Slouching to Election Day with MiniVAN

We're sending tens of thousands of grassroots door-knockers, many of them newbies, into battle "without guns that work, just bullets that we’re telling them to throw real hard at people."

Back on August 10th, I spent a Saturday afternoon volunteering for the New York State Democratic party’s coordinated campaign on behalf of incumbent House Rep. Pat Ryan and three other lower-ballot candidates. It was fun to be outside on a gorgeous summer day knocking on doors in the suburbs around Poughkeepsie, and there is always something to be learned from talking with ordinary voters about politics. Tons of studies have also found that a well-run canvass operation can also improve voter turnout by a modest degree, which can mean a lot if an election is close. August was a bit early to reach people (and the good weather probably also caused a lot of people to be out) but like tens of thousands of other grassroots volunteers I’m planning to knock doors again this weekend and plenty more to come.

Which prompts a question: How is that nothing about how Democrats go about running canvass operations has been improved in the last few cycles?

Right now, there is a massive wave of people volunteering to door-knock for candidates from Kamala Harris on down through many critical congressional and state races across the country. As seasoned political reporter John Heilemann noted (gift link) in his report for Puck on the Democrats’ Chicago convention:

“To give you a sense of how the political operative class assesses a convention, consider this: When I sat down late Thursday night after Harris’s speech with Patrick Gaspard—Barack Obama’s former political director and ambassador to South Africa and now C.E.O. of the Center for American Progress Action Fund—to tape the most recent episode of the Impolitic podcast, the first words out of his mouth had to do with volunteers. When Joe Biden was the party’s nominee, he noted, the campaign had thousands of them; now it has hundreds of thousands. As Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon laid it out in an “interested parties” memo a few days later: “Headed into the convention, our campaign hosted a weekend of action, and volunteers completed 10,000 shifts and contacted over 1 million voters. The convention itself helped build on that momentum, generating nearly 200,000 new volunteer shifts.”

O’Malley Dillon doubled down on this point in her latest “interested parties” memo from September 1 , where she wrote, “In an election that will be decided in the states, ground game matters more than ever. [Emphasis in the original]….Heading into the final stretch, our operational strength matters more than ever. Since Vice President Harris entered the race, she’s raised more than $540 million - a historic sum. That money is going directly to a relentless battleground operation, with more than 312 coordinated offices and 2,000 coordinated staff in the states – a reflection of a campaign with presences in every corner of every battleground state and with the communities critical to victory. During a recent Weekend of Action, more than 10,000 volunteers made nearly 900,000 calls and knocked on 150,000 doors, contacting more than 1 million voters.”

Indeed, NGP VAN, the source of the canvassing software MiniVAN that most Democratic volunteers will use on their phones as they go door-knocking, reported on August 24 that it was “early October” levels of usage, and 55% of those canvassers were first-time MiniVAN users. The gross numbers are impressive. But the quality of the experience matters even more. And there are at least three aspects of the Democratic ground game that leave much to be desired: the tools, the data, and the follow-through.

First, MiniVAN, the mobile canvassing tool that Democrats have been wedded to for years since the Democratic National Committee gave a de-facto monopoly to NGP VAN, its maker, still sucks. Back in the spring, Chelsea Peterson Thompson, the general manager of the company (which is itself a subsidiary of the overseas private equity group Apax Partners, under the brand name Bonterra), insisted to me on the record that deep cuts in NGP VAN’s staff in 2023 would have no negative effect on its tools usability in 2024. Instead, she framed the cuts, which amounted to about 30% of its headcount, as “the tough but strategic decision to reorganize our workforce to make sure our political customers have the exact resources they need in a critical election cycle.” She insisted that “We are doubling down on what we do best: Organizing, fundraising and compliance, and digital engagement. Where others do it better, NGP VAN will partner and/or integrate their tools so that our clients have access to the very best technology possible.” And she promised that a “robust roadmap leading into the election” would elevate new features to help Democrats and progressives win. (For my deep dive into how we’ve been “Living with VANxiety” since the Apax takeover, go here.)

MiniVAN map screenshot

Well, I see no evidence of any improvement. The app is still clunky and confusing to use. Its map feature doesn’t integrate with consumer-facing tools like Google Maps, so if your bit of assigned turf requires driving you have to constantly toggle between tools. But two features that, to my knowledge, remain unchanged from past years, really stand out for their lack of utility. First, there’s no reliable way to update information using Minivan. It is a “push” tool only, designed to send people out to do a task, not behave with any agency. If you knock on a door and someone tells you that their son or daughter has moved to a different part of the district, but they are still registered to vote at their parents’ address, there’s no way to – on the spot – use Minivan to tell the campaign that this parent promises they’ll remind their kid to vote. And second, there is just a cookie-cutter list of responses you can record. Even more absurd in our age of abundant and hyper-cheap data and memory, you can only check one box for each contact. If someone is “not home” but you also “lit dropped,” well, you can’t record both. If someone cares about education and racial justice, well, again, pick one! It’s almost as if campaigns don’t really care to know.

NGP VAN seems to have done just a few things to tweak its toolset in preparation for this fall’s push to Election Day. First, it announced in mid-August that it had at long last opened up its API (application programming interface) to third-party vendors, saying this would allow users to “access the best-in-class tools available.” This is nice, but extremely late to have any tangible effect on what campaigns do between now and Election Day. Second, it just announced that as of the beginning of September, MiniVAN will automatically save campaign user data, rather than leaving that step to individual campaigns to do. Apparently, a lot of campaigns forget to do this in the heat of the election—which perhaps explains why Democratic voter data is often out-of-date. A useful improvement, but not one that will affect 2024.

The third thing NGP VAN is doing is spending money on a PR campaign for itself, which it is calling the NGP VAN Organizer Hypeline. Over the next few weeks, it is engaging celebrities and influencers to share “their love and encouragement” for the thousands of organizers “doing the hard work on the ground.” Oh look, there’s Jonathan VAN Ness from the show Queer Eye sending his love via the pay-a-celebrity-to-leave-a-message app Cameo. Somewhere in the bowels of NGP VAN, there’s an overworked engineer wondering why this was more important than hiring more staff. Oh, I know why. It barely costs anything.

The second problem we seem stuck with is lousy data. For example, I was canvassing in a swing district, which means that presumably Democrats had some history in their voter file from past efforts to contact voters in recent years, but I was still astounded at the number of bad addresses I encountered. Of the nine doors where someone was home and willing to talk with me, six said the person I was asking for had moved—invariably several years ago. About ten percent of Americans change their address every year, according to the US Postal Service, which might explain some of this—but surely updating address files isn’t something you need to spend precious volunteer time on?

Talking about these problems with a technologist friend of mine who is a top veteran of past presidential campaigns, we couldn’t decide which analogy was more evocative of the situation. “We’re sending Democratic volunteers into battle using tanks without treads,” I said. “More like sending them without armor or guns that work, just bullets that we’re telling them to throw real hard at people,” this person responded.

The third problem with the canvassing system that Democrats are relying on to help win 2024 is more social than technological, though technology has also helped enshittify (Cory Doctorow’s wonderful term) things here too. The only follow-up a volunteer canvasser gets after they’ve done a canvassing shift is completely automatic and anonymous. A text: “Hi Micah! How was your POUGHKEEPSIE: Canvassing for Pat, Yvette and Dan! Reply GOOD if it was good, BAD if it was not, or MISSED if you unable to attend.” If you reply, Mobilize—the tool (also owned by NGP VAN) that generates these messages will invite you to add a comment. You can leave one, but I have never heard back. You’d think that a qualitative response from a volunteer would be seen as something of value—permission to start a conversation and build a relationship, but this entire system is centered on generating tallies, not building community.

None of this has to suck.

For example, if a volunteer canvasser is helping one of the many independent organizations, PACs or c3/c4s that use OpenField instead of MiniVAN, they’re having a better experience AND being more productive. Ari Trujillo-John, OpenField’s founder and CEO, tells me, “Our average training time is under 7 minutes, because it's a web application.” Instead of making canvassers download an app, campaigns just give them a unique URL to use. That’s for starters. (It also works offline.) Even better, with Open Field, she says, “you can manage your own turf as a canvasser, grabbing more doors if you get kicked out of a complex, etc,... And since we allow you to add people as you go/pull them to their current address from elsewhere on the voter file, you can capture supporters regardless of registration status or what address you found them at.” The tool allows any canvasser to add their own follow-up information to a person’s record—and if they’ve scheduled a planned visit, the icon for that location on the map will light up in a different color to alert whomever is covering that area.

Other aspects of OpenField put Mini-VAN to shame. The day I was canvassing near Poughkeepsie, my partner and I passed a house with a rainbow flag outside and other signs that its residents were potential Democratic voters. But the address wasn’t on our walk-list so we skipped it. With OpenField, if you meet someone who isn’t on your list while canvassing, the tool first invites you to search for their name and/or address, and if they aren’t in the voter file, you can add them and then add information about the interaction. The tool also makes it very easy for two or more people to form a team and share turf, something that you can also do with Mini-VAN but only by acting as if you are the same person. If you want, you can turn on a “live canvasser view” that shows your location in real-time, making it much easier for teams to coordinate.

Trujillo-John says people using OpenField “have an average 20-30% higher contact rate per shift than Mini-VAN does. Simply put, folks get to talk to more people, record more information and spend less time looking for how to be effective.” If every one of those thousands of volunteers O’Malley Dillon is bragging about was twenty to thirty percent more productive on each shift they are doing, maybe we wouldn’t be worrying as much about the election coming down to just several thousand voters in a few swing states. But apart from private conversations, no one in Democratic politics says anything about the drag of using NGP VAN’s tools. It’s just a sunk cost. Let’s hope it doesn’t sink us.

That said, if you are a canvasser, you can speak up. I’m convinced that a big part of why we’re stuck with this status quo is because volunteers put up with it instead of demanding better. The same goes for grassroots groups that partner with campaigns to turn out volunteers; they should be insisting that they get something in return from campaigns that helps build their organization year-round. Otherwise, we’re all just helping to build beautiful voter mobilization sandcastles that will be washed away without a trace after the election is over.

-Bonus link: “Building Prisms of Power, Not Sandcastles that Get Washed Away Each Election.”

Other political tech news

--The Washington Post’s Cristiano Lima-Strong and Cat Zakrzewski have a very good summary of the many ways Big Tech stands to benefit from a Kamala Harris White House, starting with her brother-in-law Tony West who is Uber’s chief legal officer and Google defense lawyer, Karen Dunn, who is another one of her top advisers. Lima-Strong and Zakrzewski note that “Harris’s Big Tech ties generate anxiety among some liberal Democrats, who say Obama officials’ hands-off approach to regulation let tech companies quash rivals and undermine consumer privacy with impunity. They worry she could abandon the aggressive posture Democrats have taken toward the sector in the nearly eight years since Obama left the White House. ‘The fear would be that it would impact her appointments, her policy decisions, her worldview,’ said Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, a left-leaning advocacy group.”

--An aggressive outreach effort by Movement Labs that involves texting people and telling them that their records show they aren’t registered to vote is getting some serious backlash, as it appears to be working from inaccurate data. As Krebs on Security reports, the texts have led to warnings by local TV stations in Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania that the messages look like a scam. Yoni Landau, Movement Labs founder, told Krebs that the texts were targeted at underrepresented groups in the electorate, sought to prompt recipients to check their status and then to help them register if needed. “I’m deeply sorry for anyone that may have gotten the message in error, who is registered to vote, and we’re looking into our content now to see if there are any variations that might be less certain but still as effective in generating new legal registrations,” Landau said.

--It sure looks like excessive greed from telecom providers is behind the long delays in the release of federal broadband funding to states eager to tap $42 billion appropriated as part of the 2021 infrastructure bill, but you have to know something about the history of overcharging and underdelivering by broadband providers in the first place—which you won’t find in this otherwise interesting story by John Hendel in Politico. The bottom line: while Democrats brag about funding “internet for all,” a lot of rural and poorer folks aren’t yet seeing it.

--A poster on DailyKos, the Democratic blogging hub, describes how their sister has gotten fired up by the Harris candidacy and then made her first ever political donation. Now, “having made one donation, she now gets a dozen or more texts and another dozen or more emails a day. Every day. Every single day, she’s getting what she now definitely considers spam after spam after SPAM…. STOP PASSING OUR INFO AROUND LIKE YOU’RE GIVING BONG HITS AT A PARTY!!!” Tell us how you really feel!