Kalla and Broockman found that, if the campaign action canvass, phone call, etc. About one in people reached were persuaded, they estimate. By contrast, when the campaign action happens well before election day, and the effects are measured quickly thereafter, there's a real impact on opinions — but it disappears before election day.
The sooner you get to the election, the more voters get set in their ways and choose candidates by their partisan alignment, and aren't persuadable by additional campaigning. Partisanship seems to be the major factor here. While campaigns can rarely persuade people in general elections, Kalla and Broockman do find that campaigning significantly increases support for primary candidates and ballot measures.
By definition, the rivals in a primary election come from the same party — so cues from party leadership tend to be subtler. But Kalla and Broockman weren't content with only 40 existing studies.
The evidence they had on hand was useful but very imprecise: For instance, they found that the eight studies measuring the effect of personal canvassing within two months of election day had an average effect of negative 1. If you use standard techniques to construct a confidence interval, that finding suggests that late-stage canvassing could do anything from hurt candidates by 5.
Not satisfied with that kind of uncertainty, Kalla and Broockman teamed up with Working America, the political organizing branch of the AFL-CIO, to conduct nine more field experiments in a primary, a special election that year, and the general election. Working America appears to be an unusually effective canvassing group. In the Democratic primary they studied — for mayor of Philadelphia— Kalla and Broockman find that a Working America canvass six weeks out from the election increased support for their candidate, Jim Kenney who won the primary and is now mayor , by 11 percentage points a week later; the effects mostly persisted to the end of the campaign.
Similarly impressive numbers came in a special election for the Washington state legislature, and a turnout experiment in the general election in North Carolina. These results confirmed that boosting turnout, primary election persuasion, and perhaps persuasion in special elections are possible, especially with a skilled organization. But evidence of persuasion in general elections remained negligible. Reconducting their meta-analysis with all this new data, Kalla and Broockman concluded, once again, that contacting voters within two months of a general election does not persuade them.
The average effect was indistinguishable from zero. So what does this mean for campaigns? One takeaway is that campaigns and non-campaign groups like Working America could do well to focus more of their energy on boosting turnout at the end of a race than persuading voters earlier on.
Another is that campaign funders should consider directing more money to primary election and ballot initiatives, where persuasion does appear possible. But the authors found a couple possible exceptions in general elections too, when persuasion is possible. The first case occurred in the US Senate race in Oregon. Smith was unusually pro-LGBTQ for a Republican at that time, most notably pushing for sexual orientation to be added to the federal hate-crimes statute.
That led to a common misconception that he also favored abortion rights, when he actually identified as pro-life. With that in mind, Planned Parenthood Advocates of Oregon and NARAL Pro-Choice Oregon worked together on a campaign in which they identified pro-choice voters and targeted them with mailings and phone calls hoping to educate them on Smith's actual views, and the pro-choice views of his opponent Jeff Merkley.
Crucially, the groups worked with political scientists to randomize which voters got these treatments. Early in the electoral cycle, canvassing shifts usually launch from the campaign office, but by GOTV weekend there are typically many launch locations spread throughout the district.
A good walk packet will have addresses grouped by evens and odds, so the canvasser can knock every door on one side and then switch to the other side of the street. Or, it can be fun to knock in pairs; each person can take one side of the street.
The campaign will then enter all of the voter information you collected into their database, and redistribute the lit to other canvassers. Like any specialized activity, canvassing has its own jargon and shorthand. GOTV has arrived!
Sister District outlines the 6 things you can do this election season to help get out the vote. Our top 7 recommendations for staying healthy, sane, and still getting Democrats elected during the coronavirus outbreak. We recently released our Impact Report.
Read on for some of the takeaways from the report. Here are some of my favorite canvassing stories. Canvassing is not always so rewarding. Sometimes, you may knock on three or four doors in a row and get no answer. Field activies. Sign Up! Knocking On Doors. Canvassing for Campaigns. Presidential elections vs. Group of Sister District volunteers gather together for a photo at their political canvass launch.
Who Canvasses — Volunteers or Campaign Staff? Bring your own water, snacks, clipboard, and markers. We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from. To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. Political scientists say contacting voters by phone might be just as good as going door to door.
If you buy something from a Vox link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. Among the many impossible-to-predict consequences of the Covid pandemic for the presidential campaign, this may be one of the most surprising: The Trump campaign has taken door-knocking much more seriously than the Biden campaign.
Door-to-door canvassing — where campaign workers knock on doors to either persuade residents to vote for their candidate or remind the already persuaded to turn out — is traditionally a strong suit of Democratic campaigns. But in , the politics of Covid mean that pattern is reversed. Trump is knocking on doors, and Biden, until very recently, was not. On August 28, the Trump campaign bragged about knocking on its 1 millionth door in Florida.
The Biden campaign responded to the risk that door-to-door canvassing will spread Covid infection by shutting down its door-knocking efforts. Given the central role canvassing has played in recent Democratic presidential campaigns, you would think this discrepancy would prompt some concern among Democrats who believe in the ground game. Most political scientists I talked to affirmed this view. You have to ask how many votes it pulls in per dollar spent, and compare that to whatever the equivalent figure is on alternative uses of campaign money: TV ads, digital ads, direct mail, and non-knocking fieldwork like phone banking.
Given the expense of running a good field team, skeptics argue that the cost-per-vote is too high relative to alternatives and that Covid might serendipitously be pushing campaigns away from inefficient uses of resources and toward more efficient ones. When big companies want to get the word out about their products, they use ads — and Shor and other field skeptics think campaigns should double down on those, too.
The other purpose is turnout: getting people who are already persuaded to support your candidate to actually vote. Persuasion obviously happens by some mechanism in elections — swing voters are rare, but real , and a large number of voters switched from supporting Trump in to supporting Democrats in the midterms. But when political scientists try to evaluate the effect of specific campaign interventions at persuasion, the results tend to be quite dire. But in general elections? There are unique circumstances where persuasion tactics become more effective for campaigns see the last section here.
Voters know who Donald Trump is. They know who Joe Biden is. The empirical literature here was kicked off by political scientists Alan Gerber and Donald Green two decades ago , and their book Get Out the Vote!
This is across a variety of elections, though, not just presidential ones, where effect sizes might be lower. Similarly, a volunteer phone bank that reaches 1, people will produce about 28 new voters, since the effect size is 2. When you put it like that, it makes door-knocking look considerably better than calling voters, which is likely to replace it in a Covid environment. But you can also talk to more people in an hour through phone banking than through canvassing. They found that calling voters produced more consistently positive results than door-to-door canvassing, in part because it was easier for callers to stick to a script than it was for canvassers.
Door-knocking and phone banking are not the only possible ways to contact voters, of course.
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