Outside our campaigning comfort zone

I have very warm feelings toward Doug Jones, the Democratic Alabama Senator whose surprise election in 2017 proved that Republicans had not completely lost all sense of decency when they flocked to Donald Trump. Jones had an appealing record, having prosecuted and convicted in 2001 two of the white men who bombed Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963. He's an all round good guy and voters preferred him to a wacko racist and accused pedophile. Nobody (except maybe Jones' campaign) thinks deep red Alabama is likely to re-elect Jones in November; partisanship is too powerful for Alabama white voters. But Jones' campaign is taking a bold tack as he tries to hang on. He's accusing his opponent, college football coach Tommy Tuberville, of caring more for Donald Trump than for the citizens of the state. Take a look at this ad:

Jones aims straight at Republican threats to health care access and Social Security, as most Democrats do. But he also, probably accurately, accuses his opponent of running to be a Trump suck-up. It's a bold move when most Republicans including Tuberville have competed to win primaries by demonstrating how submissive they can be to the Orange Cheato. 

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Also outside campaign norms, In These Times reports on intriguing experiments with canvassing in rural North Carolina where preserving Confederate monuments and resisting a feared immigrant invasion are common sentiments. Local organizing groups think they've found a way to train canvassers to have deep conversations that can reach conservative voters. Their contacts find themselves cross-pressured between fear of the unfamiliar and attachment to humane values. 

“We need to specifically talk about race and class,” said Danny Timpona, an organizer with Down Home North Carolina. “The Democratic Party might talk about class or they might talk about race, but they’re not talking about both of these things and how they pull at each other. We’re specifically pointing it out. We’re naming that this is a weapon that is economically harming us, and that the alternative, the antidote, is multiracial solidarity.” ...

 

“What we find with the majority of voters is they’re conflicted,” [Adam] Kruggel [from People's Action] said. “People carry all these contradictory beliefs. Often times, it’s more a matter of what is rising to the surface than a conflict in shared values. Deep canvassing helps slow people down. When you communicate, you create nonjudgmental space and lead with listening. You communicate through stories. It’s an effective way to de-polarize, to a certain extent.”

I'm always a little skeptical when social scientists and professional organizers claim to have come up with new techniques which will enable canvassers to make major inroads with otherwise antagonistic people. I understand that we'd all like to reduce how to carry on a successful persuasion campaign to a formula that could be taught. And we often give our magic bullet a very serious label like "deep canvassing" or “the “Race-Class Narrative.” Such claims probably play well with donors. 

But the struggle to make door-knocking effective will always be tough. Some people who do it take to it. Training can make these naturals better, pointing them toward techniques to have more effective conversations. But scaling up to produce multitudes of canvassers who lack a preexisting sympathetic gift-for-gab is not formulaic. Campaigns keep trying.

The In These Times story is nonetheless interesting.