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Republicans are already in the field but Hope Springs is knocking on doors, too [1]
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Date: 2023-06-13
I noted in last week’s canvassing wrap up (what i usually call data dumps) that we are starting to see canvassers from the conservative orgs in weekly efforts to knock on doors in Senate and Presidential Swing States. 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, Michigan, Montana, Ohio and Wisconsin. Our efforts in Virginia (which has critical state legislature races in a closely divided (and split) legislature this) has been suspended until our primaries are over this month. All are critical states that will determine who is our President and who holds the Senate majority in 2025.
Hope Springs volunteers have run into canvassers from Turning Point Action (as identified by t-shirts or messenger bags) in Arizona, Florida and Ohio. We have seen canvassers from America for Progress in Wisconsin and canvassers from Club for Growth in Ohio and Virginia. One volunteer also saw a women with a “Moms for Liberty” (sic) shirt on, but could not confirm that she was actually knocking on doors.
So Republicans are out there, knocking on doors, already, in an off-election year (except in Virginia). So are we, and i would hope that we aren’t alone among the Democratic and progressive orgs. This diary was prompted by an article that one of our volunteers read and this question, “What is the difference between what we are doing and what Republicans are [doing]?” Then she went on to explain that Republicans claimed they had knocked on 100 Million doors last year, while Hope Springs only knocked on under 3M. She was really struck by the disparity.
I had to track down the 100M number. Apparently the claim came in a FoxNews report: “We’re creeping up on over 100 million voter contacts.” After having spent millions to identify and mobilize voters, Republicans still lost key races they were expected to win. Hope Springs hasn’t even hit the quarter-million mark, and we have spent our contributions on access to VAN and walk literature, for the most part.
There’s a big difference between using paid canvassers who are knocking on doors at least 8 hours a day and (at least) 5 days a week compared to grassroots driven volunteers who knocked on doors on Saturdays between March and Labor Day last year. Democrats have not (afaik) aggregated their data on canvassing, largely because we use a distributed, volunteer model for knocking on doors. We don’t use vendors and we don’t report our data to the DNC.
Just as important, “The large-scale voter contact effort that conservatives have put at the center of their political operations in recent years is plagued with issues.” “Those issues include fraudulent and untrustworthy data entries, akin to what occurred in Nevada, as well as allegations of lax hiring practices and a lack of accountability.”
The problems, six people said, are pitfalls of the right’s increased reliance on paid canvassers rather than volunteers, and on a sprawling web of vendors and consultants tasked with what can be a thankless, though critical, job. Seven people said that cheating is on the rise amid pressure to quickly meet steep outreach goals.
Democrats learned a long time ago that the paid model for doing voter contact and voter registration can be problematic. The accusations against ACORN remain a clear reminder to Democratic leaders and we take steps to determine that the data we collect is accurate and useful.
ACORN, if you don’t remember, was accused of committing voter fraud, even though what the organization was doing was registering voters. From 2008, when Republicans were struggling to keep Barack Obama from the White House:
Over the past four years, a dozen states have investigated complaints of fraudulent registrations filed by ACORN. On Tuesday, Nevada authorities raided an ACORN office in Las Vegas, Nevada, where workers are accused of registering members of the Dallas Cowboys football team. And the group has become the target of Republican attacks on voter fraud, a perennial GOP issue.
Part of what prosecutors (even Democratic prosecutors) realized was that the paid model used by ACORN invited fraud.
Two former leaders of the group’s Nevada branch were also charged in connection with the submission of thousands of bogus voter registration forms. The organization, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or Acorn, is accused of paying canvassers only if they registered at least 20 voters per shift and providing bonuses of $5 for registering more than 21.
Republicans tried to smear the candidacy of Barack Obama because of his prior work as a community organizer.
Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign on Friday stepped up its efforts to tie Senator Barack Obama to a community organizing group that has been accused of involvement in problematic voter registrations in several hotly contested states, including Colorado, Indiana, Nevada and North Carolina. In 1992, Mr. Obama was personally involved in voter registration efforts when he served as director of Project Vote in Chicago, helping to register 150,000 voters on the South Side. His success was widely written about at the time and credited with helping to elect Senator Carol Moseley Braun, the first African-American woman in the Senate.
With all the attention the accusations created, people hardly remember that most of the investigations into ACORN were dropped or that Republicans have their own issues with paid voter registration drives, including one that “turned in illegible, incorrect, and falsified voter registration forms to Florida election officials.” One study (about ACORN) concluded, “ACORN’s danger to democracy was absurdly hyped for partisan advantage.”
Here’s the thing, there are legitimate ways to do voter contact and voter registration, and there are wrong ways to do it. Just because we are grassroots driven and rely on volunteers to knock on doors does not mean someone couldn’t cheat the system. But we employ safeguards beyond the use of volunteer labor: i call 10 volunteers, 10 voters and 10 organizers a week as a check-in. If anyone talks to more than 8 voters on a weekend, they automatically make the list (and we do have volunteers who regularly do so — several email me on that Saturday night to let me know when they have). I don’t think we have ever had a canvasser do voter registration at more than one home.
But we simply to not see the kind of statistical-defying behavior the plagues Republicans in their paid voter contact efforts.
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.
What we are doing is vastly different from what Republicans and their conservative org vendors are doing, as well. I talked a bit about that yesterday. I love this definition by Kristin Demetrious: “Deep canvassing emphasises non-judgemental listening to voters’ stories and emotions, in order to avoid any threat that voters may feel from ‘forms of persuasion employed by traditional political campaigns’.” We focus on the idea of “active listening,” leaving a positive impression at the door and helping voters navigate their government by collecting requests that elected officials can pass along to the correct governmental provider. Democratic machines, a feature of most city Democratic politics, used to do this very thing, through the use of precinct captains who were expected to regularly contact all the households in the precincts for which they were responsible.
“With a deep canvass, we want to figure out what’s relevant to voters.” What is really interesting, given that Hope Springs was created to try to revive this particular approach (which we had used in the 2008 presidential primary on behalf of Barack Obama), a lot of elected politicians are interested in the information we collect. One senator’s campaign asked me if they would still receive the CSRs we had provided them last year (even though there was another senate seat up next year!).
Democrats recognize that “Direct voter contact and “deep canvassing” with open-ended questions result in better organizing outcomes than other forms of voter contact.” Because we understand that the information we collect is so valuable to Democratic candidates, it is all made available to Democrats who use VAN after Labor Day (in this case, 2024). We believe in this approach, our volunteers seem to love this and the Democratic candidates and elected officials we have interacted with seem to, as well. But we do need financial support.
As part of our systematic efforts to register voters, clean up the voter rolls and capture essential data that can be used for Democratic GOTV activity, we ask voters (as a part of our Issues Survey) whether they have concerns about the upcoming elections or know of incidents in prior elections designed to deter our supporters from casting their votes and having their votes count. We do this two different way: collecting Incident Reports and organizing Voter Photo ID days at their local elections administrative office. Super compliance works both ways.
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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