Did that grassroots campaigning last fall accomplish anything?

The Pew Research Center just issued a bulletin describing survey research among citizens -- voters and non-voters --  about their contacts with various campaigns. Pew's interest is in the discrepancies between the quantity of campaign contact with people of color as compared to white people. I'm interested as well in the broader picture this information points to about what campaigning actually did.

To be honest, the racial gap which Pew is looking at isn't as large as I would have expected. And certainly, at least in Georgia, Philadelphia, and perhaps Florida, my experience of contacts through the UniteHERE phone bank was largely calling into Black populations. Pew notes that although 80 percent of people classified as Hispanic use English every day and likewise 71 percent of those labelled Asian, it seems likely that citizens who do not routinely speak English received fewer contacts. Smart campaigns try to work with that. The perfectly proper complaint that non-English speakers are ignored has been a feature of campaign postmortems for as long as I've worked in campaigns. Winning campaigns try harder.

What grabs me about the picture Pew draws is the sheer ubiquity of campaign contacts, including some that might have had some actual effect. Here are Pew's findings in graphic form as well as snippets of the accompanying text.

Click to enlarge.

• Overall, 84% of U.S. adults who are citizens, and therefore eligible to vote, said they were contacted by a candidate’s campaign or by a group supporting a candidate in at least one of six ways in the month before the November 2020 election.
• A higher share of U.S. citizen adults living in nine presidential battleground states reported receiving at least one campaign contact than did those living in non-battleground states, 93% vs. 80%.
• Among those who said they voted in the 2020 election, about nine-in-ten adults reported receiving one or more campaign contacts, a higher share than among all citizens (83%). This pattern extended across most racial and ethnic groups.
• Adults ages 50 and older are more likely than those 18 to 49 to say they were contacted by a campaign, 90% vs. 79%.

To be blunt, nothing in my experience of campaigning suggests that many of the methods of contact that Pew documented do a damn thing in a campaign. In that dismal category, I include postal mail and dropped flyers, "pre-recorded phone calls" otherwise known as robocalls, and email. 

I'm more agnostic on texting. Because of legal constraints on cell phone usage, some human has to click on a button for each text sent; texting therefore can engage a fair amount of volunteer energy. Whether texts move otherwise unlikely voters, I have no idea. I'm pretty sure that the efficacy rate is no higher than something like 500 or 1000 texts to one -- but that's not nothing. Software that enables activists conveniently to remind known friends to vote may be effectual in low participation elections -- which last November was not. 

Then we get down to the more effectual methods of voter contact: canvassing door to door and live person phone calls.  

Aside from a few places - Nevada and Philadelphia with UniteHERE, Arizona with a community coalition, and the Georgia run-offs -- canvassing just didn't happen on the Democratic side because of the pandemic. There were constant reports that the Trumpists were out on the doors, but this seemed to be a mixed bag. (Maybe too many of these folks got stuck on boat parades, another completely useless form of electioneering?) But the Pew survey suggests the amount of canvassing was actually quite restricted on both sides -- and quite targeted, amounting to 11 percent of voter contacts. Marginally more Blacks and Hispanics were door knocked than white voters.

The pandemic enormously heightened the importance of using phone calls as an election volunteer activity. Phoning also compensated somewhat for the geographical mismatch: though local volunteers are always the most effective messengers for a candidate, phoning can use volunteer energy among people who don't live in contested "battleground" states. Because so many of us never answer calls from unknown numbers, it strikes me as amazing 28 percent of voters report being contacted by a live caller.  They answered! The higher contact rate among older voters suggests that we may be more likely to answer our phones. And the pandemic itself may have increased the contact rate. Certainly early on, in August and September calling into Florida, I met many voters who seemed to have been cooped up for months with little human contact who were eager to chat while being helped to understand the rules for absentee voting. 

So did all that phoning actually do any good for our candidates? I think so, with two caveats. Callers need to be trained in whatever election information might be useful to the voter, such as what are the times and manners of casting a ballot. And also callers need to learn to establish a human connection with whoever answers the phone. This latter can be trained and practiced, but it is a high skill. 

From the small example amidst the vast coalitional effort I observed up close: the UniteHERE national phone bank developed a cadre of volunteers who could do it all; by the end of the Georgia run offs, I estimate this relatively small group of star talkers were turning up 2 to 4 voters each who otherwise might not have voted during each three hour shift. Less accomplished callers (I'm one) might be lucky to find one additional voter among 20 to 40 contacts with a human answering the phone during a shift.

Obviously, effective phone banking takes a lot of training, a lot of practice, a lot of shifts, and a lot of volunteers. And persistence. But something is accomplished if the election is closely fought.

And all-out citizen campaigning did prevail in Georgia, after all.