PDF Book Club Synopsis Canvassers often had to politely extricate themselves after 20 minutes voters were sad to see them go. Fleischer has an unwavering confidence in his ability to persuade most people to be more empathetic and less prejudiced, and his optimism is shared by progressive groups who train with him. Dates: March 31 from 1:00-2:00 PM EST and April 7 from 1:00-2:00 PM EST. That means canvassing is much more about conversational skill rather than identity. We want to avoid asking for permission, she told them. Thats what the Mormons use, he said on this sunny, bird-chirping Saturday in February. When the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage nationwide in 2015, Fleischer and his team could turn their focus to the next L.G.B.T. And like the 2016 study, Broockman and Kalla found it didnt matter who the canvassers were: They could be members of the impacted communities, or just allies. Do you have a few minutes today to talk about transgender people?, Williams played a busy voter. Its not about calling people out or labeling them fill-in-the-blank-phobic. Whats the best way to convince a voter at the door? Volunteers went to the other half and started the conversations that Fleischer thinks can help change minds. After the canvass, the study participants answered the same questions about transgender people that they had answered before the study, including how positively or negatively they felt towards transgender people on a scale of 0 to 100. 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. How Do You Change Voters Minds? People are resistant to changing their mind during an argument, the hypothesis goes, because it threatens their self-image. I would totally vote in favor, the woman says of a transgender protection law. 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). Topping, whos nonbinary, and others, went door to door. Deep canvassing is when volunteers and organizers engage in extended, empathetic conversations, with the goal of combating prejudice and shifting beliefs. I'm David McRaney, and this is the final segment about deep canvassing. That means not making assumptions based on the voters age, race or their religion. Going door to door, a Los Angeles-based activist group tries to reduce prejudice against transgender people. Deep canvassing is a technique created and used by a group of people at the Leadership LAB, an organization that is part of the Los Angeles LGBT Center in California. 7. Steve Deline has been organizing around the methodology of deep canvassing, across multiple movements, for 13 years. But remember, the impact of these conversations can last nine months or more. 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. Fleischers team videotapes many of its conversations with voters, then analyzes the tape like a football team might so we can figure out whats working and whats not, explained a field organizer, Steve Deline. 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. In aggregate, it turns out these tactics dont work at all. Canvassers (who may or may not be members of the impacted community) listen nonjudgmentally. After disappointing outcomes on Election Day for Democrats across the country, plenty of folks are wondering how we move forward and run better campaigns in the future. Topping and dozens of other canvassers were a part of that 2016 effort. Dont try to change someones mind alone. Her passion for social justice and teambuilding began in the woods of Timber, Oregon, where her family built a large community home around the core value of radical acceptance. And an uptick in 10 points on a feeling scale of 0 to 100 doesn't sound like an epiphany. 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. Join us for the following two webinars on Effective Lobbying and Deep Canvassing, both presented by Olivia Chow and the Institute for Change Leaders in partnership with the Sustainability Network. We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Leadership Canvas Owl, Fox & Dean When the subject turned to potentially awkward initial encounters with voters, the Leadership Lab staff member Laura Gardiner and the longtime volunteer Nancy Williams (who is transgender) did some front-door role-playing. Most notably, Ella led the LABs collaboration with SAVE, Miami-Dades leading LGBT group, to develop and measure a deep canvass model that could reduce transphobia. (Its hard, he adds, to directly compare the two papers, though, since the 2016 effort focused a bit more on combating prejudice, and this one more so on policy. hide caption. Mike LaCour had not assembled [it]. Ella then managed the Leadership LAB project at the Los Angeles LGBT Center, where a team of more than 1,000 volunteers and staff collaborated to innovate new methods of voter persuasion and prejudice reduction and apply them on the ground to help win LGBT rights campaigns across the country. If you would like to see first-hand what these one-on-one conversations are like, we encourage you to sign up to canvass with us. Had it all been wishful thinking? Its just not easy. "Deep Canvassing" - What Political Campaigns Can Learn From It Advancement Leadership Lab was established in 2018 as an experiential and community-based approach to leadership transformation through an investment in people, curriculum, and lifelong community. Think of any of our recent elections nobody is winning these things by 10 or 20 points. What a roller coaster of emotions," he says. What an African-American person has faced because of their race is not the same as the discrimination that Ive faced for being bisexual, or that my friend has faced for being transgender, she told the group. Dave and C Deep Canvass Conversation One of the first times I felt successful on a canvass was when I got to Hs house, on a cul-de-sac of nicer []. particularly those who are most at-risk for missing critical elections. Note: One needs to login/become a member to access webinar. Canvassing with Love: David Fleischer Future Hindsight "It was a really ingenious test of the change. What does it take to divert someone away from prejudice and toward greater acceptance of others in order to build support for progressive causes? They dont say if they are pleased or hurt by the response. Do you have a script? Prejudices are often deep, obstinate beliefs. 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. The voters were followed up with by survey one week, one month, and several months after being contacted by the canvassers. On the issue of transgender rights, the woman seemed mostly supportive but stopped at a nine. It is stories, not facts, that are most compelling to people when theyre changing their minds. Nancy Williams, right, who is transgender, talks with a voter as part of a canvassing effort in Los Angeles. Jeffrey Fountain/Courtesy of Los Angeles LGBT Center After the dust. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Sharing narratives gets around that: The persuasion happens because in talking about themselves, the voters realize a more tolerant attitude is consistent with their self-image. "To go into it with high hopes and then get this really bad piece of news, then to go forward anyway and have the accurate results? Topping calls this giving them grace. Its a powerful idea: Giving grace means being able to hear someone say something that can be hurtful, and trying to think about how to have a real conversation and connect with them.. The video ends like this. This is why since 2008, the Leadership LAB has used deep canvassing to connect with infrequent voters (folks who have missed 1-3 of previous major elections), in order to help voters reflect on one of the biggest motivating factors to take action and vote - the love and hope they have in their own lives. It likely wasnt because someone berated you. After the dust settled, Broockman and Kalla went on with their experiment on transgender prejudices. Insights from Deep Canvassing: Proven Scripts for Transformational Outreach, The New Conversation Initiative, Netroots Nation, 2021 (Video 60 mins). "When we were nonjudgmental and vulnerable with them and when we exchanged our lived experiences about marriage and gay people, that's when we started changing people's minds," he says. They sent out surveys to thousands of homes in Miami, asking people to answer questions that included how they felt about transgender people and if they would support legal protection against discrimination for transgender people. Why Should My Campaign Consider Using Union Printers? As several studies have shown, deep canvassing, which involves deliberately developing a nonjudgmental, empathetic connection with a voter through 10 to 15 minutes of authentic conversation, canif done properlylead to persistent changes in people's attitudes on issues like immigration and transgender rights. Have a Conversation. "That was a real shock," he says. Broockman and Kalla found that the treatment group was considerably more accepting of transgender people and that a single, approximately 10-minute conversation with a stranger can markedly reduce prejudice for at least three months. Unlike LaCours invented finding that the messenger matters more than the message, Broockman and Kalla found that both transgender and nontransgender canvassers were effective. It is an extraordinarly rewarding experience, and you will come away with greater skill at talking with, understanding, and influencing a wide range of voters who are not just like you. For her, the video seemed to clarify that Fleischer was specifically asking her about transgender people, a group she had no experience with and seemed to have little inherent empathy for. We have worked for candidates and causes, big and small, all across the country. How Do You Change Voters Minds? I have to teach my hamster to speak Finnish today., Gardiner turned to the volunteers. A few days before, the Human Rights Campaign released a report warning about 44 anti-transgender bills filed in 16 states. Those basic numbers tell you something about just how willing most Americans are to have an open conversation with a stranger about these ostensibly divisive issues, Broockman says. 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. graduate student in political science and statistics, who said he could design a study to assess the long-term effectiveness of Leadership Lab canvassers at increasing support for same-sex marriage among voters in Los Angeles who had supported Prop 8. The new research also tries to identify the secret ingredient that makes deep canvassing work, and whether versions of it that occur over the phone or through video prompts can be useful as well. And thats exciting, because it offers the possibility that we could get past the current paralysis on a wide variety of controversial issues.. 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. Though there was currently no ballot measure in Los Angeles to worry about, there was a palpable urgency to the Leadership Labs work. Leadership LAB Conversation with a Voter about Transgender Rights, 2016(Video 8:30 mins). But through deep canvassing, the activist is able to turn her around. Their main hypothesis is that it works because its not threatening. Though Fleischer thought his new approach was working, he wanted to know whether the persuasion lasted. This tactic is the only thing that has been proven to work on nondiscrimination, so without it we wouldnt have been able to win, they say. In his work, Bruneau finds that political partisans have a skewed view of how they think their opponents think of them. Fleischer headed west to work with the Los Angeles L.G.B.T. The design of this tool was inspired by the Business Model Canvas. Committing to curiosity rather than assumptions or judgment. Danny Timponais Movement Politics Field Director for Peoples Action. He likes to say that he has been talking to people who disagree with him since he was 4. Tags But this work isnt about that. He handed her a small video player, on which she watched a Baptist minister in Houston make the case about bathrooms. Deep canvassing is a long-term investment, but the impact is cumulative. In the video above, notice how the voter starts to come around on the issue when the canvasser asks if shes ever been on the receiving end of discrimination. To test whether transphobia could be overcome during a face-to-face encounter, Broockman and Kalla measured a 2015 canvassing effort in Miami by volunteers from the Leadership Lab and SAVE, a local L.G.B.T. Kathleen Campisano, Deputy Director of the Leadership LAB, . How long does a deep canvass program typically take? This model encourages a freeform and reciprocal conversation between the volunteer canvasser and the voter. People would often be very judgmental of the woman on the video or any woman who had had an abortion, Fleischer said. You can connect to their values in that way. For instance, Donald Trump won Michigan by 10,000 votes. Have more questions about long form or deep canvassing? You dont know if theyre at McDonalds on their iPhone, and you cant always be sure what theyre saying to voters. But he also knew that political persuasion had not been studied often. She talks about being picked on at work and feeling different. New research tells us changing minds with deep canvassing is not impossible; its just very hard. Broockman and Kalla (2016) assessed the impact of the . Both types of canvassers could instigate change. One such activist is Vivian Topping, who decided, along with other LGBTQ activists and allies, to try deep canvassing in Massachusetts in 2018, when transgender rights were on the ballot. I dont like seeing people mistreat Jackson. 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. The Center's carefully honed method of "deep canvassing" delivered the first empirically tested and proven process where a single conversation decreases prejudice in a long-lasting way. Like, of course were on your doorstep on a Saturday talking about transgender issues!, Moments later, Williams reminded the volunteers to be open and nonjudgmental. Social science experiments are usually conducted on college campuses, in a lab, in contrived scenarios. Possibly. Copyright 2021 by People's Action Institute and the New Conversation Institute. Dave Fleischer, director of the center's Leadership LAB, welcomed the academics' independent measurement of its canvassing program. The Leadership LAB works to reduce prejudice and change voters hearts and minds. Its also a challenge to change a campaigns habits and make the goal of canvassing be to successfully relate to other people. In 2004, for example, some 3,500 orange-hat-wearing Howard Dean supporters (many bused in from around the country) managed to annoy Iowa voters days before the states Democratic caucus. Taken advantage of us. Fleischer wasnt surprised; people rarely feel safe enough at first to express deep hurt. Were asking voters not to discriminate, to be less prejudiced, and we need to walk that walk, she said. Immigration particularly that of asylum seekers loomed over the 2018 elections. ", The conversations are short, usually 10 to 20 minutes long. So why dont more campaigns for candidates and issues canvass? But Science retracted the study five months later, after the lead author couldnt produce his data and admitted to lying about aspects of the experiments design. Still, Fleischer isnt ready to give up. Nancy had no such seemingly relevant personal experiences, nor did she appear particularly concerned about bathroom safety. LaCour claimed that there was only an effect from the deep canvass if it came from someone who was LGBT. And 75 percent of the people who start the conversations with the canvassers share a story about their own lives. (This definition is sourced from The New Conversation Initiative). It was developed by the Leadership LAB in Los Angeles and has been effectively employed to help motivate voters in multiple organizing projects across the nation. Its a type of conversation thats closer to what a psychotherapist might have with a patient than a typical political argument. 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. Deep canvassing, a relatively new technique, []. 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). Its not easy to confront people whose votes would seek to hurt you, and then try to change their minds. But why? Since 2018, as the cofounder of the New Conversation Initiative and the New Conversation Institute, Steve has been a key partner in the development, rigorous testing, and implementation of deep canvass programs on issues from climate to immigration and policing. Second, we will provide volunteers with materials, including template scripts, data entry sheets, sign-in sheets, field training and debrief agendas, etc. It also takes time to get a canvass up and running and for volunteers or paid staff to get good at delivering. He also hopes it will usher in a new era of political persuasion. But for now, the findings are a relief to David Fleischer. 5. We studied everything, from the kinds of conversations we should be having to the characteristics that made a voter persuadable, he says. 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. Here is the script used by The Australian Youth Climate Coalition AYCC in the lead up to 2022 Australian election to talk about climate. It was only in his 20s that he started to tell his folks the truth, and he started making the transition to living as a man. Maybe, as The Wall Street Journal suggested, Fleischers efforts merely flattered the ideological sensibilities of liberals. But this week, a new study published in Science by David Broockman, an assistant professor of political economy at Stanford, and Joshua Kalla, a graduate student in political science at Berkeley, appears to serve as vindication of Fleischers work. Take a mental break with the newest Vox crossword, Sign up for the Is this the first time youve thought about transgender people? Fleischer asked her soon after she backtracked. ", Williams says around the time she began volunteering with the LGBT Center, she canvassed a man who didn't support nondiscrimination protection for transgender children. Our team is made up ofamazing creative, organizational, and political consulting talent committed to achieving political and advocacy goals. 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. The study claimed to find that though both gay and straight canvassers were effective at the door, only voters contacted by gay canvassers remained persuaded nearly a year later. Jackson grew up as a girl, but he knew even when he was 5 or 6 that he was really a boy. His previous research suggested that people dont change their mind very easily, and when they are persuaded to think differently, the effect is usually temporary, he told me. We work to empower volunteers to connect the personal to the political with voters in order to make long-term, meaningful impacts on elections. If youre talking about having real, quality conversations with voters, you cant bring that to scale without a really large number of people, says Tim Saler, a Republican strategist at Grassroots Targeting, which works to mobilize and persuade voters. The canvassers then ask if the voters know anyone in the affected community, and ask if they relate to the persons story. Knocking on a strangers door is scary, and a lot of that mornings training session was spent boosting the confidence of first-time canvassers. In these, researchers included conditions to see whether the conversations could work if conducted over the phone (they did, but it was slightly less effective). This recorded webinar gives a walkthrough of the deep canvassing design process including instructional materials, tips sheets, and sample scripts. The lessons from deep canvassing are that when youre trying to talk to people that may disagree with you and change minds, you have to work as a team. Effective Lobbying and Deep Canvassing - Institute for Change Leaders Through a deep canvass, we can at times identify a voters deeply bias and prejudices, views that may not be identified through polling or focus groups but can be utilized by your opposition. The activists and scientists I spoke to for this story all agree that you cant change everyones minds. 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. We are still in the process of figuring this out. Hi, my name is Laura, and Im with the Leadership Lab, Gardiner told Williams, channeling a shy first-time canvasser. Typically, in a political canvass, an activist might list a bunch of facts or statistics about why the voter should support their cause. Deep Canvassing Script: Voting for Climate in 2022, AYCC, 2022 (4 pg Google Document). Volunteers may also canvass as part of an issue-specific advocacy campaign. You can also go more in-depth on the science behind deep canvassing by reading the academic study referenced by the New York Times that was published by political scientists David Broockman and Josh Kalla in the peer-reviewed journal Science. These conversations arent arguments. Dave Fleischer of The Leadership Lab joins The Great Battlefield podcast to talk about how he's spent most of his life fighting for equal rights for LGBTQ people and how deep canvassing can help us find common ground and reduce prejudice. 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. The Leadership LAB Those who had discussed prejudice they'd experienced felt about 10 points more positively toward transgender people, on average. Script structure used to guide SURJ-NYC deep canvassing conversations on reparations, A Qualitative Examination of Dialogical Elements in Anti-Racist Deep Canvassing Conversations, 2021 (Journal article see fig. Instead of a script that lasts 60 seconds, volunteers spend 10 or 20 minutes talking with each voter. I cant think of a campaign thats put more volunteers on the ground in a primary season to have quality, face-to-face conversations with voters, she told me. Thats likely a lot of people. For example, KED wont support Republicans or, potentially, certain Democrats facing primary challenges. These deep conversations, I suspect, may be more cost-effective in the long run because the impacts are durable, Serrano says. LaCour, joined late in the process by Green as a co-author, published the results in the December 2014 issue of Science. Twitter is obviously full of the notion that what we should do is condemn those who disagree with us. I have friends who are gay.. Theres a smaller finding nestled in Broockman and Kallas new paper, one that might not make headlines but is worth thinking about. For privacy information see the About page. Steve Deline - Netroots Nation A gray-haired Hispanic woman named Nancy cracked open the front door, though not enough to let her little dog eat our ankles. "Burning the mental calories to do effortful thinking about it, that leaves a lasting imprint on your attitudes," he says. For me, I never had a transgender friend I was really close to until I was 56, he said, handing Nancy the picture. He and his colleagues started the effort in 2009, shortly after the Prop 8 constitutional amendment and struck down same-sex marriage in California. I think theyre wonderful. It could take awhile. But instead he began with a simple question: If she were to vote on whether to include gay and transgender people in nondiscrimination laws, would she be in favor or opposed? Interacting with people different than me was a normal thing, and certainly not undesirable or scary. At Vox, we believe that everyone deserves access to information that helps them understand and shape the world they live in. After the canvassing, 29 percent of the people in the placebo condition said they strongly supported policies inclusive of undocumented immigrants. They share takeaways on how to construct outreach scripts that bridge divides and move people powerfully, with practical examples from advocacy campaigns on the ground. This family is a 10!, Several of Rileys conversations proved poignant. That campaign completed 3,000 conversations, and persuaded over 40 percent of those people to support the amendment. At the door, Fleischer asked Nancy if she knew any transgender people. The Great Battlefield. A typical state or national campaign, even one with a ground-game focus, doesnt want its volunteers spending 10 or 15 minutes at a door. Deep canvassing, a relatively new technique, is showing promise and is backed by rigorous testing from researchers and activists in the field. All three places are experiencing demographic change, with a growing and diversifying population of immigrant residents, says Kim Serrano, the messaging research project manager at the California Immigrant Policy Center. For many voters, they reflect on it and they realize that's a terrible feeling they don't want anyone to have," Broockman says. Both were on display during many of the canvass conversations I observed, including the one with Nancy, the woman who moved to a five from a 10 after watching the opposition video. 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. The numbers get a bit bigger when you just focus on people who actually entered into the conversation, he says. That doesnt tell you about the person inside., On this particular day, volunteers would be canvassing in a predominantly black neighborhood, so Gardiner reminded them to be sensitive to experiences of race-based discrimination. All Muslims are often blamed for single acts of terror. With a deep canvass, we want to figure out whats relevant to voters. Anyone can read what you share. The groups feared a backlash against a recent ordinance that prohibited discrimination based on gender identity. Namely: Its larger, and it targets more issues, both trans rights and policies protective of undocumented immigrants. Then volunteers from SAVE, an LGBT advocacy organization based in Florida, visited half of the 501 people who responded and canvassed them about an unrelated topic, recycling.