(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Just the Stats, Man!: Weekly Canvass Wrap-up from FL, GA, MI, NC, NV, OH, PA, WI & VA [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-08-11 Since March 4, Hope Springs from Field PAC volunteers have been knocking on doors (as weather permitted) in Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Virginia. These all are critical states that will determine who is President and which party controls the Senate in 2025. So, not much at stake. 4,370 volunteers came out to knock on doors for Hope Springs from Field last Saturday. We are now canvassing in 10 states with our systemic Deep Organizing, conversational approach designed to engage voters at their doors and elicit valuable information that will help Democrats during our Fall 2024 GOTV efforts. We also feel like this approach is a great introduction to canvassing for the volunteers who have never knocked on doors before, and especially for those volunteers who are intimidated by the activity. Hope Springs volunteers knocked on 332,510 doors. More than a third of this number comes out of Ohio, where we have been pushing hard to defeat Issue 1. Although only Saturday is included in the number above, for all of GOTV Week in Ohio, we hit 357,417 doors to turn out the vote. But we are giving volunteers larger pieces of turfs everywhere in the very walkable areas (as opposed to having them keep coming back for more), as we strive for the very ambitious 6 million doors knocked goal that volunteers set for themselves over the winter. Volunteers got to talk to 24,619 voters on Saturday. They opened the door and at least took our lit. A very high percentage of them will respond to our query about whether they are registered to vote at this address. Anywhere between 55% to 65% of the voters we actually talk to will agree to answer questions on our Issues Survey. But our number 1 piece of advise (something all our organizers are supposed to start with) when training volunteers is, Smile! When i lead trainings, i tell them to “Smile, because no one you talk to today will remember a single thing you say. But they will always remember the impression you left.” A DKos commenter told me that this was in line with Maya Angelou: I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. Hope Springs from Field volunteers walk with an Issues Canvass, where we ask voters what they think and whether they had a message for their elected officials. 15,431 voters answered questions from the survey, in whole or in part. By far, the highest response numbers always are in the second question, about what issue voters think “is most urgent” at this time (Q2). The “send a message to your Member” (Q5) is also very popular. And we are getting a lot of responses to the “Is there a single issue that will determine how you vote” question (Q7), too — something we added in 2022 because we were finding voters answering differently to the Top Issue question than to what was actually driving their vote. This is incredibly valuable information for those who do persuasion canvassing next year! Hope Springs from Field PAC has been knocking on doors since March in a grassroots effort to prepare the 2024 Electoral Battleground in what has been called the First and Second Rounds of a traditional Five Round Canvass. We are canvassing Democrats and unaffiliated voters with a systematic approach that reminds them not only that Democrats care, but Democrats are determined to deliver the best government possible to all Americans. Obviously, we rely on grassroots support, so if you support field/grassroots organizing, voter registration (and follow-up) and our efforts to protect our voters, we would certainly appreciate your support. You may note that we are asking for financial support for our GOTV and Ballot Curing efforts in Ohio right now to defeat Issue 1: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/hope4ohio Hope Springs from Field understands that volunteer to voter personal interactions are critical. Knocking on doors has repeatedly been found to be the most successful tactic to get voters to cast a ballot and that is the goal of what we do. We ask voters who talk to us whether they approve or disapprove of the job the president, their incumbent Senator (up for election this year), and how their governor is doing. After the primaries, we also ask about the Democratic Senate and nominees. But a very high percentage of the voters who provide responses to the Issues Survey will tell us what they think about their president, or senator or governor. But especially president. In Ohio, we ask supplemental questions related to Issue 1 which will be replaced by supplemental questions about the constitutional amendment on Ohio’s ballots in November after August 8th. In Florida, 53% of the voters we talked to who responded had a favorable impression of President Biden. 11% of voters approved of the job Senator Scott was doing last weekend. 9% had a favorable impression of Governor DeSantis last week. We are basically knocking on doors of households with Democratic and Independent voters; although we include households that are mixed households, with Republican voters in them. This change is an outgrowth of our experience dealing with mixed (Dem/GOP) households in the Georgia runoff and GOTV in Jacksonville. We have taken a Summer break in Arizona and plan to resume knocking on doors there after Labor Day. It’s just too darn hot there! In Georgia, 52% of the voters we talked to approved of the job President Biden was doing. Georgia doesn’t have a Senate election this cycle, our efforts here is a pure Electoral College play. 41% approved of the job Governor Kemp was doing. For awhile, after we started knocking on doors in the Atlanta metro region, Kemp’s approval had increased as we were including more white voters in our target universe. This trend seems to have returned. We shall see. We began knocking on doors in Michigan on the first Saturday in June. It’s a brand new state for us, but Michigan has an important, open Senate race in 2024 and remains a critical Electoral College Swing State. Among the voters we talked to in the 10th week, 54% had a favorable opinion of President Biden. 56% had a positive view of Gov. Whitmer. As noted in an earlier diary, we continue to find voters who tell us their governor is “a star!” Republicans got their first Senate candidate for the open seat currently held by Debbie Stabenow. We still expect more Democrats to enter the race, as well. Rain washed out our plans for Montana last Saturday. In Nevada, 54% of the voters Hope Springs from Field 317 volunteers talked to approved of the job President Biden was doing while 6% disapproved. 66% had a favorable impression of the job Jacky Rosen was doing. 5% disapproved. 38% of voters approved of the job Governor Lombardo was doing and 33% disapproved. After weeks of only being able to canvass in Reno, we finally got a full reading of the state. As expected, Lombardo benefitted from that, as he remains much better known in Las Vegas from his prior service as Clark County Sheriff. In North Carolina, 53% of the voters we talked to approved of the job President Biden was doing. 55% of the voters we talked to approved of the job Governor Cooper was doing. North Carolina is also a pure play for the Electoral College. It has no Class I senators, which is kind of unfortunate given what the North Carolina legislature is doing with it’s GOP supermajority. But we are trying to protect Democratic seats in the House, given the North Carolina Supreme Court ruling overturning the 2022 Congressional Map. There’s a lot of fear about what will happen. In Ohio, 57% of the 4,765 voters we talked to ON SATURDAY approved of the job President Biden was doing. 5% expressed disapproval. 69% approved of the job Sherrod Brown was doing; 4% disapproved. 17% approved of the job that Governor DeWine was doing and 44% disapproved. This was GOTV Week in Ohio, and 3,357 volunteers came out to knock on doors to defeat. This meant we were focusing on Democratic households and less on unaffiliated ones. But it worked. I will give details in a separate diary. Part of our focus in Ohio, though, is the possibility that Ohio’s Congressional Map may be redone. “New Ohio Statehouse and U.S. Congressional maps are due this year, just like they were last year. But political scientists in the state aren’t holding out hope that major changes are coming.” “In-fighting among Republicans has made any agreement at all uncertain” but we definitely want to protect the small gains we made there last year. In Pennsylvania, the 1,438 voters we spoke with gave Biden a 52% job approval rating; 7% disapproved. 66% of the voters we talked to approved of the job Bob Casey was doing in the Senate and only 6% disapproved. Governor Shapiro received a 55% approval rating last week. 6% disapproved. The nice canvassing weather last weekend really helped, and 428 volunteers came out to work the system. 365 volunteers came out to knock on doors on Saturday in Wisconsin. 53% of the 1,182 voters they talked to approved of the job President Biden is doing while 8% disapproved. 64% of them approved of the job Tammy Baldwin is doing in the Senate and 4% disapproved. This may have something to do with the fact that the Republicans who were being recruited to run against her have passed on the race. We are sure that the most competitive prospective opponents have decided to pass on challenging her next year. 53% of voters approved of the job Governor Evers is doing while 7% disapproved. We are wrapping up our Virginia canvassing in key Virginia state legislative districts again as candidates are starting to knock on doors. We are doing Early Organizing, and we intend to free up the volunteers who knock on doors for us when their campaigns starting doing so. 54% of the voters we talked to in Virginia approved of the job President Biden was doing. 6% disapproved. 67% approved of what Tim Kaine was doing in the Senate, while 4% disapproved. 23% of the voters we talked to, mostly independents to boot, approved of the job Gov. Youngkin was doing in the state. 34% expressed disapproval. If support our grassroots efforts to turn out voters opposed to Issue 1 in Ohio and to cure early vote ballots that are (usually) missing a signature, please help: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/hope4ohio Top 3 Issues in ea State Last Saturday Each week, we ask voters what is the “most urgent issue facing” us today. Lots of concern about the Economy and Jobs. Reproductive Healthcare continues to motivate voters, not just on this question (Top Issue facing the nation). It dominates our “Single Issue that will determine your vote” question. Given all the attention devoted to the Ohio special election this week, it is hardly surprising that Reproductive Rights was very prominent right now. Schools also featured here. 103 people filled out new voter registration forms for their states during last weekend’s canvassing. I write forms but most often these are completed on a tablet from their state’s election administrative website. Another 367 voters updated their address, as required by HAVA. We differentiate between the two, though, because brand new voters are often ignored by campaigns and we hope to compensate for that somewhat by having volunteers send them post cards before the election and they are also getting robocalls thanking them for registering. You can see that the number of voters registered is not a function of the number of volunteers present or doors knocked. Clearly, they help, but there’s no guarantee that more doors equals more voters registered. Even though registering voters is a primary rationale behind early canvassing, it is not the only one. Just wanted to point that out. We collected 839 Constituent Service Request Forms last week. In general, we send these to Democratic elected officials responsible for the requested functions, but if the appropriate office is held by a Republican, we still send it along. For Democrats, though, we encourage them to reach out immediately to the voter who filled out the CSR and let them know they are working on the issue. This credit-taking is enormously valuable to the Democratic office-holder. We continue to walk with Incident Reports, and we ask people who say they are concerned about the upcoming general election if they want to fill one out. Last Saturday, 12 voters filled out Incident Reports, detailing acts of voter intimidation or voter suppression they witnessed in a prior election. We pass along Incident Reports to the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights and NALEO (those that correspond to Hispanic precincts), and send copies to state Democratic Party committees. But our purpose is to combine this information with the two independent databases of voting incidents to look for patterns before the election and use that information for warning district, state and U.S. attorneys’ offices that we could see those patterns resurface on election day. We will also use it to target Election Day Protection activity. By starting early, and aiming towards super-compliance with these really, really onerous provisions in some states, Hope Springs from Field PAC seeks to undermine that strategy, while informing voters about the new laws and regulations aimed at them. There’s a lot of work to be done, but fortunately, the three states that are making it most difficult are also states in which you can knock on doors at least 10 months out of the year. And, with your help, we will be there, getting our people to super-comply with these restrictive provisions. I am aware of the volume of data presented in this post. But it is the result of the data we collect at the door, to be entered in VAN and accessible by all Democratic candidates who utilize VAN this Fall. The focus on the “horse-race” aspect of this data is unintentional, because the data is what the it is. It is useful for Democratic candidates and provides paths to victory for data-driven candidates (which most campaigns are these days). We really do need financial support to continue these efforts. If you are able to support our efforts to protect Democratic voters, especially in minority communities, expand the electorate, and believe in grassroots efforts to increase voter participation and election protection, please help: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/hope4ohio If you would rather send a check, you can follow that link for our mailing address, as well. Thank you for your support. This work depends on you! [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/11/2186436/-Just-the-Stats-Man-Weekly-Canvass-Wrap-up-from-FL-GA-MI-NC-NV-OH-PA-WI-VA 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/