People seem to have noticed that President Biden is gaining on TFG in the polls. But this is what we have been finding at the doors, in every state (which just so happen to be Swing States) where Hope Springs from Field PAC [website] volunteers are canvassing. Many DKos commenters have noticed this, and the polls you see being released in the past week reflect what we have found and posted here at Daily Kos.
Last week (5/4), Hope Springs volunteers knocked on 250,231 doors and talked to 20,499 voters. 13,025 voters answered questions from our Issues Surveys in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Wisconsin. We did not canvass in Maryland or Pennsylvania this week because of rain and cold. But 13 thousand survey respondents is a lot more than your average public poll released and discussed in the media. Public polls generally survey 400 to 1,200 people.
Now here’s the thing: we aren’t doing polling, there’s nothing statistically significant about the work we are doing, we aren’t even talking to Republicans (although sometimes we end up with one, who resides in a home with a Democrat or unaffiliated voter). And, yet, because we are talking to voters, or, rather, LISTENING to voters and recording their responses, we can see the trends before pollsters can even identify them.
You can see the state by state graphs at our weekly Canvass Wrap-up, but i wanted to focus specifically on Biden, because i think that’s what most people are talking about.
Instead of trying to get a 50/50 mix this year (something we wanted because we didn’t want volunteers to get discouraged by talking to too many unaffiliated voters), this year we are aiming for a 40/60 mix, Democrats to unaffiliated. So we are talking to a lot more unaffiliated voters this year than we did last year.
I use the term talking in a generic sense, because what we are really doing at the doors of these Democratic and unaffiliated voters in suburban — swingy — areas is listening. Hope Springs from Field volunteers employ a voter-led discussion approach that allows voters to focus on what they want to tell us, what information they are willing to share. Even though most of the data gets inputted at the door with a phone using MiniVAN, volunteers walk with a paper copy of the Issues Survey and are taught to show it to the voter, even let the voter hold it during the discussion. But this means the voters can skip through the survey, answering the questions they are interested in.
For example, you might have noticed that all our Issues Surveys begin the same way (Are you registered to vote at this address?). But in parenthesis right next to the question is please register. And we do have people who take the survey in their hands and say to us, before we even ask, yes, i (or someone in the house) needs to register or update their address. But we also have people who will, say, skip over the message to your member question, while others have something to say right off the bat. Being voter-led can be confusing for volunteers when voters skip back and forth, but the ease it provides to voters is well worth it. They feel like they have the power, as they are divulging critical data about their attitudes towards the election.
Axios notes that
The titanic Biden-Trump election likely will be decided by roughly 6% of voters in just six states, top strategists in both parties tell us.
- Each side will spend billions to reach those voters over the next six months.
Why it matters: Roughly 244 million Americans will be eligible to vote. But 99.5% of us won't be deciders: We won't vote. Or we always vote the same way. Or we live in states virtually certain to be red or blue.
Zoom in: Both campaigns are obsessed with six states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
- Those were the battlegrounds disputed by Donald Trump after the 2020 election. And they're the '24 toss-ups, as rated by The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter.
- A seventh state, North Carolina, is included in some swing-state polls. It's rated "Lean R" by Cook. The other 43 states are either "solid" or "likely" for one of the parties.
Reality check: In our private conversations, Democrats are a lot more worried about November than Republicans are. Democrats say the race is winnable. Republicans think they're winning. The swing-state map is a big reason why.
Hope Springs from Field’s approach to winning over voters in these Swing States amounts to identifying the critical data needed to win their vote — or mobilize them, even when they aren’t exactly enthusiastic about it — and getting that information into VAN, the voter database most Democrats will use in the Fall.
Hope Springs from Field PAC began knocking on doors again on March 2nd in a grassroots-led effort to prepare the Electoral Battleground in what has been called the First and Second Rounds of a traditional Five Round Canvass. We are taking those efforts to the doors of Democrats and unaffiliated voters with a systematic approach that reminds them not only that Democrats care, but Democrats are determined to deliver the best government possible to all Americans.
Obviously, we rely on grassroots support, so if you support field/grassroots organizing, voter registration (and follow-up) and our efforts to protect our voters, we would certainly appreciate your support:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/hopemobilization2024
Hope Springs from Field understands that volunteer to voter personal interactions are critical. Knocking on doors has repeatedly been found to be the most successful tactic to get voters to cast a ballot and that is the goal of what we do.
We aren’t asking about Trump. Some voters tell us what they think anyway, but asking about Trump really serves no purpose here. We are really much more interested in the voter’s attitudes about their community, the issues they think are important, what government can do for them.
This is more important that you might think. Even though we hold off on asking about needed public services until the end, we have been repeatedly told by voters that they’d heard we were doing this and anticipated a visit by one of our volunteers. That kind of welcome, that expectation, is something that draws many of our volunteers to return. They feel like they are helping their neighbors, and voters tell us that this kind of assistance makes them think more highly about Democrats, in general, and our candidates.
I write this and know that there are people who are wondering, how can we know that? Well, we know that because we talk to voters after volunteers visit. Both organizers and myself will call up voters that we have talked to, both for the purpose of verifying that information is valid and for input about the kind of canvassing we are doing. But this is an outgrowth of a problem all field organizers have: how do you trust the data? Sometimes volunteers just phone it in, and, to be honest, those are the easiest ones to identify. If, for (a real world) example, a volunteer reports that half their assigned doors had a voter speak to the volunteer, we would (and did) call those voters back to verify that someone had talked to them recently. But volunteers know that we do this. I talk to 10 voters, 10 volunteers and 10 organizers a week, in order to stay on top of their needs and issues. I’ve done this for years, as part of my campaign staffing or consulting work. The overwhelming majority of our volunteers give it to us straight.
But we see these trends (or reversals) in real time, and that information gets shared here every week. Voters tell us lots of things before we even ask about how they think President Biden is doing. Many volunteers tell us that they know what voters will say about the candidate’s (approval ratings) before they even get there, from the issues that are important to them and earlier questions. And, sometimes, volunteers come away astounded because, for example, a voter will say they don’t have an impression of Joe Biden or they have a negative impression of Biden but say they are voting for him in November! How can that be?
It is important to remember that Biden has shied away from the media because the president believed that Trump was “in the news too much.” Now people i know in the advertising world are horrified by that decision. Seriously horrified, but i know i was exhausted by TFG being in the news so much. I was glad for the break. But i can see their argument. My friends talk about “brand lift” and how the more than Biden appears in the news (on TV), the higher his brand lift has been.
Now these friends worry about Biden not having been on TV enough. But we’re about to see the president on television a lot. Perhaps more than he’d like. There’s just no getting around the fact that Biden is, well, Biden and he likes to do things his way. Like he’s always done them. He’s really comfortable with his narrative (although you could/should argue he shouldn’t be). And the fact is that Biden is proud of his accomplishments, proud of his presidency and doesn’t share Trump’s need to be in the center of the narrative. Joe Biden is the anti-Trump.
In all its connotations. And this is the finding we are seeing in the news, as well. “Biden sees highest approval rating since November,” “a 4-point increase from the same poll in March.” “President Biden has nearly erased Donald J. Trump’s early polling advantage, amid signs that the Democratic base has begun to coalesce behind the president,” inching “among Black and Latino voters,” “while older voters provide a source of relative strength for the Democratic president.” Nate Cohn writes: “The movement in Mr. Biden’s direction over the last month is slight, but it may be just enough to suggest that he’s beginning to benefit from improving political conditions.”
While media or public polls focus on head to head comparisons, Hope Springs volunteers are identifying the things that can be used to motivate and mobilize voters this November. And we are definitely finding that Biden vs. Trump isn’t driving this election cycle. At least not to the voters we’ve been talking to. And we are finding that Democrats running for Senate as well as the generic ballot test has Democrats “inching up” as well. These are trends that our field work, knocking on doors and engaging Democrats and unaffiliated voters, bolsters.
We can’t do this without help. Our biggest expense is the Voter File. But it is also a fixed cost. That won’t change as we raise and spend more money. Printing literature is our second largest cost. Printing and mailing our our Post Cards to New Voters is our third cost and paying the fees for ActBlue is the smallest of our monthly costs.
Hope Springs is a seat-of-the-pants grassroots-driven operation. We don’t have employees but we realize that to formalize and professionalize this effort that will have to change.
But here’s the reality: Identifying Single Issue Voters and Constitutional Amendment supporters and doing GOTV (Get-Out-the-Vote) costs us more money than our regular canvassing because this issue drives volunteer turnout higher and higher. Which means we have to buy more lit to distribute and other minor expenses (like water for volunteers). We just paid off the printers for last year’s Ohio lit that we distributed there. So please:
If you are able to support our efforts to protect Democratic voters, especially in minority communities, expand the electorate, and believe in grassroots efforts to increase voter participation and election protection, please help:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/hopemobilization2024
If you would rather send a check, you can follow that link for our mailing address at the bottom of the page. Thank you for your support. This work depends upon you!