On Canvassing: The Mind You Change May Be Your Own

An election-day meditation on what we can learn from meeting voters where they are.

Yesterday afternoon, while door-knocking in Sleepy Hollow, NY on behalf of the Democratic slate, I saw someone across the street in a light blue sweatshirt carrying a piece of campaign literature and glancing at his cell phone. “Are you also canvassing here?” I called out. And that’s how I met Kevin, a 56-year-old Republican activist from Connecticut who was canvassing for Elon Musk’s America PAC. Yes, they’re here on the East Coast and not just in swing states. And hence the fancy blue sweatshirt with an embroidered American flag on it.

He told me he was a former corrections officer who had gotten into politics in 2013, narrowly winning election to the Griswold, CT town council as First Selectman. Then in 2016 he ran for state assembly and won, carrying his district handily and earning the moniker “Baby Trump” from some of his supporters, as he told me. Truth be told, he came across as very easy-going and happy to meet a fellow canvasser, even if we were on opposite sides. For example, he complimented my “White Dudes for Harris” hat, joking that he almost wanted to buy it from me.

These days, he said, he went by the name Kevin Alan, though his birth name was Skulczyck. After just one term in the state legislature, he had decided not to run for re-election, and was now focused on his podcast, The Kevin Alan Show. He said he enjoyed talking to people from all sides of the aisle, from leaders of Black Lives Matter to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene—who he actually spoke with at an “America First” rally in 2021 in Plainfield, CT.

While our conversation couldn’t have been more amiable, that was also because both of us were not looking for an argument. I asked to see what app he was using to walk his turf and he showed me a screen that looked exactly like MiniVAN’s street map with dots for every household. He showed me the literature he was leaving on behalf of his candidate House Rep. Mike Lawler, and I asked him if he thought it showed Mondaire Jones in a fair light.

“Don’t you think that photo was chosen to make him look as threatening as possible?” I asked. (It depicts Jones in a sweaty close-up, brandishing a megaphone, shaded as darkly as possible, and makes all kinds of claims about how he wants to defund the police, let felons vote from prison, etc.) Kevin admitted it might be, especially after I showed him a much friendlier picture on one of Jones’ own pieces of literature. But then he shrugged, suggesting that Democrats did the same thing to Republican candidates.

For every point I made, Kevin had a counterpoint. Only once did we start to veer into conflict, when I told him I couldn’t let him brush off Trump’s admiration for Hitler’s generals. That was just because he wants generals loyal to him, Kevin claimed, not because he wants to copy Hitler. Not so, I said, during Trump’s first term he tried to order the US military to fire on Americans and they refused—that’s why he wishes he had Hitler’s generals. Kevin seemed at least slightly chagrined. But the big cross he wore around his neck seemed to protect him from anything critical I said.

This isn’t the only time while out canvassing that I’ve had civil conversations with Trumpers. When you are standing face-to-face on someone’s doorstep, people are generally nicer than our hyper-polarized politics would suggest. It was only while phone-banking over the weekend for “Progressives Against Trump,” an ad-hoc group of volunteers who have been calling likely Green party members in swing states (but obviously getting some MAGAnauts at the same time), that I’ve encountered intense vitriol. Luckily, I’m a New Yorker and for us being told to “f---” ourselves is almost a term of endearment.

Researchers have found that while canvassing may only tilt election results by a small degree, maybe a percentage point or two, the biggest impact of going door-knocking is probably on the volunteers doing the door-knocking, in that it causes them to moderate their own views. Inevitably, as you door-knock, you are exposed to Americans in all of their crazy diversity of views and experiences. The phrase “meeting people where they are” takes on real meaning when those people are outside of your own bubble. I’ve met vaccine-skeptics who weren’t going to vote because AI had already decided the election, young people of all races who couldn’t be convinced to vote, and older voters who were with me on their vote choice but only because Evil was stalking the world.

Whatever idealistic hopes you may have about getting everyone to embrace your well-thought-out and informed position on any issue will get humbled when you spend time talking to people who don’t obsess about politics all day long. And even if our side has the better case to make, we don’t have everyone’s undivided attention. Even worse, we can’t control how our ideas reach other people once we’re not in one-on-one contact with them. If someone says they don’t like being told they have to ask people their pronouns, or that they think your candidate is “too close to AOC” even if he isn’t, or won’t be budged because both parties are too close to Israel, you’re not going to change their mind in one chat.

With tens of thousands, or maybe even hundreds of thousands, of Democratic volunteers flowing into swing states and onto phone- and text-banks this past week, it may seem churlish to ask if all this last-minute work is really as important or useful as everyone makes it sound. Very few voters get persuaded to change their behavior because of a quick conversation with a volunteer. One could respond—if all those thousands of volunteers each only managed to move one voter, that might still be enough to tip the results in states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Fair enough. But the whole system of just-in-time transactional voter engagement (combined with capital intensive paid media bombardment and incessant spam-like fundraising) isn’t doing a very good job of moving the needle in any more fundamental way. For that we need a much deeper investment of time and money in place-based year-round work.

So whenever anyone asks, how could this election be so close, remember that it isn’t just all the billionaire money propping up Trump’s campaign, or the Supreme Court giving him effective immunity from prosecution these last few years. It is also that we live inside radically different information worlds, and that most of the time, when people are confronted with ideas or facts that contradict their prior beliefs, they instinctively try to reinforce their pre-existing identity. Changing minds is hard and slow work. And far too much of the time and money put towards that task is spent only in the final months and weeks of an election campaign, for the relatively modest outcome of gaining votes. If you want (and need) change to come faster, start by asking: now that the election is over, how are you going to stay engaged?

—Bonus link: Dave Fleischer, one of the pioneers of deep canvassing, shares some wisdom about the value of building real relationships with voters, compared to the one-way tactics of letter-writing etc where no one ever writes back.

A personal note

Today is the second anniversary of my father Bernie Sifry’s passing. (Here’s an obit we published in his local paper.) I got a lot of my life-long engagement with politics from him. About seven or eight years ago, when he was in his early 80s, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Luckily for his family, he got sweeter as the disease progressed, not meaner as happens with some. I was very fortunate to go visit him out in California where he lived in late February 2020, just a few weeks before COVID hit. Here’s a photo of him that I took after he voted in the California primary. That’s the last time he voted in person (in the fall that year my brother helped him vote absentee), and I’m sure he was doubly happy to do it because he got to vote for Bernie Sanders, who he was a big fan of.

Rest in peace, Dad. And don’t worry, I think we’re going to dump Trump.