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Weekly DataDump: What Grassroots Volunteers did in AZ, FL, GA, NC, NV, OH, PA, WI & VA [1]
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Date: 2023-05-27
We hit our first milestone last Saturday. Hope Springs from Field PAC held 80 canvasses last Saturday in 9 states, and not all of them will happen this Saturday because volunteers voted on whether they wanted to canvass over the holiday weekend. Lots of people have plans today and that’s the way it goes in an off-year. But all our Arizona canvasses voted to continue this weekend, which says something. And the reason is worth noting: volunteers wanted to go out on Memorial Day weekend “to remind Arizona that Ruben Gallego is a vet.” Grassroots pride.
Our first milestone or goal was to have volunteers go out from 75 locations. Which meant that we had to bring more states online and have enough organizers volunteer to lead them. Right now, everything is driven by grassroots volunteers and organizers, so that is the ultimate determiner. But 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. Some voters will even object to their holiday weekend being disturbed, although not as many as you would expect (no real increase when compared to a normal weekend, we see this every week). Canvassers always run into people who don’t want to be disturbed, or are too busy or, quite frankly, are in the middle of something.
Our efforts in Ohio have really picked up. Most of our organizer volunteers there come out of the 2016 Hillary campaign. Last weekend, we held 13 canvasses out of Cincinnati, Columbus, south east of Cleveland and the Toledo-based Congressional District of Marcy Kaptur (it covers a lot of counties along Lake Erie), 8 different counties in all. This tied with our efforts in Georgia, which should surprise no one that they continue to be first in this regard. So, yay! Ohio.
Since March 4, Hope Springs from Field PAC has been knocking on doors (as weather and primaries permitted) in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Virginia — all critical states that will determine who is our President and who holds the Senate majority in 2025. Our planned kickoff in Michigan had to be delayed because of weather, and we will start there next Saturday (in June). But we have now gotten to the point where our grassroots volunteer statistics can no longer be contained within a couple of diaries. So we return to the weekly datadump! These are time-intensive but a lot of fun (both volunteers and i like to see our progress and there are some volunteers who really track our milestones — after all, they set them!).
1,818 volunteers came out to knock on doors last Saturday. Remember, last week’s numbers were inflated because of GOTV in Jacksonville, Florida (where volunteers from Georgia came down again) and that now has normalized. We are now canvassing in 9 states with our systemic Deep Organizing conversational approach designed to engage voters at their doors and elicit valuable information that will help Democrats during our Fall 2024 GOTV efforts.
Hope Springs volunteers knocked on 130,490 doors, and reached another milestone or goal that organizers and “super volunteers” set for themselves this year. (The goal was 100,000 doors, which we would have reached the prior week except for Pennsylvania being rained out that week.) But it does seem to be our practice to not just creep on our goals but to blow right past them! That’s a good thing.
Volunteers had conversations with 11,252 voters. Nicer weather encourages voters to talk more; people will always tell you what is on their minds if you ask. Some people will tell you before you even ask!
Our number 1 piece of advise (something all our organizers are supposed to start with) when training volunteers is, Smile! When i lead trainings, I tell them to “Smile, because no one you talk to today will remember a single thing you say. But they will always remember the impression you left.” We also warn them that they should expect to talk to no more than 8 voters that afternoon (more than that is exceptional). When people voice that this think this is lower than expected, we ask them if they think phone bankers talk to more than 8 people a session. The difference between knocking on doors and phone (or text) banking is that we will leave a positive impression no matter what.
But we also train our door knockers to “predict” whether there is anyone home before they even knock (iow, as they approach the door). Our more observant volunteers will share with others things they see as indicators in their minds whether there is anyone home to help newbies. One of our organizers calls it, “Knock, Drop and Move On” — if they don’t see an indicator that anyone is going to answer the door. I will say that i can be quick to decide (or predict) and will sometimes be moving on as someone actually opens to door. But no one has ever acted offended (and voters will act offended if they feel slighted); this happens to me 2 or 3 times a year. But i have been doing this a very long time (i started in 7th grade), in many states, and i am all about hitting as many doors as possible. “That’s why I am here,” volunteers will say. No one wants to waste their time.
Hope Springs from Field volunteers walk with an Issues Canvass, where we ask voters what they think and whether they had a message for their elected officials. 6,971 voters answered questions from the survey, in whole or in part.
By far, the highest response numbers always are in the second question, about what issue voters think “is most urgent” at this time. The “send a message to your Member” is also very popular. And we are getting a lot of responses to the “Is there a single issue that will determine how you vote” question, too — something we added in 2022 because we were finding voters answering differently to the Top Issue question than to what was actually driving their vote. This is incredibly valuable information for those who do persuasion canvassing next year!
Hope Springs from Field PAC has been knocking on doors since March in a grassroots-led 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 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 personal 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 ask voters who talk to us whether they approve or disapprove of the job the president, their incumbent Senator (up for election this year), and how their governor (if they are up for election this year) is doing. After the primaries, we also ask about the Democratic Senate and nominees.
In Florida, 52% of the voters we talked to who responded had a favorable impression of President Biden. 6% of voters approved of the job Senator Scott was doing. 7% had a favorable impression of Governor DeSantis last week. Remember that we are basically knocking on doors of households with Democratic and Independent voters; although we have started to include households that have mixed households, with Republicans in them. This change is an outgrowth of our experience dealing with mixed (Dem/GOP) households in the Georgia runoff and GOTV in Jacksonville.
In Arizona, 51% of the voters we talked to who responded had a favorable impression of President Biden. 11% of voters approved of the job Senator Sinema was doing. We also ask about the likely Democratic nominee for Senate and Ruben Gallego’s name recognition has been rising (and, with it, job approval — 48% this week). We don’t know (yet) if Sinema will really run, but we assume she will. Arizona is a critical race for both the Presidential and the Senate next year. 48% also had a favorable impression of Governor Hobbs last week.
In Georgia, 54% of the voters we talked to approved of the job President Biden was doing. Georgia doesn’t have a Senate election this cycle, our efforts there is a pure Electoral College play. 38% approved of the job Governor Kemp was doing. It is interesting, because we are now knocking on doors in the Atlanta metro region, and Kemp’s approval has risen markedly since we are (percentage wise) knocking on fewer African-American doors.
In Nevada, 51% of the voters Hope Springs from Field volunteers talked to approved of the job President Biden was doing. 58% had a favorable impression of the job Senator Rosen was doing. 24% of voters approved of the job Governor Lombardo was doing. There is definitely a difference between the results we see in the Reno area than we find in the Vegas area, where Lombardo had been the county sheriff.
In North Carolina, 51% of the voters we talked to approved of the job President Biden was doing. 58% of the voters we talked to approved of the job Governor Cooper was doing. North Carolina is also a pure play for the Electoral College. It has no Class I senators, which is kind of unfortunate given what the North Carolina legislature is doing with it’s supermajority. But we are trying to protect Democratic seats in the House, given the North Carolina Supreme Court ruling overturning the 2022 Congressional Map. There’s a lot of fear about what will happen.
In our third week of canvassing in Ohio, 49% of the voters we talked to approved of the job President Biden was doing. 9% disapproved. 55% approved of the job Senator Brown was doing. 54% approved of the job that Governor DeWine was doing.
In our second (successful) week of knocking on doors in Pennsylvania, voters gave Biden a 55% job approval rating. We were able to canvass out of more locations last Saturday (during the first week, Pittsburgh didn’t meet our temperature threshold and the week before, we got rained out). 60% of the voters we talked to approved of the job Bob Casey was doing int the Senate. Governor Shapiro received a 55% approval rating last week.
Last week was our first week knocking on doors in Wisconsin. We had a terrific kickoff turnout perhaps due to our work in GOTV for the Wisconsin Supreme Court election. 53% of the voters we talked to approved of the job President Biden is doing. 62% of them approved of the job Tammy Baldwin is doing in the Senate. 52% of voters approved of the job Governor Evers is doing.
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. In Virginia, governors can’t run for re-election, which is why he’s been sniffing around the presidential race.
67 people filled out new voter registration forms for their states during last weekend’s canvassing. Another 328 voters updated their address, as required by HAVA. 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. You can see that the number of voters registered is not a function of the number of volunteers present or doors knocked. Clearly, they help, but there’s no guarantee that more doors equals more voters registered. Even though registering voters is a primary rationale behind early canvassing, it is not the only one. Just wanted to point that out.
We collected 625 Constituent Service Request Forms last week. 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.
We continue to walk with Incident Reports, and we ask people who say they are concerned about the upcoming general election if they want to fill one out. Last Saturday, 12 voters filled them out.
We pass along Incident Reports to the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights and NALEO (those that correspond to Hispanic precincts), and send copies to state Democratic Party committees. But our purpose is to combine this information with the two independent databases of voting incidents to look for patterns before the election and use that information for warning district, state and U.S. attorneys’ offices that we could see those patterns resurface on election day. We will also use it to target Election Day Protection activity.
By starting early, and aiming towards super-compliance with these really, really onerous provisions in some states, Hope Springs from Field PAC seeks to undermine that strategy, while informing voters about the new laws and regulations aimed at them. 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.
I am aware of the volume of data presented in this post. But it is the result of the data we collect at the door, to be entered in VAN and accessible by all Democratic candidates who utilize VAN this Fall. The focus on the “horse-race” aspect of this data is unintentional, because the data is what the it is. It is useful for Democratic candidates and provides paths to victory for data-driven candidates (which most campaigns are these days).
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 on you!
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