David Zalubowski/AP Photo
Joey Prestley, a staff canvasser for the Progressive Turnout Project, door-knocks while reaching out to voters in northwest Denver, June 24, 2020.
With fears rising that it will take either a Biden landslide or post-election mass mobilizations—or both—to oust Donald Trump from office, the no-boots-on-the-ground Biden campaign strategy is drawing more scrutiny than ever.
In early August, the Trump re-election effort was already boasting that it was knocking on more than one million doors a week. The Biden campaign has so far avoided face-to-face voter outreach entirely, citing health risks from COVID-19. Instead, it is using digital tools to direct all its volunteers into phone-banking and text-banking. Voicing increasing concern, some Democratic candidates and local groups have decided to coordinate their own door-knocking anyway.
Who is wrong? Or is it possible that the Biden campaign and local Democratic groups, which have made opposite choices, are both right?
Back before we had to worry about catching a deadly disease from one another, the standard campaign playbook called for massive field programs that fused data-gathering and mobilization in a choreographed sequence. It began with phone, text, and door-to-door outreach to identify supporters and persuade undecideds. Those identified or persuaded became the target universe for a tsunami of “Get Out the Vote” reminders just before Election Day. In some cases, volunteers from noncompetitive states would drive hundreds of miles to swing states and districts where they would receive “walk lists” with the names and addresses of identified supporters and spend hours pounding the pavement of unfamiliar towns knocking on strangers’ doors.
What the different approaches to voter outreach can achieve depends on who is actually doing the work—and where.
In recent years, political campaigns have taken advantage of a growing toolbox of digital tools. The Obama 2008 campaign pioneered an interlinked data system, with on-ramps from numerous online sites, including Facebook, that worked to leverage supporters’ personal networks and channel volunteers into neighborhood teams. During the following decade, many national progressive groups have doubled down on digital outreach: A census of members of the Indivisible network in April 2020, for instance, found that over half reported doing most of their politics online even before the pandemic hit.
Experimental research on data-driven approaches to voter outreach focuses attention on the relative efficiency of the different techniques. For the best outcome, though, they must be employed in a way that takes advantage of their potential impacts, which are context-specific. Voter-contact strategies are not just interchangeable tools in a universal tool kit. What they can achieve depends on who is actually doing the work—and where.
Digitally facilitated phone-banking and text-banking are particularly efficient for large-scale, light-touch contacts, like “ID” contacting aimed at identifying supporters. In an era of political realignments like those under way in swing states today—when a registered Republican may be persuadable for Joe Biden, and a former Democrat may be Donald Trump’s biggest fan—it makes sense to reach out to a universe including registered Democrats, Republicans, and independents to identify the supporters who should be encouraged and reminded to get to the polls. Casting such a wide net takes time and people. Digitally facilitated distributed-organizing tools that channel nonlocal volunteers into text and phone banks that are targeting swing-state voters are a good fit for these types of contact goals.
However, if only digital outreach is used, key opportunities for voter engagement are missed. An army of imported door-knockers isn’t the answer, however. Big data and shallow touches—in-person or online—cannot substitute for the interpersonal networks that mobilize individuals to participate in the electoral process. Friends, family, and community members are most effective at getting the people they know registered (or re-registered when they move, as younger people and renters often do).
The ground game of a large-scale campaign (like President Obama’s in 2008) may matter most for its activating impact on these local networks, rather than the numbers of doors knocked. Research finds little inherent advantage for contacting voters in person versus contacting them through phone or text messages. In fact, some ground-game truisms—like the supposed need for multiple GOTV contacts to get individuals to the polls—contradict experimental findings and may simply waste volunteer time.
What’s definitely not a waste are the side effects of local efforts: bonds built between canvassers, activists’ learning about normal people’s political views, and connections to voters begun via canvassing that can be harnessed in future campaigns. This type of in-person campaigning builds capacity for the long haul.
That’s why the blossoming of local center-to-left political groups across the country in the wake of Donald Trump’s election in 2016, and their intense involvement in local campaigns since then, is such a big deal. Today, candidates backed by these local grassroots groups are running for state legislature seats in suburbs, exurbs, and rural regions that in the decade before 2016 might not have been contested by Democrats at all.
It’s not that these groups are right and the Biden campaign is wrong. These local groups are exactly who should be doing in-person outreach.
Meanwhile, there are other places—often, urban ones—where Democratic incumbents dominate and may have little interest in expanding the electorate. Independent voter registration efforts are particularly crucial in such places, and can’t simply be shifted online. Local nonprofits and state and national advocacy groups such as Arizona’s Mi Familia Vota and the Sunrise Movement are currently hustling to make up for lost time, through in-person outreach with protective gear and safety protocols in place. Crucially, these groups do not treat voter registration as a one-off goal, but integrate it into broader efforts to engage and enfranchise. This is the lane that funders like the Movement Voter Project have focused on, and it’s more important now than ever before.
In our research tracking grassroots political engagement in sites across Pennsylvania, we’ve seen grassroots organizations, labor-linked advocacy groups, and state legislative campaigns stepping up with careful and creative in-person outreach: tabling at farmers markets, fanning out at parks to talk people through requesting mail-in ballots on their phones, and, yes, knocking on doors—all while wearing masks and staying six feet apart.
It’s not that these groups are right and the Biden campaign is wrong. These local groups are exactly who should be doing in-person outreach. Local groups and regional campaigns are the ones positioned to reap the real benefits of in-person campaigning, building capacity and connections for the long haul. They are also the ones best situated to assess the level of health risk (or reputational risk) that face-to-face canvassing during COVID-19 may bring in their region. And they do not face the same stepping-on-our-core-COVID-message trade-off that the Biden campaign would face if its campaigners began door-knocking.
Our message to anxious Democrats, then, is: Don’t worry that the Biden campaign isn’t knocking on doors. Do worry that Democrats have been underfunding high-touch local politics for so long. Don’t worry that no one is asking you to travel out of state to help GOTV. Do join the texting brigade online, or download the tools that let you text people you know. But also: Start building for the long haul. Find a grassroots group near you and show up for meetings, virtual or otherwise. Choose a swing-state down-ballot candidate and send them money to support their ground game. And support advocacy groups whose voter registration campaigns are integrated into place-specific power-building that will matter in November—and beyond.
No matter who wins the 2020 election, local infrastructures that connect individuals to political action will be important. And if Trump follows through on his threats regarding the transition of power, they will be a life-or-death matter for democracy.
