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My hunch about door-to-door election campaigning is that it’s largely a waste of time. Seriously, except for Girl Guide cookies, who buys anything at the door, let alone endorses a stranger after an elevator pitch?
I ran the theory by a veteran MPP this week and he agreed. Partly because of the nature of his riding, he’s stopped the practice altogether. Crying babies, barking dogs, voters who don’t vote, the haters, the cynics — he figured there must be better use of his time.
(Simple test: In a contest of federal ideas, some of them complicated, are you going to vote one way or the other because a partisan volunteer rings the doorbell during Jeopardy?)
The experts, however, swear by door-to-door work. Candidates, too, tend to say this is the real “ground game,” the self-generated momentum only their talent and eagerness can make.
We reached out to Chris Froggatt, a veteran Conservative organizer, one-time John Baird loyalist, and now managing partner of the Ottawa office for National Public Relations. Together with input from a couple of candidates — winning and failed — a picture emerges.
Door-to-door canvassing is useful, not because it’s random glad-handing but a kind of targeted intelligence work.
A riding is broken up into polls. The parties have historic databases to indicate where the support usually is, virtually street to street. Individual addresses will sometimes be marked with smiley faces, frowns, or neutral icons. Off the canvassers go, in an effort to rally the smiley faces, determine their willingness to vote, and take the temperature of the undecideds.
Signs are pitched, feedback is recorded and, to ensure the vote is pulled, reminders are sent out. If needed, transportation is arranged on voting day.
“Door-to-door is the way to go,” says Froggatt. “ID your vote and get the vote out.”
There is some academic research to indicate that door-to-door canvassing does have an effect on the outcome, but the evidence is hardly overwhelming. An experiment done for the 2009 referendum in B.C. (on electoral reform) found that canvassing had a roughly 10-per-cent positive effect on the result.
Get Out The Vote, by American academics Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber, has an interesting breakdown of door-to-door canvassing.
“Think of canvassing as a big walk through town, a meet-and-greet with thousands of strangers. The outcomes are generally positive, but anything can happen,” they write.
They say it is not uncommon that a canvasser would have one contact with a voter for every six doors knocked. For those voters who are on the fence about even turning out on election day, the authors say it takes 15 contacts to generate one vote.
“Visiting voters at their homes was once the bread and butter of party mobilization, particularly in urban areas.” Then came phone banks and mailouts, and mass messaging that could be run from a laptop. It didn’t need an army of eager volunteers.
Thus, the canvas needs to be carefully organized so that the candidate, in a short election and with a relatively small visiting window (evening), is not plowing infertile ground by hitting the wrong areas.
It does seem a muddled picture. We hear stories of Davis-era Tories in the west part of Ottawa who did virtually no door-to-door canvassing because they didn’t have to. And what of NDP candidates in Quebec, now MPs, elected without any campaigning at all?
And no ever talks about this aspect of personal contact at the door: it can reinforce minor misgivings, as in: “Oh God, he’s even worse than I thought.”
If doors could vote, candidates like Catherine McKenna would have the election wrapped up. She says her Liberal team has knocked on 65,000 doors in Ottawa Centre. (It is always “knocked on,” as opposed to “actually contacted.”) We shall take the estimate at face value: the riding, according to census data, only has 57,000 households.
Similarly, Conservative Andy Wang is committed to knocking on every single door in the riding of Nepean. With all due respect to the young man, who wishes that kind of hell on themselves? It’s called public service, not valet service.
The problem for half of us is not that we don’t know our MP, it’s that we can’t name our MP. So I find this kind of “I’m everywhere for you” veneer slapped on a patchy MP-citizen relationship to be a lot of phoney baloney.
Q: Knock-knock, who’s there? A: Elections won at the door.
Not funny, not buying it.
To contact Kelly Egan, please call 613-726-5896 or email kegan@ottawacitizen.com
Twitter.com/kellyegancolumn
查看原文...
I ran the theory by a veteran MPP this week and he agreed. Partly because of the nature of his riding, he’s stopped the practice altogether. Crying babies, barking dogs, voters who don’t vote, the haters, the cynics — he figured there must be better use of his time.
(Simple test: In a contest of federal ideas, some of them complicated, are you going to vote one way or the other because a partisan volunteer rings the doorbell during Jeopardy?)
The experts, however, swear by door-to-door work. Candidates, too, tend to say this is the real “ground game,” the self-generated momentum only their talent and eagerness can make.
We reached out to Chris Froggatt, a veteran Conservative organizer, one-time John Baird loyalist, and now managing partner of the Ottawa office for National Public Relations. Together with input from a couple of candidates — winning and failed — a picture emerges.
Door-to-door canvassing is useful, not because it’s random glad-handing but a kind of targeted intelligence work.
A riding is broken up into polls. The parties have historic databases to indicate where the support usually is, virtually street to street. Individual addresses will sometimes be marked with smiley faces, frowns, or neutral icons. Off the canvassers go, in an effort to rally the smiley faces, determine their willingness to vote, and take the temperature of the undecideds.
Signs are pitched, feedback is recorded and, to ensure the vote is pulled, reminders are sent out. If needed, transportation is arranged on voting day.
“Door-to-door is the way to go,” says Froggatt. “ID your vote and get the vote out.”
There is some academic research to indicate that door-to-door canvassing does have an effect on the outcome, but the evidence is hardly overwhelming. An experiment done for the 2009 referendum in B.C. (on electoral reform) found that canvassing had a roughly 10-per-cent positive effect on the result.
Get Out The Vote, by American academics Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber, has an interesting breakdown of door-to-door canvassing.
“Think of canvassing as a big walk through town, a meet-and-greet with thousands of strangers. The outcomes are generally positive, but anything can happen,” they write.
They say it is not uncommon that a canvasser would have one contact with a voter for every six doors knocked. For those voters who are on the fence about even turning out on election day, the authors say it takes 15 contacts to generate one vote.
“Visiting voters at their homes was once the bread and butter of party mobilization, particularly in urban areas.” Then came phone banks and mailouts, and mass messaging that could be run from a laptop. It didn’t need an army of eager volunteers.
Thus, the canvas needs to be carefully organized so that the candidate, in a short election and with a relatively small visiting window (evening), is not plowing infertile ground by hitting the wrong areas.
It does seem a muddled picture. We hear stories of Davis-era Tories in the west part of Ottawa who did virtually no door-to-door canvassing because they didn’t have to. And what of NDP candidates in Quebec, now MPs, elected without any campaigning at all?
And no ever talks about this aspect of personal contact at the door: it can reinforce minor misgivings, as in: “Oh God, he’s even worse than I thought.”
If doors could vote, candidates like Catherine McKenna would have the election wrapped up. She says her Liberal team has knocked on 65,000 doors in Ottawa Centre. (It is always “knocked on,” as opposed to “actually contacted.”) We shall take the estimate at face value: the riding, according to census data, only has 57,000 households.
Similarly, Conservative Andy Wang is committed to knocking on every single door in the riding of Nepean. With all due respect to the young man, who wishes that kind of hell on themselves? It’s called public service, not valet service.
The problem for half of us is not that we don’t know our MP, it’s that we can’t name our MP. So I find this kind of “I’m everywhere for you” veneer slapped on a patchy MP-citizen relationship to be a lot of phoney baloney.
Q: Knock-knock, who’s there? A: Elections won at the door.
Not funny, not buying it.
To contact Kelly Egan, please call 613-726-5896 or email kegan@ottawacitizen.com
Twitter.com/kellyegancolumn
查看原文...
