The traditional way campaigns have run paid canvass programs in the past is to chat with friends, family members or neighbors at the front door, which is more likely to get a voter's support than a conversation with a stranger. The test case for using the strategy at scale came out of the Georgia Senate runoffs in 2021. Jon Ossoff's campaign, flush with nearly unlimited cash but only two months to spend it, used a paid and volunteer program to get people talking to acquaintances.
2,800 Georgians were hired by the Ossoff team to reach out to their own networks. The campaign bet that many of the friends and family of their highly political volunteers were already engaged in the election and that this group could expand the electorate with outreach into their networks. The data was folded into the campaign's field program. They could inform organizers based on their own network, which voters were only reachable by.
A post- election analysis found that their efforts boosted turnout by an estimated 3.8 percent. Ossoff is now a senator. The state and Senate were flipped to the Democrats by Raphael Warnock.
The two women behind that effort are working together with the former national organizing director of Pete Buttigieg's presidential campaign.
The Progressive Turnout Project is putting $1 million behind a paid program in Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. A group focused on organizing suburban moms is working with another group on a volunteer program.
The Texas Democratic Party is giving every county party in the state access to the volunteer program called Connect Texas. They are also piloting a paid program. They are launching an app that allows campaigns and committees to use a tool that lets volunteers or paid organizers check if their family and friends are registered to vote. Texas requires voters to physically mail in their Absentee Ballot requests.
The last door-to-door salesman is the campaign. "No one is trying to sell you knives at your door anymore, we're using share codes onInstagram from the people we follow," said Carnes, who joined Leonard and Stein as a partner at Relentless.
There is a long history of community organizing movements. It is a new feature of a political campaign. Democrats need to reach voters who are less likely to vote this year, with the party facing a serious enthusiasm gap.
The push comes from the conclusion that traditional organizing tactics didn't work as well during the coronaviruses epidemic, with fewer volunteers wanting to work in person, and the rise of the phoney-call era pushing people to send unknown numbers to their voicemails.
Leonard said that traditional, cold voter contact methods have a ceiling for their effectiveness.
Stein said that peer-to-peer conversations do work.
Tracking volunteers, storing that data in a usable infrastructure, and scaling it to a statewide race are some of the back-end operational strength that a relational organizing campaign needs. Counting up how many doors a volunteer has knocked on is more complicated than that.
Stein and Leonard argue that the Ossoff campaign showed it was possible. They built that technology and infrastructure, much of which they laid out in Medium posts, a clear look inside the guts of campaign work that is often treated like state secrets. Over 17,000 personal contacts were made with voters by the Ossoff campaign in the two days leading up to the election in Georgia.
The Democratic Party of Wisconsin chair said that the team's tactic with Ossoff in Georgia was a rarity in politics. It is difficult to get enough voters to shift election results. There is a way to dramatically expand the size of the program.
Ellen Foster said that the paid program made a difference for the Ossoff campaign.
Ossoff was credited with the campaign's focus on organizing. Regular or semi-reliable voters were hammered by paid communications and voter contact campaigns when the candidate ran in an expensive congressional special election. How to get those voters who didn't have a voting history to vote was what kept Ossoff up at night.
Foster said that people are always trying to find more direct ways to communicate with voters.
The Progressive Turnout Project found that voters who were contacted by their organizers turned out at a rate 9.2 percent higher than the general population in the area. PTP plans to spend $1 million on a paid program in Georgia, Arizona and Nevada in 2022, according to the national organizing director.
She said that the key to getting Democrats to vote is because they are trying to meet voters where they are.
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