Five Times As Many Canvassing Conversations

The Results of a Spontaneous Experiment

By Steve Schear

I fell into a revealing experiment in Dubuque, Iowa, that compared standard targeted Democratic Party canvassing using the MiniVAN App with Swing Left’s knock-every-door (KED) Ground Truth canvassing using its People App. Swing Left’s KED method resulted in five times as many conversations with voters and more potential volunteers. Although a small sample size, it proved what Swing Left leaders have been saying – overly targeted canvassing before the GOTV phase misses a motherlode of opportunity, and it’s time for a change.

Well, if you insist . . .

I chose Dubuque as a canvassing location because it gave me an opportunity to talk to voters who could help Democrats win races for the U.S. Senate, the Governor, the U.S. House, the state legislature and other statewide and local races. I planned on using Swing Left’s People App (which they built in partnership with Everybody Techworks) because I am a big believer in the KED approach based on extensive canvassing I did in 2022 through 2025 in seven different states.

On my first day in Dubuque, I went to the Democratic County Party office to get literature. I also wanted the Party to assign me a turf, to avoid duplicating canvassing of Iowa Forward, the state party’s coordinated campaign. A regional organizer told me I had to use MiniVAN, because KED canvassing would waste resources. A local organizer then gave me a map of my “turf”, my assigned neighborhood. The map had scattered red dots showing the addresses where I should canvass, a small percentage of the houses in the turf.

I decided to use MiniVan for the houses on the Dem Party list, while going to all the houses in the turf and recording responses on the People App, too.

The Results

The Dems’ list was, as usual, targeted to exclude most Republicans, houses not listed with registered voters, and many of the most solid Democrats, as well as many unaffiliated voters and Independents whose target scores were not within a designated range. My MiniVAN list included only about one in five houses in the turf. Only 20% of the people on the MiniVAN list were home, so I only talked to someone at four of the twenty houses I visited that were on the Dem Party list. On average, I had to walk past 24 houses just to have a conversation with one of the MiniVAN targets. If I had only used the MiniVAN list, I would have spent a lot more time walking than talking. Here’s the results as shown on MiniVAN:

Valuable Conversations I Would Have Missed

More importantly, if I had only used MiniVAN, I would have missed great conversations with:

Marlene, a Republican who is very unhappy with Trump and our lousy health care system. She was clearly open to voting for Democrats.

Victoria and Patrick, strong Democrats who agreed to put up lawn signs supporting Democratic candidates.

Timothy and Ryan, who are not very interested in politics but still vote. Both listened carefully to my explanation of why they should vote for Democrats.

Victoria, who generally votes Democratic but doesn’t always vote. I was able to explain to her the importance of voting in these midterms.

Josh, an independent who is likely voting for Rob Sand but wasn’t sure about other races. We talked cordially and I was able to promote voting for other Democrats.

Jackie, a hair stylist who was eager to talk politics. She’s a passionate Democrat who “loves talking to Republicans. And I’m good at it, too,” as she told me. I asked her to become a neighborhood organizer and she immediately agreed. Neighborhood organizers are likely to be far more effective than one-time canvassers who don’t know the neighbors and who can’t go back repeatedly to talk to people.

I had conversations at 17% of the houses and spoke to nine people on the Democratic Party’s MiniVAN list. Forty-three of the people on the MiniVAN list were not home and one person refused to talk. Using the People App, I had conversations at 30% of the 154 houses I visited. I spoke with 46 people and found six potential volunteers, only two of whom were on the Dem Party list. The Ground Truth program resulted in my talking to five times as many people and finding four potential neighborhood volunteers who would otherwise have been missed. In the graphic below, the green checks are the houses where I talked to someone, and the grey checks are where no one was home.

We Can and Should Talk to Republicans

Only two of the people I talked to were MAGA Republicans highly unlikely to vote for Democrats in November. Both were friendly Christians, and I had good conversations with them about Jesus’s compassion and desire to help the poor, unlike the Republican leaders.

Based on my experience, the idea that knocking on every door will waste a lot of time talking to intransigent Republicans who are scary and will never change their minds is a myth. Many Republicans simply won’t engage, so a canvasser doesn’t spend more than a minute or two at those doors. The Republicans that are willing to talk are usually friendly. A lot of the anger against Democrats that some Republicans felt in 2022 and 2024 has melted away. With Democrats out of federal power, it’s hard for them to blame the Dems for what’s wrong with their lives and the country. Learning How to Talk to Republicans is important. Swing Left training can help with that, because it teaches non-judgmental listening that helps not only with Republicans, but also with Independents, non-voters, and disillusioned Democrats.

This year is a great year to talk to Republicans. As the polls show, lots of them are unhappy with Trump and the number of enthusiastic Republicans has plummeted. The Dem Party brand is still lousy, so we need to encourage them to move to our side. But the doors to change their minds are opening and we need to take advantage of that.

It’s Time to Stop Over-Targeting

Targeting voters absolutely makes sense when focused on getting out the vote in the month or six weeks before an election. On September 18, Swing Left will be moving to using some targeting, its “GOTV mode,” using its accumulated data. It will continue to have persuasion conversations during the last six weeks. That is unlike many Democratic GOTV canvasses which only try to ensure that people expected to vote for Democrats do so.

Since the 2008 campaign, Democrats have relied on Target Smart and its supposedly “smart” targeting for almost all of its canvassing, including voter identification and persuasion canvassing. The basic idea of persuasion targeting is that some smart people can use computer programs to identify the people who might or might not vote for Democrats. The idea is to get enough of the maybes to vote Democratic to win the next election.

This kind of targeting sometimes works well enough to win elections, but it is a flawed, ineffective and highly inefficient method. It fails to expand our numbers because it excludes most Republicans and non-voters. For the past 20 years, Democrats have been unable to consistently win elections, despite the fact that Republican policies are damaging so many people. We can’t make inroads with Republicans and non-voters if we never talk to them.

Because standard Dem targeting relies on incomplete and often inaccurate voter rolls, the targeting is often off. Because it usually excludes the most reliable Democratic voters, canvassers often don’t talk to the people most likely to become neighborhood organizers. It does nothing to build the kind of long-term infrastructure that the Democratic Party needs to overcome MAGA. Knock-every-door canvassing is a great way to recruit neighborhood organizers, because canvassers are going to find many of the enthusiastic Democrats who are most likely to volunteer to organize their neighbors.

Ground Truth Is Better at Data Collection and Management

Swing Left’s People App obtains the same critical information about voters that the Dem Party needs for GOTV purposes, because it asks everyone, on a one-to-ten scale, how likely they are to vote and how likely they are to vote for a Democratic candidate. That data will be shared with national and state parties and the Democratic Data Exchange, so candidates and campaigns have the benefit of the Ground Truth voter identification data.

But Ground Truth goes far beyond simple voter identification. Canvassers engage in deep listening with voters. After a voter contact, canvassers are expected to dictate a detailed voice-to-text description of their encounter. Swing Left then combines artificial intelligence with human expertise to not only store the data and give it to campaigns and candidates, but to also agglomerate the data so we can find out what issues are most important to voters in the areas canvassed.

The Proof Is Not Just From Dubuque

The results described above are obviously a small sample size. However, I learned about the problems with Democratic Party over-targeting during months of canvassing in Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Ohio, Montana, North Carolina, and California in 2022-25. I also saw the benefits of knock-every-door canvassing when I was given the opportunity to do that in Tucson, Arizona, in March 2024, and in Oakland last year. My conclusions are based on those experiences, too.

The Swing Left analysis that led to the creation of the Ground Truth Program is also consistent with my experience, as are the results of the program to date.

We Can Win by Talking With Everyone

Leaders and consultants of the Democratic Party have relied on targeted canvassing for nearly two decades. The results are in. The Republicans won Congressional and/or Presidential elections in 2010, 2014, 2016, 2022 and 2024. Traditional Democratic targeting can help win some elections, from time to time, but it will never allow us to build the neighborhood organizing and supermajority strength that we need to protect our democracy and achieve economic fairness. It’s hard for a large organization to change its ways, but it’s time for Democratic leaders to recognize a failed methodology and to start using a better one. At the very least, Democratic state and local leaders should be willing to try Ground Truth and compare its results with targeted MiniVAN canvassing.

If you are going canvassing with a Democratic Party coordinated campaign, I encourage you to try my experiment and use both MiniVAN (or PDI in California) and the People App. Anyone can sign up for an every-Friday training on how to canvass with Ground Truth here. If anyone does this experiment, I’d love to hear the results, which you can send to me at steveschear@gmail.com.

Anyone interested in hosting a Ground Truth canvass outside a coordinated campaign can learn how to do that every Wednesday by signing up here. Those of you who can’t or won’t canvass, but still want to help, can participate in Swing Left’s highly intelligent organizing program by signing up for phonebanking here or letter-writing here. For more general information on how to volunteer with Swing Left to win the midterms, go here.

Hope For the Future

Expanding the universe of people we organize will not only help us win the midterms, it will lay the foundation for lasting political power. If we focus not only on motivating maybe Democrats, but also Independents, apolitical people, non-voters, and Republicans, we can become a force even the right-wing propaganda machine and the billionaires’ money cannot defeat.

Steve Schear is an organizer and writer from Oakland, California.