One of my earliest memories of politics is walking door-to-door with my father when I was about five years old, talking to voters and handing out palm cards with him when he was running for local office. Every night after he got home from work, we’d quickly eat dinner, make sure the trunk of the car was loaded with literature and lawn signs, and head off to some neighborhood in town that we hadn’t been to yet, ringing doorbells until 7:30pm, the universal time in our neck of the woods at which political cold-calls were deemed to be acceptable.
From my point of view as a child, this was the essence of campaigning. We got so many local and state-level candidates knocking on our door that I just assumed this was how you campaigned: you personally talked to as many people as possible, and tried to convince them to vote for you. Of course, this is not how contemporary federal election campaigns work; instead, mass media — and particularly television ads — is the heart of campaign strategies in the modern age. Still, door-to-door campaigning is still the essence of local campaign activity in many places. And in the all the campaigns I’ve worked on in my life, it is always my favorite part.
Four related thoughts about door-to-door campaigns and local elections:
(1) Flying blind and poor. Local elections are really the last place left in electoral politics that public opinion polling is not part of the equation at all. There’s no polling of the issues, and there’s no polling of the horse-race. And if you have some money to spend, it’s never enough to get on the airwaves. The upshot is that local races tend to resemble 19th century campaigns, both descriptively and strategically. Candidates try to spread their name and a very basic message through free media, personal contact, and palm cards. They judge how they are doing on intuition and non-random opinion samples.
As such, the races can be both more exciting and tougher to approach strategically: you never know if your plans are effective, and you really don’t know what is going to happen until the votes are counted. Consequently, pretty much all strategy revolves around some version of pushing your name and face out there on the cheap. Which means hitting the shoe leather. The irony, of course, is that door-to-door campaigning is way more effective than mailers or phone callers or other forms of mass campaigning.
(2) A different shamelessness. Local politics has a different personality screen than national politics. If you want to run for Congress, you usually have to be able and willing to beg total strangers for money, over and over again. If you want to run for a local office, you usually have to be willing to knock on people’s doors, interrupt their dinner, and ask them to vote for you. These are very different personal attributes. Some people, of course, have both. Some have neither. But there are many people like my father, who would never have been able to beg people for money, but was able to at least stomach interrupting dinner and the occasional door slammed in his face.
Sometimes this isn’t the case. A local election can be so locked-down by a party that you don’t even really have to campaign after you get the nomination, and getting the nomination might be more about inside politics among local leaders than any actual campaigning. And some towns are so small that you can know, or at least know of, most of the voters. But those are the exceptions, and unless you have an uncontested race, the lock-down situation is never such a shoe in that you can kick back.
(3) The fieldcraft of shoe-leather campaigning. There are all sorts of theories about what you are best off doing when you go door-to-door. Some people think it’s best to treat it as GOTV activity; just hit the neighborhoods that are solidly in your partisan camp, and encourage them to go to the polls. Other people think you want to go right to the swing districts and hit the independents. At any rate, the name of the game is approaches per hour and memorable contact, but mostly the former. There are some things you can do to increase approaches per hour without any costs: these include running (literally) from house to house; concentrating on dense population neighborhoods, and working public events. It’s no surprise that town Halloween parades are filled with local candidates; the greet/hour rate is incredible.
But often, approaches/hour is at direct war with memorable contact; if you want to get to more people, you’ve got to spend less time with each of them. Which raises the obvious question: what are you actually trying to accomplish when you ring the doorbell, and what’s the most effective way to do it? There’s virtually no political science literature on this question, but there are generally accepted maxims: first and foremost, you aren’t there to debate policy. There’s a fantasy in many candidates’ heads that they will convince someone about something on a front porch, and that person will not only vote for them but become a cult follower and volunteer extraordinaire. Actually, it’s just a complete waste of time. On the other hand, however, if you can get someone to ask you a question that you have an easy and surefire answer for, you probably just collected a vote. So most candidates use a basic formula: say your name and what office you are running for, tell them one reason you are running, and then offer them a piece of literature and ask if they have any questions.
My dad preferred a more personal/GOTV strategy, which I still think is a good one, and definitely a more efficient one. He simply gathered the names of the residents, and then calmly introduced himself by using both his and their first name, and tried to shake their hands. “Bill, I’m Dave. I’m running for county judge. [hold out hand] I hope you’ll vote for me, but either way I want to remind you to vote next month. Here’s a pamphlet about me.” If they said anything, great. If not, he added a “We’ll see you at the polls” and left. There’s no way my dad ever read Home Style, but his door-to-door strategy tracked right into Fenno’s Member A anecdote: you will never lose a vote from someone on a first-name basis with you. This strategy, however, only works for the candidate himself; campaign workers going door-to-door have to stick to pretty basic lit-drop scripts.
Besides the approach rate and the contact style, one other key aspect of shoe-leather fieldcraft is how you handle getting the door slammed in your face, both figuratively and literally. One way to deal with this is to find some ways to preempt it; that was certainly one value to having a 5-year old tag along with you while you walked the neighborhoods. People just don;t seem to be as mean if there are children around, either their own or yours. But you are still going to get a high percentage of people who refuse to engage at even the most basic level; this problem leads a lot of door-to-door campaigners to believe that you are almost better off with the people not being home, so you can just lit-drop (always with a personal scribble on it!) and be done with it. I don’t think that’s quite right, but I do think it’s the right impulse; there’s only a very narrow band of people you are trying to reach by door-to-door’ing — people who weren’t going to vote or weren’t going to vote for you, who now will show up and vote for you. The probability of those people being among the percentage who slam the door in your face is so small as to not be worth dealing with. And the golden rule, of course, is don’t create a negative memorable moment. So don’t fight for a contact. Just drop the palm-card and be done with it.
(4) Turning the tables. The flip side of door-to-door is what you do when a candidate knocks on your door. I see so many people completely freeze up when they run into a politician standing outside the grocery store or subway station, like it’s rude or something to talk to them when they approach you. Whenever candidates knock on my door, I always ask them the same question: what got you into politics? It’s a good question for two reasons. First, many local candidates don’t have a stock prepared answer to it. If you ask them why you should vote for them or how they feel about policy X, you’ll get some robotic nonsense. Second, it tells you a lot about who you are dealing with. Not substantively; I don’t really care why people got into politics. But it’s pretty darn easy to gauge a person’s honestly and sincerity when they have to answer that question on the spot. Some people go into some bullshit about helping people and quickly shift to one of their key policy ideas. Others tell a story about a particular event. And some just stare blankly and then come up with something really lame. But no matter what they say, you can usually see right through it and figure out if it’s the kind of person you want running the town council.
