The study got a huge amount of attention. Mehrdad Azemun is Senior Strategist at Peoples Action. Oops. Broockman says that public opinion about gay people has improved by 8.5 points between 1998 and 2012. In the experiment on immigration, Broockman and Kalla found that 78 percent of all the people who came to the door when the canvasser rang ended up staying for the entire conversation. To combat that, canvassers tried to get voters to reflect about challenging decisions they had made in their own sex lives or relationships or times they were judged harshly. In Maine, using deep conversation to reach voters, NPR, 2021 (Podcast 4 minutes), Deep Canvassing Toolkit, Neighbours United, 2022 (5 pg PDF). #KnockEveryDoor serves as a nationwide hub for progressive canvassing training and deployment. Deep Canvassing in Action - The Leadership LAB He calls it "deep canvassing. Does this give us any guidance on how to talk to folks we dont agree with? 4. But research shows that the impact of our deep canvass conversations can last nine months or longer. The study's conclusions differ from the conclusions of the LaCour's falsified study from 2014 in one crucial way, Broockman says. Steve Deline has been organizing around the methodology of deep canvassing, across multiple movements, for 13 years. Though there is scant research on transgender prejudice, what is known suggests transgender people face widespread prejudice and discrimination, Aaron Norton and Gregory Herek wrote in their 2012 study of heterosexual attitudes toward transgender Americans. After the canvassing, 29 percent of the people in the placebo condition said they strongly supported policies inclusive of undocumented immigrants. Taken advantage of us. At Peoples Action, he helped build and execute a groundbreaking immigration Deep Canvass experiment in the fall of 2019 that targeted rural voters and persuaded them on pro-immigrant perspectives. Though Fleischer thought his new approach was working, he wanted to know whether the persuasion lasted. As Fleischer returned to the discrimination she had faced, Nancy paused and said, It felt terrible. A few minutes later, when he asked her if she saw a connection between your experience and how you want to treat transgender people, she said she did. Broockman points out that this graph shows the impacts of deep canvassing among all people who came to the door to answer the canvassers questions. "Burning the mental calories to do effortful thinking about it, that leaves a lasting imprint on your attitudes," he says. While a discussion of transgender rights can trigger deeply ingrained feelings about sex and gender roles, the issue is also a fairly recent political consideration for many people. "We found non-trans allies had a lasting effect as well," Broockman says. The groups feared a backlash against a recent ordinance that prohibited discrimination based on gender identity. Its almost the opposite of growing up today in the age of Facebook and political polarization, where its easy to always be among like-minded people, your self-isolation complete before you have your first beer., At first, Fleischer and his team tried cerebral arguments and appeals to fairness in their doorway conversations with same-sex-marriage opponents who didnt express deep religious objections. They still felt more positively about transgender people than those who had gotten the unrelated canvass. People are what makes Advancement advance. It costs money. director of the Leadership LAB at the . Support our mission and help keep Vox free for all by making a financial contribution to Vox today. Deep canvassing, a relatively new technique, is showing promise and is backed by rigorous testing from researchers and activists in the field. But maybe not when it comes to our neighbors. He ran a phone program in the 2020 general election that canvassed over 15,000 people in battleground states, and also led the deep-canvassing phones program in support of the Minneapolis public safety charter amendment in 2021. It also takes time to get a canvass up and running and for volunteers or paid staff to get good at delivering. There were days it was just hard to face that and everything that I was going through with my transition at the time. But what weve learned by having real, in-depth conversations with people is that a broad swath of voters are actually open to changing their mind. No, Im sorry, she said. This is not just a story of pushing on an open door and taking people who are already Democrats and they just needed a small push, Broockman adds. You will also need a team of at least three full-time organizers, which is the majority of the budget, and you need a dedicated team of volunteers (ideally 200 or so). Then theres the duration and longevity of the impact. It also seemed to bolster the contact hypothesis theory of prejudice reduction, which finds that personal contact decreases bias against a minority group. The effort helped defeat the anti-L.G.B.T. The two other experiments in the study targeted transphobia. The goal is to share personal stories about times when the voter and the canvasser felt attacked or discriminated against, says Nancy Williams, a volunteer canvasser with the LGBT Center. David Fleischer discusses best practices to approach deep canvassing to impact the mind of voters efficiently. To run a canvass you need staff, office space, voter lists, technology and more. Possibly. Modern political campaigns have focused mostly on communicating with people who already agree with them and turning them out to vote, Fleischer says. A shocked and embarrassed Green requested that Science retract the study; soon after, Princeton rescinded a teaching offer to LaCour. Please enter a valid email and try again. Volunteers who want to work on an election happening in their community or a nearby community will have the option to use a fill-in-the-blank style voter ID or GOTV script. For instance, Donald Trump won Michigan by 10,000 votes. In 2016, Broockman and Kalla showed that a 10-minute deep canvass conversation could reduce transgender prejudice for at least three months (you might recall this study was a redo of a previous experiment, from a separate team of researchers, which was retracted due to falsified data). One canvasser stood up and spoke of moving a man to a seven from a three. In 2012, Steve embedded with the Minnesotans United marriage equality campaign, which mobilized over 14,000 LGBTQ and ally volunteers to have more than 220,000 deep canvass conversations on the phones, contributing to a first-ever ballot box victory that many thought impossible. What are the drawbacks of this method? As part of the LA LGBT Center's groundbreaking Leadership LAB team, he helped create the original deep canvass approach. (Also worth noting: Deep canvassing has only been tested with progressive causes. How Do You Change Voters Minds? activists in another state. There might be a couple of reasons for that. The Leadership LAB Over the next few minutes, she recounted several instances of racism after moving to Los Angeles from Central America with her husband. Training resources will include a structured training pipeline of live calls and webinars, training guides, recorded videos, and volunteer-to-volunteer coaching calls. Its a type of conversation thats closer to what a psychotherapist might have with a patient than a typical political argument. In the runup, conservative news outlets were blaring headlines about a scary immigrant caravan marching north through Mexico to the US southern border. Specifically, the canvasser asks the voter to recall a time when he or she was discriminated against. There are other potential problems. The experiment, like all the ones in the study, was run a bit like a drug trial: The voters were randomly assigned (before the canvassers even knocked on their doors) to receive either the full deep canvassing conversation treatment, a watered-down version where the voters and canvassers dont exchange personal stories, or a placebo condition, where voters were engaged in a conversation that had nothing to do with immigration. In the face of this defeat, the Leadership LAB was established at the LA LGBT Center to embark on a radical project - knocking on voters' doors to learn why and make a case for love. See below for examples around particular issues including climate change and marriage equality. Since then, Matthew has organized around disaster relief in Houston after Hurricane Harvey, and worked as a regional field director for the Bernie Sanders Campaign in Northern Nevada. LaCour, joined late in the process by Green as a co-author, published the results in the December 2014 issue of Science. This article covers the basic components of a deep canvassing script. Have a Conversation, academic study referenced by the New York Times that was published by political scientists David Broockman and Josh Kalla, http://www.vox.com/2014/11/13/7214339/campaign-ground-game. Connecting and Inspiring Voters Through Deep Canvassing - MyLO This toolkit is full of useful links to materials they have developed and shared including Climate Action Scripts online and in person, Script Iteration Examples and lots of training resources. Just dive in. Though the abortion debate is less obviously rooted in prejudice than transgender discrimination, Fleischer and his canvassers noticed that many voters reacted negatively to a short video of a middle-aged woman recounting having an abortion when she was 22. The canvasser shares vulnerably about their own life and asks curious questions to create mutual understanding grounded in lived experience. Topping and dozens of other canvassers were a part of that 2016 effort. Listening to a political opponents concerns. Its also a challenge to change a campaigns habits and make the goal of canvassing be to successfully relate to other people. An excellent introduction to deep canvassing and the work of the Leadership LAB can be found in an April 2016 feature article in the New York Times Magazine: How Do You Change Voters Minds? I know Im in favor of gays, because Ive worked with them and socialized with them, she said. How Do You Change Voters' Minds? Have a Conversation There's this belief that if we just say the . The video ends like this. And he can grow a better beard than I can!. Have a Conversation. Keep in mind the media environment the canvassers were working in. A Qualitative Examination of Dialogical Elements in Anti-Racist Deep gets them to begin thinking hard about the issue. Those who had discussed prejudice they'd experienced felt about 10 points more positively toward transgender people, on average. One of the challenges at #KnockEveryDoor is to take a traditional organizing practice that assumes volunteers can be extensively trained and managed by staff and translate it into a distributed organizing model. I think theyre wonderful. But there is a similarity, because at the root theres the feeling of being judged, of having someone make assumptions about you, and that does not feel good.. KnockEveryDoors canvassing methodology is based on the groundbreaking work of the Leadership LAB at the Los Angeles LGBT Center. In addition to being a strong persuasion medium, for some issue areas, the deep canvass can also help to serve as an effective voter research tool as well. I have to teach my hamster to speak Finnish today., Gardiner turned to the volunteers. Susmik Lama is a one-and-a-half generation Nepali immigrant to the United States, born and raised in Kathmandu, Nepal, who now calls Philly home. Committing to curiosity rather than assumptions or judgment. Follow The Great Battlefield and others on SoundCloud. Subscribe to the newsletter for new resources every month. See video at 10:20 mins for script development process. We hope to provide both new and seasoned grassroots activists with a quality canvassing training that will allow them to enhance their local power building around whichever issue or candidate of their choice. But things fell apart when David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, then graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, tried to use LaCour's methods to study prejudice against transgender people. To run an ad campaign you just need a bank account and a media consultant. And its this meta-perception, Bruneau finds, that then fuels ongoing conflict and dehumanization. In this graph, Broockman and Kalla break down how the canvassing moved the needle on particular questions: whether the government should provide attorneys for undocumented immigrants in legal proceedings; whether the US should grant legal status to people who were brought to the US illegally as children; whether they support deporting all undocumented immigrants; and whether undocumented immigrants should live in fear of daily deportation. Ellas earliest organizing focus was on developing innovative tactics to recruit, train and retain large, dedicated volunteer teams with the Oregon Student Association at the University of Oregon. Dates: March 31 from 1:00-2:00 PM EST and April 7 from 1:00-2:00 PM EST. Thats not known.). These conversations arent arguments. LaCour's misconduct only made them more determined to do the study for real. The biggest gift you can give someone whose mind you want to change is a supportive environment that lets them think about their experiences and how those experiences affect their opinions on issues. David Fleischer is the Director of the Los Angeles LGBT Center's Leadership LAB. The effects of most efforts to change peoples minds on an issue, if successful at all, tend to fade over time. Finding common humanity. That means not making assumptions based on the voters age, race or their religion. Treat it like the most normal thing in the world. In terms of the length of the canvass program, you have to look at the outcome you are trying to achieve. With COVID-19, Is Deep Canvassing the Key to Defeating Trump in 2020 With a deep canvass, we want to figure out whats relevant to voters. Our organizing philosophy was outlined in the book Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything which was co-authored by Becky Bond, one of the volunteer chief organizers at #KnockEveryDoor and featuring stories about several other co-founding staff and volunteers who worked together on the Bernie Sanders 2016 presidential campaign, including Texas Zack Malitz, Hannah Fertig, Lynn Hua, Sam Ghazey, Cole Edwards, Kenneth Pennington, Hector Sigala and Max Cotterill. But not both.". LGBT Center volunteers went out to canvass hundreds of people. In favor, she assured him. Proven Persuasion and Inoculation: Breakthroughs in Deep Canvassing Deep canvassing is an approach to conversations which is non-judgemental and invites people to open up about their real conflicted feelings on an issue. What a roller coaster of emotions," he says. Leadership LAB - Los Angeles LGBT Center And while the effects may be small, only moving opinion a handful of percentage points among those canvassed may be worth it, too. Social science experiments are usually conducted on college campuses, in a lab, in contrived scenarios. New distinctions Rather, the deep canvass is built on a different set of assumptions than a traditional canvass. Were just beginning to learn how to do this well, but its important. Deep Canvassing to Shift Hearts, Mind and Votes. 3. Topping, whos nonbinary, and others, went door to door. I'm David McRaney, and this is the final segment about deep canvassing. Since joining Peoples Action, Matthew has been a part of two of the largest deep canvass campaigns ever run. Broockman and Kalla point to Leadership Lab canvassers ability to engage voters in two prejudice-reduction behaviors at the door: perspective taking (the ability to empathize with anothers experience) and active processing (deep or effortful thinking). Over the last eight years, and through more than 12,000 conversations, The Leadership LAB has developed a new kind of persuasion they call deep canvassing. The woman eventually told Riley that she had voted against gay marriage in California, but that she now regretted that choice. He and LGBT Center volunteers began talking to as many people as they could, trying to understand why they lost Prop 8. During a 2013 trip to New York City, he visited the Columbia University political-science professor Donald Green, whose experiments on voter behavior including his findings that canvassing is a more effective mobilization tool than telephone calls or direct mail partly inspired a focus on building a ground game, a strategy mastered by the Obama campaign. We have a national reputation for our success developing practical, positive, non-partisan, non-judgmental ways to connect with voters. It was an important study: Not only has social science found very few strategies that work, in experiments, to change minds on issues of prejudice, but even fewer tests of those strategies have occurred in the real world. We can change the minds of 1 in 10 people we talk to. In aggregate, it turns out these tactics dont work at all. You can do training and prep together prior to canvassing and then come back and debrief afterward. Whats missing here, she says, is a theoretical understanding for why the change is occurring. Instead of pelting voters with facts, we ask open-ended questions and then we listen, Dave Fleischer, the LGBTQ rights organizer who developed the technique, told me in 2016. Whats the best way to convince a voter at the door? The fight to make it harder for landlords to evict their tenants. I see transgender people as the same as I see myself, Nancy told him. Well use these conversations at the door to engage people who are currently sitting out elections, to recruit the people who are already with us to volunteer, and to persuade people who supported Trump but have a shared interest in our agenda of racial and economic justice. . The Los Angeles LGBT Center's Leadership LAB (Learn Act Build) specializes in deep canvassing and organizing through volunteer leadership development. Deep Canvassing - Western Wisconsin Votes Nancy Williams, right, who is transgender, talks with a voter as part of a canvassing effort in Los Angeles. This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. people, with a current focus on transgender discrimination didnt take to the golf-ball suggestion, but Fleischer wanted me to know that he is not opposed to stealing a good idea from the Mormons.. Sample Scripts for Deep Canvassing: Signature Gathering and Voter Research, CallHub, 2022 (Online article). #KnockEveryDoor will support volunteers in several ways: First, we will train volunteers. In this conversation, recorded in March 2016, a Leadership LAB volunteer speaks with a voter in Los Angeles about including transgender people in non-discrimination laws using the same approach that was studied by Broockman and Kalla in Miami in 2015. Volunteers may also canvass as part of an issue-specific advocacy campaign. 2. Who can you reach with a deep canvass? Paid for by Up PAC and not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee. One of the highest impact and lowest cost strategies for building power in our communities and taking back our democracy is to radically increase the number of conversations between volunteers and voters. Give me a few years, and I know Ill be a 10!, How Do You Change Voters Minds? Think back to the last time you changed your mind about something important. She ended a solid 10, a rating he was confident could survive opposition messaging. Knocking on a strangers door is scary, and a lot of that mornings training session was spent boosting the confidence of first-time canvassers. The Personal Leadership Canvas is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. . Hes married to a woman now, and hes so much happier. She said she was trying to evolve on the issue, though. We have a national reputation for our success developing practical, positive, non-partisan, non-judgmental ways to connect with voters. Its only right. "We had a certain sense of responsibility.". "Canvassers asked people to talk about a time they were treated differently. Nancy laughed. President Trump called it an invasion, apparently hoping that by raising xenophobic, dehumanizing fears about nonwhite immigrants, as he had in 2016, hed help his party win seats in Congress. Theres still a script, but its designed to help the canvasser build a good rapport with a voter. To Change Voters' Sympathies, It's Time to Go Deep In many campaigns, polling data and focus groups tell us that very few people are persuadable, so we ignore those voters and stick with talking to the voters who are already on our side. These scientists keep proving that reducing prejudice is possible. That means you need to create 100,000 conversations to change 10,000 minds and win the vote. As a result, our elected officials are reflecting the communities they represent less and less. Remarkably, we dont know very much about what forms of campaign communications are most persuasive, he said. All Muslims are often blamed for single acts of terror. Nancy Williams, right, who is transgender, talks with a voter as part of a canvassing effort in Los Angeles. The experiment divided voters into a treatment group engaged in a conversation intended to reduce transgender prejudice and a placebo group targeted with a conversation about recycling. In short, very little, she writes in the same issue of Science, adding that the new studys results stand alone as a rigorous test of this type of prejudice-reduction intervention., Fleischer is planning more interventions. issues, told me that changing peoples minds about transgender rights might simply come down to which side gets to a voters door first to do the persuading.. These deep conversations, I suspect, may be more cost-effective in the long run because the impacts are durable, Serrano says. Center, which houses the Leadership Lab, and proposed an unusual idea to his new colleagues: Canvassers should talk to Prop 8 supporters about why they had voted against same-sex marriage. How much does a deep canvass program typically cost? We work to empower volunteers to connect the personal to the political with voters in order to make long-term, meaningful impacts on elections. Over the last six years, Fleischers unorthodox canvassing technique has attracted the attention of social scientists, liberal groups and even presidential-campaign consultants. The distinguishing feature of a deep canvass is you take a lot more time to talk to voters and have a bona fide two-way conversation about real experiences that shape their thinking about the issues. Betsy Levy Paluck, an associate professor at Princeton who studies bias, believes the study will have broad implications for those in her field. How to talk someone out of bigotry with deep canvassing - Vox In a deep canvass, we go to the turf where voters have voted against our causes in the past, and we find out why. Volunteers who dont have a specific election or issue they wish to canvass on can use a listening script. For example, KED wont support Republicans or, potentially, certain Democrats facing primary challenges. Deep canvassing was born - and can be boiled down to two key skills: Vulnerability and curiosity. I know it exists, and I hear stories, and I see them on TV. There are three things. 1), Unpacking Deep Canvassing, Indivisible, 2021 (see right to vote video example at 19:49 mins), Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike CC BY-NC-SA, Contact a Commons librarian if you would like to connect with the author. Its not easy to confront people whose votes would seek to hurt you, and then try to change their minds. It is stories, not facts, that are most compelling to people when theyre changing their minds. Topping says, in their experience, deep canvassing works best on people who might be concerned about an issue like transgender people in bathrooms but have never really talked through their feelings. (These methods may make it easier to scale up in a bigger campaign.). The watered-down intervention without the two-way exchange didnt move anyone to support undocumented immigrants. Learn from Netroots Nation about research from the field of deep canvassing and receive training on how to apply this grassroots learning to your own power-building and persuasion work. Oh, okay, that makes a lot of sense, she says. We studied everything, from the kinds of conversations we should be having to the characteristics that made a voter persuadable, he says. Though Fleischer prefers talking to voters face to face, he isnt opposed to sequestering volunteers in a phone bank to help L.G.B.T. Anyone can read what you share. Whats the coolest thing about this method of canvassing? Theres plenty of work that offers some possible mechanisms by which opinions change. That changed everything, Fleischer told me.
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