Field

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Monday morning, after the breaking of the story about Republican robocalls being misattributed to Democrats, our campaign was trying to run through that day's list of 4500 get-out-the-vote calls.  Phone banking, as Ezra described earlier, is among the less fun jobs that a volunteer has to do -- you're basically an annoying telemarketer and lots of people get irritated and hang up on you.  That day it was especially unpleasant, because I was doing something fairly similar to what Republicans were paying money for.  As soon as the opportunity arose, I ran away to do some door-to-door canvassing.

Experiences like this have given me a keen interest in how a campaign can develop a good field operation, and now I'm poring over the academic research on the issue.  The big study on this issue comes from Donald Green at Yale.  From the abstract: "We find that personal canvassing increased voter turnout substantially; direct mail, slightly; and phone calls, not at all."  Green's hypothesis is that a decline in the amount of face-to-face contact between people and campaigns is responsible for the historical decline in voter turnout. 

One of my favorite forms of field work, and one that Green's theory would encourage, is posting a group of enthusiastic volunteers beside a busy highway holding signs and waving to motorists.  When people honked or waved back, I'd give them a thumbs up or yell or jump around.  There's a sort of enthusiastic supportive communication going on then, in full view of others who might be undecided.  Seeing a lot of people be excited about something may have a sort of contagious effect on undecided voters that other forms of campaigning can't replicate.  (We also had this really cool art school girl who would do cartwheels when the motorists were especially enthusiastic.)

Another interesting thing that our Deputy Campaign manager, Lisa Sherman, had volunteers do was to hand-write letters to undecided voters.  The thinking is that while people might just throw away commercially produced flyers, regarding them as junk mail, a handwritten letter would have a much larger chance of being read and considered.  While a form was available for anyone who wanted to copy down a generic message, volunteers were encouraged to personalize and improvise as they pleased.  While some volunteers just want to carry whatever message you give them, others want to be able to do their little part to shape the campaign's message, and the letters gave them an opportunity to do so.  They took a little while to write, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were a reasonably effective use of that time.