{"id":934,"date":"2013-08-12T20:08:23","date_gmt":"2013-08-13T01:08:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/?p=934"},"modified":"2013-08-12T20:10:43","modified_gmt":"2013-08-13T01:10:43","slug":"doorknocking-doesnt-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/2013\/08\/doorknocking-doesnt-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Doorknocking doesn’t work"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been campaigning since I was a precinct chair my senior year of high school. In that time, I\u2019ve knocked on thousands of doors and made thousands of phone calls to undecided voters. There may be a few people in the world who appreciate being interrupted during dinner or during the Gopher football game on a pleasant fall Saturday afternoon, but for the most part, people are politely stilted at best, and outright dismissive on the bad end\u2026and I\u2019m not even counting the times I\u2019ve been physically threatened. Doorknocking never seemed all that effective to me, and so it\u2019s not surprising that a rare academic study found that no, doorknocking doesn\u2019t really work<\/a> all that well. The question is whether this data will make a difference in campaign practices.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Political campaigning is probably one of the most change-averse activities out there. It\u2019s been common wisdom for decades that you simply need<\/em> to put up lawn signs, you need<\/em> to have poorly-trained volunteers knock on strangers\u2019 doors, you need<\/em> to make phone calls to undecided voters. In all the time I\u2019ve been campaigning, I\u2019ve probably genuinely persuaded a voter about as often I was told to \u201cGet off my property!\u201d As the study seems to show, this is especially the case for infrequent voters. With few exceptions, people who don\u2019t vote have chosen that on purpose, and it\u2019s probably because they hate politics. Having a stranger, or more accurately multiple strangers, knock on your door to give you terrible campaign literature isn\u2019t likely to turn a hater into a voter.<\/p>\n

What does work? That\u2019s a very good question, one that I\u2019m not sure anybody knows the answer to. If we really wanted to find out what works, we\u2019d run the same kind of A\/B testing<\/a> that is common in the marketing industry, testing out various messages. If I were Grand Party Poobah, I\u2019d find a few candidates that have similar districts, and run a bunch of tests: doorknocking versus none, micro-targeting versus none, text-filled encyclop\u00e6dic literature versus something people would actually look at without immediately tossing, etc.<\/p>\n

One idea in particular that I would love to see tried out is a personalized opt-out on campaign literature. Two, in fact: two QR codes on a mailing, one that says \u201cI\u2019m voting for this candidate, please stop annoying me!\u201d and one that says \u201cI would never vote for this candidate, please stop annoying me!\u201d Snap the relevant code and the data is saved to the candidate\u2019s database. Candidates would like it because it would provide useful data on voters, with probable higher response rates than phone calls. Voters would like it because it allows them some control over the process (of course, if you opt out, the candidate would actually have to adhere to it or risk even more wrath\u2026). Sure, the cost would be higher because a personalized QR code would need to be printed on each piece, and backend campaign systems would have to support this, but it\u2019s technologically feasible.<\/p>\n

Alas, no candidates for office would ever subject their candidacy to randomized experimentation for the greater good. Which is too bad: I think it would be a blast to get some meaningful metrics. As a result, we are probably stuck with the same old campaign strategies, especially for local races that don\u2019t have a dozen hired media consultants. And that means more banging on doors for little gain for the forseeable future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been campaigning since I was a precinct chair my senior year of high school. In that time, I\u2019ve knocked on thousands of doors and made thousands of phone calls to undecided voters. There may be a few people in the world who appreciate being interrupted during dinner or during the Gopher football game on… Continue reading Doorknocking doesn’t work<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[236],"class_list":["post-934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-campaigns","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=934"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":936,"href":"https:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934\/revisions\/936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}