Canvassing in the Age of Ring Doorbells

and the imperative for feedback loops

Knocking on the door of a complete stranger to talk to them about politics is one of the gutsiest things we do as volunteers. It may be getting harder and more dangerous, but it’s still the best way to have a respectful dialogue with voters and gain insight into the ways our country is changing.

As volunteer canvassers who are putting ourselves on the line for our democracy, we deserve to have the best possible experience while out knocking doors.

In the Collaboration Project’s survey, The Experience of Grassroots Leaders Working with the Democratic Party, a raft of canvassing complaints emerged, including improperly targeted walk lists, bad scripts, and canvassing neighborhoods that just been knocked by other groups.

While these logistical issues can range from annoying to awful, there are more serious problems with canvassing writ large. In the current model, the canvasser is a foot soldier, not a problem-solver. Foot soldiers don’t need access to outcomes data, problem-solvers do. How can we as canvassers improve our technique if we don’t know the outcome of our efforts? At the end of the campaign, whether we’ve knocked on ten doors or a thousand doors, we are still left with the same question: Did our conversations with voters make a difference?

In their authoritative, but pre-Covid, reference guide called Get Out the Vote, Gerber and Green find that targeting people with 30-50% likelihood to vote produces the highest bump in turnout - about 1 vote per 16 contacts. In an age of Ring doorbells and partisan politics, I doubt that the average is still that high, especially since many of the voters on our assigned turfs have a track record of voting in every major election. A new edition of Get Out the Vote is slated for release in December 2023.

For 2024, the Collaboration Project’s canvassing working group welcomes volunteer leaders to pilot new approaches to canvassing. We look forward to hearing from you.