Misconceptions about canvassing
If you are a person that thinks that four years of an Obama administration will do people good and that four years of a McCain (or Palin, depending on how early McCain dies) administration will damage the country in a way that you’d find hard to bear, I think you should consider volunteering for the Obama campaign for one day. And thus, I tried to harangue some friends into doing so the other day.
These guys all talk how McCain sucks all the time, so I was surprised that they hated the idea. Well, not all of them hated it, but a couple of them did. (Of course, I wasn’t particularly artful. Jeff – fairly accurately – characterized my entreaty as “Join me or die! Can you do any less?“) Even more surprising, though, was this objection (paraphrased):
I’m afraid of confrontation, and I couldn’t bring myself to go door to door, trying to argue each person I meet into accepting my viewpoints about a candidate.
The problem with that objection is that that’s not at all how canvassing and phone banking work.
If it was the way it worked, there wouldn’t be many people capable or willing to do the job. Also, it wouldn’t actually help. No matter how right you are or how good you are at arguing, it’s pretty rare that you can decisively beat someone in an argument. And even in those few cases, the beaten party usually responds by resenting you and refusing to accept your position out of spite. So, arguing doesn’t help.
The Obama campaign, the Kerry campaign, and probably every campaign is pretty adamant about their volunteers not getting into fights with people. They explicitly tell you to not provoke or get drawn into arguments. If someone doesn’t want to hear it or states up front that they’re voting for McCain, you are to wish them a good day and move on. Canvassers are not a mobile debate assault team.
The ground game works by spreading information about Obama and about voting logistics to people that might be open to voting for Obama. You may have noticed this pattern in the primaries, particularly in Texas and Indiana: three weeks before election day, Obama starts out behind by 20 or so points. As the clock ticks down, he closes that gap down to nothing.
How does that happen? Often people don’t know much about Obama. Or they know only negative or untrue things about him. They might not be online often or read papers and just take what some co-worker said about him as true. And/or: They haven’t voted before or haven’t voted in a while, so it hasn’t really occurred to them that it’s something easy to do that they can do.
So, campaign volunteers go out and present information about Obama and about voting logistics (where and when to go to register, where and when to go to vote, how to get a ride, etc.). Some of the people they talk to decide they want to vote for Obama, and then they do it. It’s that simple, actually.
The information is presented not in a big speech, but in a brief greeting, a few questions, and a simple flyer. No debating, no fighting, no converting, no conflict. Often, no one even answers the door, and you just leave the flyer hanging on their doorknob. The same goes for phone banking, except it’s over the phone.
Certainly, canvassing is not efficient, but its purpose is to reach people that are not reachable by efficient means like the web or email. Also, it’s not fun, and you won’t feel like a super effective genius for doing it. Shit’s just like that sometimes. However, it is definitely not a confrontational task.
Tags: canvassing, misconceptions
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