Tag Archives: Canvassing

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Thoughts on Winning Over Voters

Canvassing

Addressing Potential Voters is Increasingly Problematic.

With communication technologies, we often substitute the convenient for the best. We can break off a long friendship with a text. But so impersonal a message is arguably a long way from meeting to talk through a suddenly troubled relationship. Ditto to a friend in behalf of a particular political candidate. We should expect what is innately human: presenting ourselves and our words in real time and space. The timeless and innate defaults of discourse should not be lightly tossed aside. Among other things, disembodied messages enable all kinds of unintended noise. Just try reading someone’s body language in a Zoom meeting. It is like night driving with dark glasses.

voting

To be sure, there are obvious advantages to various electronic extensions. Mass media allow millions to receive a single message. We expect that the great and significant will come to us through many channels, sometimes low levels of retention. Skepticism is also justified given the number of “dark posts” that hide the actual sources of deceitful messages. These may ostensibly support a candidate, but deliberately offend readers in the process. If a campaign has enough money, there are also many ways to target voters using radio or cable advertising strategically.

And let’s make it even more complicated. Predicting elections through polling actually measures attitudes. We ask people what they think. But voting itself is a private behavior. As we all know, what people say and what they do can be two different things: a factor that might mean the possibility of a Trump polling undercount. After all, he is a convicted felon and, according to a federal judge, the rapist of E. Jean Carroll. Voters may prefer to hedge what they say to a pollster.

And so to a timely and practical question. How are voters for the upcoming election to be reached by candidates or committed activists?

As interesting or unsettling as it is, let’s aside the presidential race a moment. There are roughly 510,000 electoral offices in the United States. Many of those seeking support in a local election have no better option than to canvass their friends and neighbors door to door. Paid media is often too expensive. So is phone or direct mail enough to have a positive effect on a person’s voting behavior? As the 2000 study below suggests, neither form is likely to increase voter turnout.  At that time only in-person contact (via door to door canvasing or a live meeting with a candidate) are likely to move the needle. Canvassing increased the baseline of voter turnout by almost 10 percent.

Of course campaign tools are now more varied. We have many more ways to target voters, using public voter data and social media algorithms to reach potential supporters and voters. But getting real action may mean getting past the advertising clutter and stock appeals on social media to showing up as a citizen’s front door. One interesting study indicates that attitudes about transphobia could be moderated in about ten percent of the population if a personal appeal was made—again—at a homeowner’s front porch.

However promising these results, there is now reason to believe that our increasingly digital world  as well as the long interregnum of Covid pose challenges to engaging others on their doorstep.  A neighborly knock on the door seems to be greeted with more caution. One common alternative is to formally invite neighbors over to meet a candidate. In this  format a city council candidate visits perhaps four homes over several days where a supporter has promised to fill their living room with potential supporters.  The larger the constituency, the more the gathered group will hear from a volunteer, a candidate’s partner or staff member.

It is also good to remember that elections on won on the margins. Not everyone needs to be persuaded. In most cases a change of about 6 percent of those voting is enough to make the formerly defeated candidate the top vote getter.

No Effects?

Persuasion research is usually not in the spotlight. But it’s easy to see why this study made news. A “meta analysis” summarizing 49 research studies concluded that most messages in political campaigns have little or no impact on voters.  End of story. 

It’s my vocation to understand how and when people change their minds. This requires a sense of both the art and science of engineering consent: a tall order that is never easy.  Persuasion analysis is a business that needs humility. Even so, there is no shortage of serious and not so serious attempts to uncover pathways to attitude and behavior change.  Interest in this subject feeds off of the central roles that advertising, political campaigns, and social action campaigns play in our culture.

Any study of persuasion effects must yield to the general operating principle in communication that context matters; any conclusion about the effectiveness of persuasion must usually come with a lot of case-specific caveats.  Uniformity of effects across forms as different as political canvassing and advertising is not likely.  Given that basic assumption, it came as a complete surprise to see a spate of news reports about a recent study by two young political scientists claiming that a large number of field experiments found no or minimal effects for all kinds of campaign activities we take for granted.  The media at the center of the research included television advertising, person to person canvassing, phone calls and mail. The “meta analysis” summarizing 49 research studies found little or no impact on voters in any of these forms.

The uniformity of null effects was a shock. In the past, studies have suggested a range of different effects for different media: typically, with an edge going to one-on-one meetings with voters. Those of us studying these things have a general understanding of events like the 2008 Obama campaign, where the effects of internet-energized supporters and effective block-by-block canvassing produced a convincing win. Or so we think. Was that a different time?  What has changed? There is no equivocation in the final conclusion of authors Joshua Kalla and David Broockman:

The best estimate for the persuasive effects of campaign contact and advertising--such as mail, phone calls, and canvassing--on Americans' choices in general elections is zero.  Our best guess for online and television advertising is also zero. . ."1

To be sure, few persuasion researchers find evidence for widespread effects anywhere. The prevailing view is for only limited effects, typically “post message” percentages of attitude change in the low single digits. Even so, a study that argues against any significant effects seems too bold, too panoramic, and a bit disheartening. It’s somewhat like telling advertisers they are wasting their time and money.

The authors have added some exceptions. If we accept their work, messages do shape responses to ballot initiatives and some primary campaigns.  And in an earlier study they noted that activists for transgender and gay rights did reduce prejudice when they were able to  meet people at their doorstep. Personal stories of travail or unfairness struck home for undecided listeners.

 Our soap-opera politics has perhaps wrung out the possibility of an open mind among those who are still paying attention.

But the broad suggestion of a brick wall of “no effects” in campaigns is stark, and raises a number of questions. Are the studies’ measures of attitude and behavior change too crude to detect shifts? Did being a part of a study effect the results?  This problem–sometimes called the Hawthorne Effect–arises if subjects know they are subjects, and act accordingly.

Then, too, because all of the messages were focused on political campaigns, we may have reached a point where the persistence of attitudes now is much more common than even a decade ago. Our soap-opera politics has perhaps wrung out the possibility of an open mind within those who are paying attention.  In any case, the question of what works remains partly unanswered.

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1“The Miminal Persuasive Effects of Campaign Contact in General Elections: Evidence from 49 Field Experiments,” September 25, 2017, American Political Science Review.

2 “Durably Reducing Transphobia: A field Experiment on Door-to-Door Canvassing,” http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6282/220.