Notes from the Field #7 (WA-3 victory gets national press, First time door knockers, and more) (email)
Dear Friends,
What follows are my reflections (#7) volunteering for various political campaigns, training volunteers/organizers, and knocking on doors. This email includes:
Good News! National Articles and podcast about Grassroots Organizing victory in WA-3
Why did most reporters refuse to report about organizing?
WA-3 – Election Day Stories
Democrats win?
First time door knockers
Slate Article about WA-3 (Pasted)
1. Good News! National Article and podcast about Grassroots Organizing victory in WA-3
Two US national outlets and one Canadian podcast told our story of how volunteers knocking on 40,000 doors in WA-3 were key to the most surprising result of the midterms. Check them out here
Slate article (also pasted below)
2. Why did most reporters refuse to report about organizing?
After the stunning upset in WA-3, a small team of volunteers set out to pitch our story to local and national news outlets. We sent press releases, followed up with phone calls, and provided every reporter who had previously written about the race phone numbers of the group of primarily young mother volunteers who we key to this victory. We timed the outreach for when the race was called, hoping that this positive story of grassroots organizing could provide some inspiration and lessons for the importance of field in close races in the future.
We were incredibly disappointed. Reporter after reporter, refused to write, or even investigate, the incredible ground game that made this victory possible. Instead, they all wrote the same article- that Joe Kent was too extreme for the district, and moderate voters punished Trump for punishing moderate Jaime Herrera Buttler for voting for impeachment. Every reporter seemed itching to make Trump and right wing extremism as the loser in this election.
While this story is partly true, it ignores what I heard on the ground by talking with hundreds of moderate voters. Most moderates were just as upset about what they felt was the extremes on the left as well as the right. Their politics on issues were all over the map. I knocked on one really nice 25 year old gay man with a rainbow sticker on his car with an AK 47 in the middle of it!?! Others blamed Democrats for inflation but were pro-choice. And the two candidates had very little name recognition with most people we talked with, since they were both political newcomers. These voters needed a conversation to help sort out their conflicting opinions/emotions, and hopefully make a decision to vote for someone who will align with something they cared about most, even if that person held other views they disagreed with.
So why did most reporters refuse to talk about the organizing, and write basically the same article over and over again, while our experience on the ground was different? Do they simply not believe door knocking is effective? Do they think that voters make up their mind by stories concocted by polls and pundits, or are making up their minds after being deluged with millions of political ads? Are they only interested in listening to polls and pundits, and do they assume that this information is what people are thinking ? Is their budget too tight and workload too high to get their hands dirty and investigate what is actually convincing people at the doors? I would love to hear any feedback/answers you have to these question.
3) Door knocking on Election Day
I’d like to give you a window into what I saw on Election Day, where I was one of several volunteers doing the final push to vote for Marie Perez. In Washington, it is an all-mail ballot state. The campaign gets regular updates on who already voted, so my list of people were people who 1) were waiting for the last minute, often because they hadn’t decided who to vote for or 2) were not planning on voting at all. I believe I talked with 12 people on Election Day who were undecided or not voting, and I think I got 10 of them to vote for Marie. Maybe it was the neighborhoods I was in, but it was the most diverse group of voters I’d talk with in a very white district.
I talked with a former air traffic controller who was fired by Regan in the 1980’s, who reluctantly voted for Trump the first time, was saddled with guilt about it, and was not planning to vote. I talked with an African American mother, very pro-choice, who asked if she could vote tomorrow because she had to take her kid to swimming practice and her car broke down. I talked with a 14 year old Latina, who was very excited to tell her 18 year old to vote for the first time for another Latina Marie Perez. I met a former farmworker who only knew Spanish, just became a citizen, had not received his ballot, knew about the election, hated Trump, didn’t know the local candidates, and didn’t know how to vote.
My favorite interaction was with a Romanian family, a mother and daughter. When I knocked on their door, it was answered by a Romanian woman who spoke almost no English, and who apparently worked at this home, that doubled as an home care support home, one of several the neighborhood. Somehow, through my exuberant gestures and a few words she knew in English, I convinced the woman to call the mother. She called on their home phone, explained that there was a strange guy looking for her, then gave me the phone. I told her it was election day, and she said firmly, “I don’t vote!” I said something about Trump and she went on a pro-trump tirade. I said thank you, hoping that she would not vote. I then asked the worker to call the 20 year old daughter. She couldn’t reach her, but I left my number.
I figured I’d never hear from her, but thirty minutes later, I got a call. She told me the same thing as her mother, “I don’t vote”, odd because they were both registered to vote. She told me she doesn’t pay attention to politics, and that she doesn’t care about anything. “I’m sure you care about something,” I said. I then started fishing for issues- climate change? Minimum wage? Reproductive rights? The latter she admitted to caring about. She didn’t want the government to tell her what to do with her body. But she didn’t know about Roe, what was going on politically around choice, so I tried to give her a crash course, “but the bottom line is that if you want to protect your right to control your body, you need to vote for Marie.” We made a complicated plan to get to the Elections Office (she was at work, didn’t know where her ballot was), and she assured me she would vote. I was not sure she would do it.
A couple hours later, I called her again to see if she DID vote, and I was prepared to go back to her house again. A few minutes after that her boyfriend called me back, and told me that she “doesn’t vote”. I figured that might be the end of it, but later she texted me and said she found her ballot, and voted for Marie! She also apologized for her boyfriend, and told me everyone in her family was surprised that she voted because they all know she doesn’t vote. She was one of many people we convinced to vote, and many we had physically bring them to the polls in the final hours.
None of these people I met on Election Day would have voted if they were not pushed at their door. They were not motivated by ads and they didn’t listen to pundits, they were just everyday people who cared about things, but hadn’t connected their issues who to vote for. They were not apathetic. If you multiply my experience by the number of volunteers that day, that could be the margin of victory, just on Election Day.
4. Democrats win?
Democrats averted disaster, that is undeniable. But I many who lost narrowly were election denialists, white supremacists, and anti-democratic candidates lost (and many won) by very few votes. Marie Perez won with 50.4% of the vote. Joe Kent was less than 3,000 votes from Marie, and was widely projected to win. As expected Nevada, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia went down to the wire.
Without quality ground campaigns, many of which were led by UNITE HERE, many of these white supremacists, election deniers, anti-democratic candidates would have won. It is not OK that these races are so close.
Elections mobilize people, yet when the campaign is done, there is rarely follow up with volunteers, until the next election where most campaigns start from scratch. We built a team of 500 volunteers, and honestly, I think we caught the republicans by surprise. If Kent had a similar ground campaign (I signed up to volunteer for Kent to see if they would call me, and they never did), he would have probably won. WA-3 is target #1 for Republicans in 2024. We need to continue to build the base for the next two years, and any swing district or state would be wise to do the same.
5. First time door knockers
Perhaps the most inspiring thing I witnessed during the fall elections were all the first time door knockers that hit the doors, liked it, and are eager to do it again.
One 24 year old organizer I’ve worked with over the last year and a half in Vancouver, agonized about getting involved in electoral politics. She is an introvert and didn’t see herself being good on the doors. No politicians represented the totality of her values, and she questioned whether getting involved in politics made any difference. Three months later, she knocked on doors in Vancouver, Arizona, and Georgia in three separate elections. She called me one day, “You won’t believe this, but I just wanted to tell you that I LOVE knocking on doors."
In the Vancouver municipal election many young organizers got their first canvassing experience. I was in Vancouver on election day, and went to several locations with young folks in their 20’s talking with people on the street, and on the doors. Many of these young leaders then went to Arizona and Georgia with UNITE HERE Local 40.
In Vancouver Washington, I was recruiting first-time door knockers wherever I could- at the doors, from my friend network, and at debates. I saw many people catch the bug- when you understand that having a human interaction with fellow neighbors is impactful, you are more likely to do it again. The Washington-3 campaign had hundreds of door knockers, and many who did it for the first time. The successful organizing and training of these folks will determine elections for years to come.
It was particularly heartwarming how thankful they were to have been recruited. A couple posted pictures on Facebook about their door knocking experience. When I shared the slate article (below) to Annie, a volunteer who I recruited at her doorstep, she texted back: “Thanks for knocking on my door and following up. After the handful of hours I spent out, I was a convert. Canvassing is a pretty good time, definitely more so than phone banking local elections.“
6) Slate Article about WA-3
The Future Is … Doorknocking? Marie Gluesenkamp Perez was a new kind of candidate with an old-school campaign strategy.
BY ALEXANDER SAMMON
DEC 06, 2022
Of all the election night surprises of this year’s midterms, none was bigger for Democrats than Marie Gluesenkamp Perez’s shock victory over the Republican Joe Kent in Washington state’s third congressional district. Five Thirty Eight’s modeling had Kent winning in 98 out of 100 scenarios. But Perez, a 34-year-old mother and auto shop owner with now-famous bangs, eked it out—by just under a percentage point.
The result, Democrats’ biggest upset in the House, came in a largely rural district outside Portland, Oregon, the sort of place where Democrats have fared particularly poorly of late and were polling dreadfully. But while post-election autopsies have credited the victory to voters’ rejection of Kent’s ties to MAGA extremist groups and Gluesenkamp Perez’s tactful embrace of pro-choice and pro-gun positions, it’s not the whole story. One big reason the Gluesenkamp Perez campaign triumphed has to do with a pretty retro strategy: a big volunteer army of doorknockers.
Over the course of the campaign, over 500 people knocked on a total of 40,000 doors spread across Vancouver, Washington, and its rural surrounds. The victory, called officially on November 12, came despite a complete absence of cash support from the Democrats’ official campaign arm, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which deemed the race a “reach,” and directed its ad budget elsewhere.
Lessons from Last Time
In 2020, owing to the health risks of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the Biden campaign and various state Democratic parties issued an edict to “call off door-to-door voter canvassing and emphasize online and digital tactics,” according to the Washington Post. It wasn’t until October 2020 that an extremely limited door-knocking effort was announced by Team Biden.
Republicans, meanwhile, were knocking on a million doors a week throughout the summer of 2020 with a massive volunteer army. The advantage from in-person contact likely helped with the surprising overperformance Republicans saw that year, despite polls suggesting Democrats would romp all over the ticket.
This year’s midterms, which will end this week with a Senate run-off in Georgia, were by far the most expensive midterm election cycle of all time.
Much of that money went to those same online and digital tactics: television spots, digital ads, phone calls, texts, and mailers. Making actual contact with voters, meanwhile, got even more difficult. Hardly anyone even picks up the phone anymore: As numerous pollsters reported, the deluge of paid messaging, combined with the demise of the landline, has made getting people to pick up calls to answer polling queries nearly impossible; phonebanking has also become exceedingly difficult.
“A good conversation with a prospective voter is maybe one in a hundred,” Tim Gowan, the field director for the Gluesenkamp Perez campaign, told me. “Phonebanking had really low contact rates, it’s just gotten less and less effective.”
The campaign tried a different approach: using phonebanks to call volunteers.
Rather than spend time on a futile effort to contact and cajole potential voters, the Gluesenkamp Perez campaign decided to prioritize calling known supporters, convincing them not to pledge their vote but to volunteer their time. A dedicated group of ten volunteers, called the “Call Squad,” focused their energy on encouraging likely voters to show up and knock on doors, and then to come back and do it again. That helped swell the number of doorknockers to nearly 500. Among them: young moms, alienated Republican voters, and political newcomers who had never volunteered before. Many of them made it a habit. “We prioritized getting people to come out again and again,” said Gowan.
All of this may sound obvious or unsurprising, but big volunteer doorknocking efforts are a notable departure from contemporary campaigning strategies. As recently as 2020, some commentators and political scientists were suggesting that doorknocking was no better than phonebanking when it came to getting out the vote, and worse than paid advertising. The ground game, they suggested, was overrated.
Getting the Ground Game Back Together
Gluesenkamp Perez’s victory has quickly made her a darling of the Democratic party. The young mother, who filmed downing a tree with a chainsaw as part of her campaign pitch, was hailed as a way forward for the Democratic Party in rural America after her win, perhaps most notably by Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times Opinion section. The Cut pointed fans to websites where they could shop for Gluesenkamp Perez’s favored jeans brand.
But if the Gluesenkamp Perez model is the party’s future, the campaign strategy is also a return to the past. The volunteer heavy doorknocking organizing that pushed her across the finish line is a throwback in Democratic campaigns.
One of the co-organizers of the Call Squad was Harley Augustino, who had worked for 14 years as an organizer for Unite Here, the service workers’ union. Augustino, based in Portland, left the union a year and a half ago to help found a recruiting program called Base Building for Power. He said he joined the Gluesenkamp Perez campaign as a volunteer after an underwhelming experience volunteering for a nearby race, that of Jamie McLeod-Skinner in Oregon’s 5th district, where he found the ground game sorely lacking.
“I was horrified at the lack of attention or interest in doorknocking. I’d show up, I’d be one of maybe four people, the only one under 65,” Augustino told me. “And when I was done they didn’t even ask me to volunteer again!” (McLeod-Skinner told me her campaign’s ground game was a hybrid effort put together by the DCCC and the grassroots base, which was also focused on a narrow governor’s race.)
After reading about Gluesenkamp Perez’s race, Augustino messaged the candidate on Instagram, and drove up to nearby Vancouver and quickly set to work crafting a volunteer-heavy ground game with Gowan, the campaign’s field director.
Augustino hounded potential doorknockers anywhere he could find them. After a debate between Kent and Gluesenkamp Perez at a local community college, he talked to Mel Finn-Kamerath, a stay-at-home mother of three from the small town of Kalama. Just a few weeks prior, she had voted for Republican Jaime Herrera Beutler in the primary, one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach then-President Donald Trump in the wake of the January 6th insurrection. Beutler had lost to Kent, a military vet who embraced election denialism.
But she was moved by Gluesenkamp Perez. After speaking with Augustino, she begrudgingly agreed to try doorknocking for the first time. (“I don’t think I’ve ever recruited a Republican volunteer,” Augustino told me.)
“It was the first time I’ve ever been more vocal than making a Facebook post or going to a debate,” Finn-Kamerath told me. But she proved to be a quick study. “As I went from door to door and as I realized just how important the campaign was, I got over that fear,” she said. “The more I was speaking and hearing myself speak up for Marie the more comfortable I got.”
Finn-Kamerath became a stalwart in the race’s final weeks, knocking doors repeatedly, and recruiting friends to stand at the only four-way intersection in her hometown and wave signs.
“I talked to several young moms who weren’t paying attention to the election,” she said. “Time and again I heard, ‘we really don’t like the Biden Administration and I’d say ‘yes, I’m with you.’ And then they’d say, ‘But we hate Trump.’ And I’d say, ‘that’s exactly where I was. The candidate that you want is no longer there, but Marie is your candidate. She’s gonna be a really great representative.’”
“I just believed that this was such an important campaign,” Finn-Kamerath said.
These days, in many races, campaigns often rely on paid canvassers to handle their doorknocking operations. Many of these canvassers are brought in from outside the community in which the campaign is taking place. Even the most successful ground game operations, such as Unite Here’s vaunted machine in Nevada, which helped save Democratic senator Catherine Cortez Masto’s reelection, relies heavily on professional canvassers. But the story of Finn-Kamerath, Augustino, and Gluesenkamp Perez shows how important local volunteers remain to the ground game.
Recruiting and training unpaid volunteers, especially in smaller House races and communities where those union operations don’t exist, can still clearly make a difference. “We weren’t paid, we were just there because we believed in the candidate,” said Finn-Kamerath. “I was just having fun.”