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Election 2020 Joe Biden
This year, the full scope of Working America’s campaign will depend on the intensity and persistence of the coronavirus.
Through a combination of mathematic precision and boots-on-the-ground organizing, Working America—the community organizing arm of the AFL-CIO—has been engaging and motivating working-class voters to turn out for progressive goals and candidates over the past two decades. Today, as it prepares to wage an extensive campaign among persuadable voters in nine battleground states, it’s testing the limits of voter contact in the midst of a pandemic.
After many years of neighborhood canvassing, Working America now has more than 3 million members. It conducts year-round opinion surveys, frequent polling, and “Front Porch Focus Groups,” which double as opportunities for face-to-face conversations about the issues most important to working-class people with specific focus on the white working-class communities in crucial swing states.
“What we do is we turn [polling] on its head,” says executive director Matt Morrison. While most polls seek to determine the opinions that people currently hold, Working America’s outreach also focuses on exposing voters to new information and gauging who’s receptive and who can be persuaded to vote.
“Most polling research is looking at where people start from, with an absence of intervention [from pollsters exposing them to new information]. As they go several layers deep, they’re looking at correlation,” Morrison says. “For example, “suburban women are leaning this way and this is how that’s different it is from two years or four years ago … We’re saying not where do we start from, but where do you end up after we engage you: That’s what I mean by [saying] we’re asking different questions.”
The new information Working America injects into its polling and one-on-one doorstep discussions concerns bread-and-butter issues of economic fairness—perspectives that their working-class interviewees may instinctively share but seldom hear articulated in a political context. Their interviewees are non-union (the AFL-CIO and its affiliates have a separate program for union members) and tend to live in white working-class neighborhoods—among the groups that have swung most into the Republican column over the past several decades. As such, Working America’s surveys have provided early warnings of that swing, and constitute the most concerted effort to combat it.
In January of 2016, Working America’s Front Porch Groups showed the growing appeal that then-candidate Donald Trump had with white working-class Democrats in Ohio and Pennsylvania, which was greater than the popularity of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders combined. “Obviously we saw how that played out,” Morrison says.
In matters of voter persuasion, Working America works to find “productive targets,” Morrison says. Key indicators may include where the people they encounter get their news, Morrison says. People who rely on local news or digital media tend to be more receptive to new information. “[But] if you watch cable news—Fox, MSNBC, a little bit of CNN—if you watch infotainment then you’re pretty dug in what you believe” Morrison explains. “What is not predictive is their race, their party affiliation, their gender … It’s useful to ground this distinction in the analytics, because it is counter intuitive.”
Similar trends between information seeking and education have been found by Pew Research Center, says senior survey advisor Scott Keeter, who is not affiliated with Working America. He calls it an “interesting paradox.”
In past years, Working America’s face-to-face approach in doorstep interviews has likely benefitted the accuracy of its surveys and its ability to impact voter preferences. Polls conducted over the phone are likely to have fewer respondents, though there’s some evidence that since the shutdown began, people are more willing to respond to phone surveys.
This year, the full scope of Working America’s campaign will depend on the intensity and persistence of the coronavirus. There are currently plans to open offices in three or four states, but a lot will depend on being able to canvas safely. Although knocking on doors hasn’t been completely ruled out, social distancing and other health precautions now have to be factored into the planning.
“Nothing compares as a tactic to face-to-face interaction,” Morrison admits. But he believes his staff has an advantage to adapting its approach and remaining effective. One factor that has always boosted Working America’s credibility with the people it canvasses is that its staff are hired from the same communities that they poll, and the relationships between voters and Working America have already been established.
The organizers who would normally be canvassing are now working the phones, trying to recreate the door-knocking experience in a phone call or in a text-message conversation.
“It’s hard to replicate what you get from [doorstep conversations], but we’ve been able to make enough progress that we feel confident about our ability to move somewhere from 200,000 to 300,000 extra votes to Biden and down-ticket Democrats this year,” Morrison says. “I think the question is: is that sufficient?”
What still works for Working America, Morrison adds, is that, “We are there as the community, not just as someone only seeking their vote. The party’s going to be great at already mobilizing people that are committed to the party, but that’s not where elections are won and lost.”
