are critical state legislative to be decided in November), and so the urgency of doing voter contact is lower. So voters will even object, although not as many as you would expect. Canvassers always run into people who don’t want to be disturbed, or are busy or, quite frankly, are in the middle of something. But we still let volunteers decide — and, in an off-election year, without guidance.
Our volunteers really like this. People who leave town for the weekend aren’t going to turn up anyway, and organizers get frustrated if they cut turf for people who aren’t going to show. So we get an idea if we are going to have volunteers show up this Saturday. Hope Springs held 80 canvasses last Saturday in 9 states, and not all of them will happen this Saturday because volunteers voted (let us know) their preference before hand. As i have said before, volunteers are golden, incredibly valuable, and should be treated as such. This includes our organizers who train canvassers, cut turf and provide support for canvassers each week. Some will get the weekend off, some will not and a few may even trade their group for another so that another organizer can take the weekend off. Keeping it all going.
We saw a drop in the number of volunteers who turned out to knock on doors in Florida Saturday. The city election in Jacksonville meant that the volunteers we imported for GOTV went home, Jax vols — exhausted by 5 days of GOTV canvassing — slept in and, as normally occurs after an election, people just needed a break. One Jacksonville dad brought 3 of his sons out to knock on doors for GOTV — and a wild guess tells me that we won’t see them (the kids) for awhile.
213 volunteers canvassed came out to knock on doors in Seminole, Volusia, Osceola and Duval (Jacksonville) counties on Saturday. They knocked on 15,634 doors and talked to 1,419 voters. 864 of those voters filled out at least part of the Issues Survey. That number is much higher than last week (while all they others were much lower) because we weren’t walking with the questionnaire in Jacksonville during GOTV.
The Top 3 concerns of the voters we talked to last Saturday in Florida were the Debt Ceiling negotiations, the Economy and, third, Jobs. You get the impression these three topics were interconnected.
Biden Approval among the Central Floridians we talked to was at 52% last Saturday and 15% expressed some measure of Disapproval. 6% of the voters who responded Approved of the job Sen. Rick Scott was doing while 44% expressed Disapproval. There is good reason to think that Gov. DeSantis is influencing some of that.
7% of the voters we talked to thought Gov. DeSantis was doing a good job, 39% said they disapproved of the job he was doing. DeSantis‘ support bounced back after we returned to using the Issues Survey in Jacksonville. Democrats throughout the state continue to voice concerns about the governor “getting a free pass” from the media because he is running for president. We especially have been hearing complaints about the legislature amending Florida’s Resign to Run law to favor the governor, as well as the Florida legislature suspending Florida’s FOIA laws for DeSantis’ travel. Can you tell that the legislative session is over? But one thing of note is that we are not finding a lot of support for DeSantis among Hispanics in Central Florida (where they have been called Mickey Ricans).
69 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.
Hope Springs from Field PAC has been knocking on doors since last month in a grassroots-led effort to prepare the Electoral Battleground in what has been called the First and Second Rounds of a traditional Five Round Canvass. We are taking those efforts to the doors of 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, voter registration (and follow-up) and our efforts to protect our voters, we would certainly appreciate your support:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/fistfulofsteel
Hope Springs from Field PAC understands that volunteer to voter personal interactions are critical. We are returning to the old school basics: repeated contacts, repeated efforts to remind them of protocols, meeting them were they are, helping voters to understand the importance of super-compliance with these new voting restrictions that Republicans keep enacting. 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 (and can be) cured (in states that allow it).
We continue to knock on doors in the Black Belt in Georgia and the suburbs of Atlanta. 246 volunteers came up to knock on doors in Georgia last week. They knocked on 17,675 doors and talked to 1,553 voters. 989 of those voters answered at least some of our questions on the Issues Survey.
The Top Issues volunteers found in Georgia was Economic Uncertainty. The second most frequent concern was the Debt Ceiling “fiasco” (to quote a voter from the Atlanta area) and third were Reproductive Rights. More than 40% of our responses were from the northern suburbs, as we have expanding the number of canvasses and volunteers in the metro region. Georgia is among several states where Reproductive Justice is the top cited “single issue” that will determine how they will cast their ballot in 2024.
Biden’s Approval numbers among the Georgians we talked to was at 54% last Saturday, with a Disapproval number of 13%. In comparison, Approval of Governor Kemp was 38% and Disapproval was 29% last Saturday. There is no senate race in Georgia this cycle and while we ask if voters approve of the job their senators are doing, we are not tracking that.
Volunteers registered 15 new voters and re-registered 17 voters. 74 voters filled out Constituent Service Request forms and 2 voters completed an Incident Report. Eleven other voters expressed concerns about the 2024 elections but did not fill out incident reports because they didn’t admit to witnessing voter suppression or intimidation (they just expressed concerns or worries about them). This is probably a result of local coverage of the Trump grand jury in Fulton county. This is definitely something of much higher interest in the Atlanta area than it is in southern Georgia.
We continue to find voters who say they need a photo id (which is surprising since that was required to vote in the 2022 elections) — even in the Atlanta suburbs — and are already arranging Voter ID Days with Registrars offices in both southern Georgia and the metro Atlanta area to help voters in need to obtain the required document to vote in November 2024. This is a joint effort of Hope Springs and the Black Churches we have been working with since the Georgia Senate Runoffs in 2021.
If you support grassroots organizing to increase voter participation and election protection, expand the electorate and prepare the electoral battlefield for Democrats, please help:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/fistfulofsteel
VA Senate (competitive districts in stripes) Districts 24, 30 & 31
Virgina (and Ohio) had the most scheduled canvasses last Saturday. We started knocking in Virginia on April 15th in support of Democrats in highly contested (or expected to be) state Senate and House districts. The 2023 legislative elections will be their first after redistricting and a lot of lines got moved in the remap. We are especially canvassing in the new areas for the targeted districts.
VA House Districts 21, 22, 57, 65, 82 & 84 (competitive = stripes)
Like Ohio last summer, we have had to import organizers for many of these districts. I’ve served as lead organizer for 2 of these, driving more than 3 ½ hours from Arlington VA to meet with volunteers in our targeted areas. I am not alone here. Strangely, we have no problem finding organizers for our Northern Virginia canvasses.
129 volunteers came up to knock on doors in Virginia last week. They knocked on 9,143 doors and talked to 800 voters. 493 of those voters answered at least some of our questions on the Issues Survey.
The Top Issue volunteers found in Virginia was the Debt Ceiling negotiations, especially how they will affect lower income Virginians. The second most frequent concern was Recession Worries and third were Mass Shootings or Gun Violence.
In Virginia, 52% of the voters we talked to approved of the job President Biden was doing. 63% approved of the job Senator Kaine was doing. 28% approved of the job that Governor Youngkin was doing. 21% disapproved of Youngkin’s performance. In Virginia, governors can’t run for re-election, which is why he’s been sniffing around the presidential race. Voters actually brought that up this week.
Volunteers registered 10 new voters and re-registered 29 voters. 57 voters filled out Constituent Service Request forms.
Our very first question is whether the person we are talking to is registered to vote at their current home address. Lots of mobility in these Florida communities, but 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.
We registered 6 new voters in Florida on Saturday, 38 voters who updated their addresses.
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!
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