Tag Archives: Donald Trump

The Canvassing Imperative

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Of course we can do politics at a distance through all kinds of dreary media: direct mail, tweets, television advertising, robocalls and other poor substitutes for direct citizen action.  But there’s a better option.

In the age of video politics and social media it may come as a surprise that political canvassing survives as a vital way to connect with voters.  Though for many it may seem like a stretch to actually show up at someone’s front door and ask for their support, thousands of Americans are comfortable doing it.  Canvassing is a proven way to increase a candidate’s chances.  One study indicated a 10 percent increase in the likelihood a voter will show up on election day if they have met someone from the campaign.

We have over 500,000 elective offices in the United States. Most are for small districts, featuring local candidates who cannot afford TV buys or big campaign budgets. The solution?  Put your supporters, friends and family to work going door to door and asking voters for their support.  It’s always been an important feature in American political life.  This humble approach is even credited with Barack Obama’s impressive presidential win in 2008. The former Chicago organizer seemed to remember a thing or two about mobilizing neighborhoods.  In that year thousands were mobilized for a street by street effort in key states, spreading enthusiasm from one front porch to the next.

When insiders talk about a good “ground game” this is partly what they mean.  It’s no wonder that the emerging wisdom in campaign strategizing is to put less money into video ads and more into organizing recruits to knock on the doors of the still undecided.

Social media and face to face canvassing share the common thread of a more interpersonal approach to political persuasion.  The canvas in particular is a hopeful exercise in direct citizen to citizen action.  By comparison, candidates who phone in a plea for support via robocalls seem positively lazy .

Two recent developments are reminders of the importance of canvassing. One is a new book by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes on the failed 2016 Clinton campaign.  Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign lays part of her defeat to the fact that her staff did not follow the Obama playbook of fully committing to get-out-the-vote efforts. Of course neither did the victor’s campaign.  But Donald Trump in 2016 was an outlier in so many ways that it is risky to view his path to the White House as a bellwether.

The second development comes from recent reports that some of the parties fighting for dominance in the French elections are trying out American-style canvassing. The tradition is deeply entrenched in Britain, but not across the Channel in France, where talking politics at the front door of a stranger’s home is considered unusual.  But it reflects a feature that motivates so much effective canvassing: an urgency at the grassroots to do something to stave off an election disaster: in this case, what some fear could be a Trump-style victory by far-right candidate Marine Le Pen.  Whatever the outcome of the final vote on May 7, the result is good for democracy in France.  More citizens will have engaged in meaningful contact with their neighbors on a vital question worthy of their effort.

Few householders are hostile.  And most seem surprised that someone cares enough to show up.

Of course we can do politics at a distance through all kinds of dreary media: direct mail, tweets, television advertising, robocalls and other mechanical means that are poor substitutes for direct citizen action.  But all are disembodied, remote and impersonal.  Only social media come close to rendering an impression of direct contact with others we know.  And even that is partly an illusion: something short of a genuine conversation with a  neighbor in real time and space.

A modern canvasser should not expect a cakewalk.  Many doorbells will not be answered. And some campaigns send their workers to the wrong houses (a micro-targeting challenge that is never easy).  But few householders are hostile.  Most seem surprised that someone cares enough to show up.  And all seem grateful that the canvasser isn’t launching into a lecture about eternal salvation.

The Limits of Forbearance

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It remains to be seen how long Americans will accept a drama queen as President: how long it will be before their forbearance for the man who can’t fill the part is tapped out.

This site is all about maximizing the chances for success in connecting with others. But if we flip that goal over, we get an equally interesting effect by testing the limits of behavior a mile wide of the norm.

I’ve been thinking about this watching television news people on cable networks, trying not to register shock that the President of the United States has just trashed another convention of the presidency.  News people are expert for keeping calm in the presence of disorder and rudeness. Serious and accomplished reporters can be very good for taking any act and trying to place it into a context that normalizes it for the beat they are covering.  This is partly a function of their self-definitions as professional observers.

Those of us with shorter fuses may not have this kind of professional elan.  But that’s what forbearance gives us: the use of euphemism and “just the facts” to keep an offensive act from devolving into a comedy of manners.

 We would never think to associate public acts so careless and random as authentic  examples of “presidential rhetoric.”

It’s not too much to say that this President has seriously undermined the conventional role functions of the Presidency.  We would never think to associate public acts so careless and random as authentic  examples of “presidential rhetoric.”  But we’ve had over fifty days of them, and then on one recent Saturday:  an astonishing and libelous tweet accusing President Obama of tapping phones at Trump Tower, followed minutes later by  a second missive expressing giddy delight that a reality star was cancelling his show. These rants came a few days after Trump gave us the wide-eyed and definitive insight that “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.”

Nobody? That must have struck analysts and experts in three previous administrations as news.  No one else had apparently been able to grasp the complexities of American health care.

These combined responses and many more like them seem like evidence for what’s known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect, a condition where an individual with limited competencies lacks even the capacity to understand how limited they are.  No wonder one of the dominant tropes emerging in the coverage of this president is of a man-child.

Donald Trump’s over 500 angry, misspelled and boorish Tweets alone would have disqualified him for leadership in most large organizations.  Can we assume that one day these rhetorical ejaculations will greet visitors at his Presidential library?

To be sure, we grant every White House occupant some non-presidential moments: Nixon angrily shoving his press secretary toward journalists, Johnson showing photographers a surgery scar on his fat belly, Ford diving head-first down the stairs of his airplane, Clinton lying about his relations with Monica Lewinsky, George W. Bush commenting at a press conference on the British Prime Minister’s brand of toothpaste.

But nothing has scratched the mostly pristine finish of the institutional Presidency like Trump. He has entire seizures of misdirected utterance and grotesque overstatement. His willful ignorance, bluster and conspiracy-mongering, are not just unpresidential, but anti-presidential. His penchant for turning almost every claim into an accusation and most statements into shaky affirmations of his fragile ego has made his short tenure an unintended psychodrama: an embarrassment to be endured.  His first address to Congress showed that he can follow linear thinking if it is fully scripted.  Yet he seems uninterested in the kinds of details and substantive exchanges that the press and public long for.  So it remains to be seen how long Americans will accept a drama queen as President.  Like a school play, the mishaps and miscues are sometimes funny.  But how long  will we accept this bad actor before our forbearance is tapped out?

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Gary C. Woodward has written about the Presidencies of Woodrow Wilson, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.