USA News Hub

Canvassers travel door to door engaging with residents who are neither strong Democrats nor strong Republicans. “We are organizers, and that is different than being a communicator in the political space,” Matt Morrison, Working America’s executive director, explained to me. “Every conversation starts with, ‘What issue is most important to you and your family?’” The term of art for this activity is “deep canvassing.” Nussbaum told me she’d talked recently to a Black woman who went eight days without heat during a cold spell and to a Latino man who was evicted and had to move further away from his place of work. “Rent has emerged as an enormous issue,” she said. Some of this deep canvassing gets compiled into research reports—what Working America calls Front Porch Focus Groups—and some becomes an opportunity for Working America to acquaint voters with where politicians at the local and national level stand on issues related to their concerns. This year, the organization is deploying canvassers in four battleground states—Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin—targeting 25 million people Working America has identified as “persuadable.”

“We measure everything,” Morrison told me, including Working America’s own effectiveness. In the 2022 midterms, according to Morrison, Working America “generated an additional 407,015 Democratic voters,” and in the Arizona governor’s race and the Georgia and Nevada Senate races, it “generated more votes than the margin of victory for the Democratic candidate.” A series of studies co-written by Yale’s Joshua L. Kalla and Berkeley’s David E. Broockman demonstrated the benefits of deep canvassing. The first, published in 2016, showed that it shifted views of as many as 10 percent of those canvassed to a more sympathetic position on culture-war issues like transgender rights and immigration. Perhaps more tellingly, a later study, published in 2022, showed that it helped canvassers reduce their own “affective polarization.”

Forget Fox News

Yes, I know, Fox News is very bad, and it seems like it’s everywhere. Tim Ryan, former Democratic representative from Ohio, who lost a Senate bid in 2022, told me that when he was campaigning that year in Cleveland, he was shocked to see it playing in a Black barbershop. When working-class people watch cable news, it’s usually going to be Fox.