At People's Action, we believe people like you and me can make the best decisions for our lives and for our country. That's why we're spending these last few weeks before the election reaching out to undecided voters.
At People’s Action, we believe in the power of our votes that ordinary people, when we put our minds together, can make good decisions for their own lives and for our country. Democracy is our guiding principle. That’s why our volunteers, all across the country, are spending these last few weeks before the election reaching out to undecided voters.
Yet I often hear people say their votes don’t matter. “Why should I even bother?” they say when I ask when they plan to vote.
I never take the right to raise my voice through democracy for granted. So I always vote, and expect my daughters and loved ones to vote, too. So let me tell you the difference your vote can make.
In 2016, many were shocked when Donald Trump won the presidency, even though he lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes. That’s because Trump won the Electoral College, which awards votes by state in a winner-take-all system, 304 to 227 - well more than the 270 needed to secure the White House.
Trump won popular victories of less than one percent in three states: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. Yet with these three, he got 46 electoral votes, which pushed him into victory nationwide.
At People’s Action, we wanted to dig deeper. So we looked closely at the numbers, and discovered that in these three states, only 77,744 votes in a handful of rural counties delivered the national victory to Trump.
Now, we’re organizers, right? And we have strong member groups in these states. So we came up with a plan to change the hearts and minds of these voters the old-fashioned way: one conversation at a time. We already knew many rural and small-town Americans felt left behind and ignored by the Democratic Party. And we also knew Donald Trump was not offering them any real solutions.
How could we change their hearts and minds? With an innovative technique we call Deep Canvassing. We engage people through conversation around their real concerns and values, rather than just pressing towards a specific outcome.
With Deep Canvassing, you always listen first. So in 2017 with Down Home North Carolina, we piloted a community listening project in two low-income, rural counties, Alamance and Haywood, which voted for Trump in 2016. We knocked on over 5,000 doors and completed 1,078 surveys to find out what was of most concern to these communities. We then expanded through People’s Action member organizations into ten states, with a priority on rural counties that had voted for Obama then flipped for Trump.
Many spoke of the challenges of keeping a roof over their heads and food on the table. There was an underlying current of financial insecurity, and the resulting stress and health problems that resulted from it. There was also broad agreement that our nation needs to do a better job to guarantee healthcare and protect our land and water.
Then Covid hit. No longer able to deep canvass in person, we experimented over the phone, and were astonished by the results. We found many people, regardless of their views, welcomed an open-hearted conversation with a complete stranger.
By the end of the 2020 election cycle, 20,000 volunteers had joined our effort. They made 9 million phone calls and held 280,000 deep canvass conversations across battleground states.
48 percent of those we contacted increased their support for Biden, and one out of every four undecided voters we talked with made a commitment to vote for Biden. Of the seven states we deep canvassed in 2020, four flipped for Biden: Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Two more held and expanded Democrats’ margins of victory: Minnesota and New Hampshire.
These numbers are big. According to an academic study of these efforts by David Broockman and Josh Kalla, our technique is more than a hundred times more effective than traditional persuasion, with longer-lasting results. They assessed our impact to be larger than Trump’s margin of victory in nine key battleground states, including Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which translated into 108 electoral votes for Biden, well more than Trump’s 2016 margin of victory.
We know deep canvassing works. So since then, we’ve doubled down, expanding our deep canvasses around divisive issues, like immigration and climate change, and founding the Deep Canvass Institute with the New Conversation Initiative to develop and share the best practices of this technique all across our network, as well as with other movement partners.
In the 2022 midterms, we and our member groups contacted over 2 million voters, helping Michigan win a governing trifecta for Democrats, expanding progressive caucuses in state houses and legislatures, and electing progressive champions as governor and to the U.S. House of Representatives in Pennsylvania.
Our proudest victories came in places like Cabarrus County, North Carolina, where Diamond Staton Williams, a Black nurse, won for the first time in an upset victory by only 425 votes. She is now favored to win reelection, and represented North Carolina and the Democratic National Convention this summer.
Down Home has a motto, which our Movement Politics program has adopted: "Elect Working People for Everything." Because when representatives like Staton Williams, who come from and truly represent their communities, are elected, it restores local communities’ faith in the power government can have to improve both our daily lives and our future.
That’s why, in 2024, we’re going even bigger: we plan to nearly double the number of undecided voters we’ll reach with deep canvass conversations to nearly half a million. This year, we have a laser focus on undecided and uncommitted voters in Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada.
We are already well on our way: we’ve made over 150,000 calls into battleground states, with more shifts and volunteers being added every day. In our deep canvass conversations, we are hearing things from conflicted voters about issues that don’t get captured by the polls and in headlines, and are learning about the common ground that can bring us together after the election.
This election will be decided by undecided voters. Through deep canvassing, we have found a way to meet people where they are, and to bring them towards a shared understanding of how we can make our country better, together. We are confident that we can win nationally in November, and just as important - that we can continue to elect champions for our communities up and down the ballot, because this is what restores voters’ faith in our democratic process and our ability to improve the quality of our communities’ lives with government that works for us.
That is the power of your vote.
