What Is Political Canvassing?
Political canvassing occurs when candidates, staff, or volunteers from a political campaign attempt to contact voters directly by going door-to-door. This door-knocking is part of an extensive outreach plan that helps put a face on a political campaign. The more people a candidate, staff, or volunteer of the political campaign reaches, the further the campaign’s message spreads.
Canvassing can help identify supportive voters, sign up voters to vote by mail, advance Get Out The Vote (GOTV) efforts, and persuade undecided voters leading up to the primary or general election.
How Effective Is Political Canvassing?
Research shows that canvassing can be pretty effective in some surprising ways.
One study from 2017 showed that canvassing worked especially well during primaries and when gathering signatures for ballot initiatives. Direct outreach was also the most effective form of community engagement or voter outreach conducted by campaigns at all levels, especially compared to phone banking.
Not to mention, canvassing is quite successful at helping with GOTV efforts and turning voters out on Election Day, especially when coupled with targeted address lists to help identify unregistered or undecided voters. Some campaigns have increased voter turnout by as much as 9% from canvassing alone. It's clear canvassing benefits the campaign in significant ways.
A candidate’s campaign must form a strategic canvassing plan that optimizes both the timing of the door-knocking and the targeting of voters.
Knowing Which Doors to Knock On
Public records show whether a person has registered to vote and what party they’ve voted for in the past. These records help establish your outreach universes. Having up-to-date, well-defined universes will help you put together walk sheets for your volunteers to use during their canvassing shifts.
Your outreach universes will help you break voters into categories (e.g., high-turnout undecided votes, low-turnout supportive voters, etc.). These distinctions and others will allow you to target voters based on what type of door-to-door canvassing is most effective for different parts of the campaign cycle. For example, you could target persuadable voters during the primaries and then shift your focus to helping voters get registered to vote or encouraging them to mail in their ballots during the GOTV phase of the general election (learn more about general vs. primary elections).
Canvassing can also be used once election night has come and gone to help cure provisional ballots in the case of an extraordinarily close race. Provisional ballots are votes cast by individuals not on the voting rolls during election day. They can still vote, but their eligibility will be determined later, which sometimes requires more information from the voter. Curing provisional ballots has even changed the race's results on election night.
Organizing Volunteers
Having field volunteers properly organized will maximize your campaign’s political canvassing efforts while ensuring you use your campaign’s resources as efficiently as possible.
Your field organizers will help you find, train, and manage your volunteers and canvassers. Canvassing training can then be done in groups or individually, depending on the size and needs of your field program.
During canvassing training, prepare your volunteers with walk sheets or canvassing software to guide them through their canvassing shifts. These sheets should include targeted voter information, and volunteers should fill out the sheets with information gathered from talking to voters. Such information will provide your campaign (and potentially other campaigns you run) with additional voter data for voter outreach.
You’ll also want to prepare and provide your volunteers with the appropriate campaign literature. They can take the literature with them into the field to drop at doorsteps, helping increase awareness of you as the candidate, even if no direct contact is made.
Finally, provide your volunteers with your campaign’s talking points for voter persuasion. Canvassing provides a great way to share the campaign’s message with voters and refine that message and campaign strategy based on voter reactions, questions, and feedback.
Political Canvassing Techniques
Here are a few canvassing tips and tricks that you, your campaign staff, and your campaign volunteers should use when canvassing for your political campaign:
- Stay polite: Not everyone will agree with your campaign’s mission, and many won’t answer the door. Don’t take these reactions personally and strive to remain polite, which makes a good impression on people—even when they disagree.
- Don’t be too pushy: Your goal is to be pleasantly persuasive. People may hesitate to listen, change their minds, or even open their doors. The right amount of pressure and goodwill can make a strong impression long after you’ve moved on to the next door.
- Keep moving: When canvassing, expect to spend an average of 1–3 minutes per door, with a goal of an average of 20 doors an hour. When someone does answer, spend no more than 3–10 minutes talking with them, enough time to establish a rapport while still making progress on making it through your entire walk sheet.
- Know that not all doors will open: Most doors you knock on while canvassing remain firmly shut. Some people hide in the house to avoid answering, so don’t linger for over 90 seconds. Instead, knock, provide time for them to answer, and then leave behind some campaign literature before moving on to the next door. That's the canvassing process.
- Collect questions and feedback: Volunteers aren’t expected to know the answer to every question a voter might have. Assuring voters that any questions that can’t be answered on the spot will be passed on to the candidate/campaign not only makes a good impression on the voter but also gives you and your campaign a chance to fine-tune your message and how it’s delivered.
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FAQs
- Is political canvassing considered soliciting or electioneering?
No. Political canvassing is distinct from soliciting because you aren’t asking anyone to buy a product. Rather, you’re reaching out to the community or communities you hope to serve. Beyond helping to get out the vote, the canvassing data exchanged through door-knocking will help you understand how efficiently your campaign is running. That information will also help you understand what issues matter to voters and how your message is received. - Is political canvassing the same thing as door-knocking?
Yes. The term “political canvassing” refers to one aspect of a political campaigns outreach efforts: knocking on doors and talking in person. Canvassing is a method that can be used for voter registration, fundraising, grassroots campaigns, primaries, and Get Out The Vote efforts. Other canvassing methods or voter outreach strategies include phone banking (phone calls to voters), mailers, TV spots, and social media ads.
