(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Weekly DataDump: What Grassroots Volunteers did in AZ, FL, GA, NV, OH, PA & WI [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-06-03
Last weekend was the long Memorial Day weekend. On the 20th, we asked volunteers if they wanted to canvass on the next Saturday and some of them agreed they would still be in town and willing to knock on doors. So the number of canvasses, and the size of those canvasses, went down. Which was fine (we had organizers bow out, as well, so a couple of our organizers subbed in at a canvass that chose to go out).
As expected, turnout took quite a dip — just like last year. But those volunteers who did show up seemed to be enthusiastic to be there. Especially in Arizona, where volunteers were talking about how Arizona would be the only Senate delegation made up of veterans if we would just elect Ruben Gallego in 2024! And we really got a great response to this. Now this might not be true after the election (and, remember, it depends on Arizonans electing Rep. Gallego), but it’s a great kwip.
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. Volunteers decided not to canvass in North Carolina last Saturday, which is what happens when you give people a choice!
535 volunteers came out to knock on doors last Saturday over the holiday weekend. We are currently canvassing in 7 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. We are taking a break in Virginia until after the primaries. And we are still hoping to expand our efforts into Michigan and possibly Montana this month.
Hope Springs volunteers knocked on 37,738 doors. We had reached our first metric of 100,000 doors the previous week, which we would have reached the prior week except for Pennsylvania being rained out that week.)
Volunteers had conversations with 3,226 voters this week.
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 aim to leave a positive impression no matter what.
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. 2,030 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 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 canvassing 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. Knocking on doors has repeatedly been found to be the most successful tactic to get voters to cast a ballot and that is the goal of what we do.
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, 51% of the voters we talked to who responded had a favorable impression of President Biden. 11% of voters approved of the job Senator Scott was doing. 4% had a favorable impression of Governor DeSantis last week. 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, 49% of the voters we talked to who responded had a favorable impression of President Biden. 8% 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 — 50% 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. 56% also had a favorable impression of Governor Hobbs last week.
In Georgia, 55% 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. 32% 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. 57% had a favorable impression of the job Senator Rosen was doing. 31% 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.
We didn’t canvass in North Carolina this week.
In our third week of canvassing in Ohio, 51% of the voters we talked to approved of the job President Biden was doing. 56% approved of the job Senator Brown was doing. 55% approved of the job that Governor DeWine was doing.
In our third (successful) week of knocking on doors in Pennsylvania, voters gave Biden a 52% job approval rating. 55% of the voters we talked to approved of the job Bob Casey was doing int the Senate. Governor Shapiro received a 52% 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.
7 people filled out new voter registration forms for their states during last weekend’s canvassing. Another 113 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 221 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, 5 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!
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/3/2172906/-Weekly-DataDump
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
