General Discussion

JudyM

(29,204 posts) Mon Mar 6, 2017, 11:35 PM Mar 2017

New group of Sanders Democrats aiming to generate deep voter info for Dem party

"Think of this as like a Terry Gross interview," Williams suggested, as they munched on pizza before heading out. "We're just trying to get them to open up a little more." Each volunteer toted a clipboard with several pages of questions ("How do you think the country will change in the next four years?" "Who do you think will benefit as a result of Trump being president?&quot designed to give structure to the conversation.

Knock Every Door... is an oddity among the hundreds of liberal groups that have popped up in the wake of Trump's election. The name gives away its mission; the group is focused on reaching two groups of voters: people who voted for Obama in 2012 and then flipped to Trump four years later, and the people who simply didn't vote at all.

... Knock Every Door wants to hear from the voters Clinton missed to make sure that doesn't happen again... The group plans to turn over the info it gathers to local Democratic groups, so that candidates will know who to connect with and how.

But the group also believes that the style of conversation itself, known as "deep canvassing," could play a part in winning these voters over.

...Its numbers are growing fast. In February, Knock Every Door joined forces with SwingLeft, a new organization formed after the election that matches progressive activists with the nearest competitive congressional district. Starting in March, SwingLeft's members will start going door-to-door in swing districts engaging in deep canvassing using the script distributed by Bond. The partnership expanded Bond's pool of volunteers by several orders of magnitude; within a few days of its first conference call with SwingLeft, Knock Every Door had picked up more than 800 new canvassers. So far members have already held 53 canvasses in 22 states.

... These post-election exercises share a common inspiration in the work of the Leadership Lab and its founder, Dave Fleischer, who began experimenting with deep canvassing after his state passed Prop 8, a constitutional amendment prohibiting same-sex marriage. Fleischer has offered pointers to Knock Every Door but has no role with the group. "It reminds me of 2008 in California," he said of the climate on the left today. "The polls all showed the LGBT issue winning, and then we lost. We didn't understand what had happened."

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/02/these-democrats-are-going-door-door-asking-trump-voters-simple-question