(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . How effective is canvassing for votes? [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-08-08 I hope this story will encourage more Dems to canvass. An acquaintance of mine expresses skepticism about whether canvassing works. If you have never canvassed then you probably think it has something to do with political persuasion. But you will mostly be visiting likely Democratic voters who are deemed to be relatively unlikely to vote. The main goal is to increase the voter rate among registered voters who are almost 100% certain to vote Democratic already. You will not be trying to persuade any registered Republicans, I occasionally encounter one if someone has moved or made a mistake and knocked on the wrong door. I have been canvassing recently in Wake County NC with wakedems.org. The current effort is called “Get Out the Organization”. Currently, the main purpose is to sign up more volunteers. The “get out the vote effort” will start later. I have also canvassed with the Hillary campaign and www.downhomenc.org. The research indicates that 2% and 12.8% of those contacted during door-knocking will vote due to the canvassing. This may be a bit of an underestimate due to an unmeasured contagion effect that brings in other votes. This data from Wikipedia and it is consistent with my other research: en.wikipedia.org/... My data indicates that I knock on about 15 doors per hour, one every 4 minutes. That includes walking/driving between houses, waiting at the door for about a minute, and entering data on my cell phone. We are using an app called miniVan for data entry. Most door knocks don’t result in a contact, but we leave literature. My contact rate is around 4 people per hour. The bottom-line estimate is that it takes between 2 and 12.5 hours of canvassing for me to add one Democratic vote to the voting box. Phone banking has a lower vote-per-contact rate. I am not sure if the vote-per-hour rate is as high. I have done some phone banking but I did not measure my contact rate per hour. Of course, if you can’t get to a swing state and your main goal is to put Kamala in office, then phone banking is your method of choice. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/8/8/2261625/-How-effective-is-canvassing-for-votes?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/