["Beliefs are not fixed," said Eboni Taggart, training manager at
the Deep Canvass Institute. "We dont want to write people off as
unreachable. I think theres a real danger in that." ]
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‘CHANGE IS POSSIBLE’: HOW CAMPAIGNERS ARE USING DEEP CANVASSING
TO BUILD A JUST FUTURE  
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Jake Johnson
June 26, 2023
Common Dreams
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_ "Beliefs are not fixed," said Eboni Taggart, training manager at
the Deep Canvass Institute. "We don't want to write people off as
unreachable. I think there's a real danger in that." _

A Nevada resident speaks with canvassers in Las Vegas on July 21,
2017. , (Photo: Bryan Steffy/Getty Images for MoveOn.org Civic Action)


 

On the surface, it may seem implausible that at a time of heightened
polarization
[[link removed]] and crises so
large in scale
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they often feel insurmountable, one-on-one conversations can have the
capacity to spur transformative political change.

But a growing of body evidence accumulated over the past decade and a
half in the United States indicates that such
conversations—specifically an outreach method known as deep
canvassing—are effective at connecting with people who feel
alienated from the political system, altering worldviews
[[link removed]],
and impacting election results
[[link removed]], making them
critical in the fight for a more just future.

Deep canvassing has its origins
[[link removed]] in the grueling fight for
marriage equality, and it differs from the traditional door-knocking
of political campaigns in that it focuses on nonjudgmental listening,
curiosity, and story-sharing—not bombarding people with statistics
and talking points.

"We believe that stuff shuts people down," Eboni Taggart, training
manager at the Deep Canvass Institute
[[link removed]] (DCI), told _Common Dreams_. "That's not
saying they don't matter, but they don't matter right away. The first
thing is to understand where people are coming from and get vulnerable
with them."

DCI, a project of the People's Action Institute and the New
Conversation Institute, was launched in 2021 in an effort to build on
the work and successes of deep canvassers across the U.S., which
continued during the devastating coronavirus pandemic
[[link removed]] and
chaotic 2020 election cycle.

In a new report shared exclusively with _Common Dreams_, DCI takes
stock of the past two years and notes that thousands of people and
hundreds of organizations have taken part in its deep canvass
training. Those individuals and organizations went on to hold more
than 245,000 deep canvass conversations around the country on a
variety of key topics, from climate to trans rights to immigration
[[link removed]].

Starting on July 18, DCI is holding a virtual and free three-day
training [[link removed]] aimed
at teaching participants how to have deep canvass conversations, which
could prove key to mobilizing neglected, marginalized segments of the
population as the 2024 election approaches and as the Republican Party
ramps up its assault on reproductive freedoms, LGBTQ rights,
environmental protections, safety net programs, and workers.

"Our main purpose and goal is to reduce the barrier of entry to
training around deep canvassing, hence the Deep Canvassing Institute,"
Ella Barrett, a co-founder of the New Conversation Institute,
told _Common Dreams_ in an interview. "The time is now, in my
opinion, to ensure that every single conversation we have with someone
is intentional and is using evidence-based tactics. And I think deep
canvassing is the way to do it."

In March, after more than a decade of debate and Republican
stonewalling, the North Carolina Legislature voted
[[link removed]] to
expand Medicaid—a move that's expected to provide health insurance
to more than 600,000 people in the state.

Corporate media coverage of the stunning reversal focused largely on
shifting attitudes among Republican lawmakers as the decisive factor
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but advocates in the state say it was their years of on-the-ground
work—knocking on doors, cold-calling voters
[[link removed]],
and holding rallies to build grassroots pressure on politicians
opposed to Medicaid expansion—that helped turn the tide.

Down Home North Carolina, a multiracial organizing group that focuses
on rural and small-town communities, said
[[link removed]] after the
March vote that its campaigners "doggedly organized for Medicaid
expansion" and "deep canvassed to mobilize our communities" as part of
a broader effort to build political power from the ground up.

"Our fight and victory on Medicaid expansion reminds us: When we
listen to working-class people and build campaigns around our issues,
we can win," said the group, whose organizing work temporarily staved
off [[link removed]] a
Republican supermajority in North Carolina in 2022. (The GOP only
achieved veto-proof majorities in both chambers of the state
Legislature after a Democrat switched parties
[[link removed]] in
April.)

Down Home's Medicaid expansion efforts, which included thousands of
deep canvass conversations
[[link removed]] across
North Carolina, are among the examples that DCI highlights in its new
report to show how its approach can deliver tangible results that
dramatically alter people's material conditions and shift political
landscapes.

Amy Cooper, a Down Home member, told DCI that she used her personal
healthcare experiences as a conversation starter in deep canvassing
sessions, which aim to foster attitude changes that last beyond just
the nearest election cycle.

"If I hadn't qualified for Medicaid, with the pregnancy condition I
had, I would've died," Cooper said, explaining her approach in
one-on-one conversations. "For them to know that, 'Wow, this person
who's talking to me, if they hadn’t been covered by insurance, they
would've died.' That's a real thing."

Exchanging stories and establishing a genuine emotional connection is
central to deep canvassing, particularly when navigating difficult
discussions around abortion, LGBTQ rights, race, the climate crisis,
and other topics.

"Compassionate curiosity is really the heartbeat of deep canvassing,"
Taggart, DCI's training manager, told _Common Dreams_. "If you're
going to have a conversation where you need to change someone's heart
and mind, you need to be really curious about their lived experience
and why they feel the way that they do."

"People have very conflicted feelings," Taggart added. "Oftentimes
they're dealing with cognitive dissonance... They're in an echo
chamber and they're not being pushed or reflecting to lean into where
that comes from."

In Maine
[[link removed]], Texas
[[link removed]],
and elsewhere, Planned Parenthood and other reproductive rights
organizations have been deep canvassing for years amid intensifying
right-wing attacks on abortion access, knocking doors and directly
engaging with voters who are opposed to or on the fence about
abortion.

"When you talk to people about the actual experience of abortion and
what they want for the people around them, they are way more
supportive than if you ask are you pro-choice or pro-life, and are you
a Democrat or a Republican," Caroline Duble, the political director of
Avow Texas, told
[[link removed]] the _Dallas
Morning News _in October.

Climate advocates have also found value in deep canvassing. After
knocking on thousands of doors and speaking with hundreds of people in
low- and moderate-income precincts in 2021, Kentuckians for the
Commonwealth concluded
[[link removed]] that
the method is "a powerful and ever-evolving practice."

"We have seen it change minds," the group wrote.

The anecdotal experiences of volunteers and organizers—which pose a
challenge to depictions of unbridgeable ideological divides one often
gets from social media and news coverage of American politics—have
been borne out in scientific research.

In 2020, building on an earlier study
[[link removed]], University of
California, Berkeley political science professor David Broockman and
Yale political scientist Josh Kalla found that "non-judgmentally
exchanging narratives in interpersonal conversations can facilitate
durable reductions in exclusionary attitudes."

The pair's latest peer-reviewed research
[[link removed]],
published in the journal _American Political Science Review_, used
field experiments in several locations in Tennessee and California to
test whether deep canvassing methods could measurably combat
prejudiced views on undocumented immigrants and trans people.

The study, in which 230 canvassers spoke with more than 6,800 voters
ahead of the 2018 midterms, found that "face-to-face conversations
deploying arguments alone had no effects on voters' exclusionary
immigration policy or prejudicial attitudes, but otherwise identical
conversations also including the non-judgmental exchange of narratives
durably reduced exclusionary attitudes for at least four months"—in
contrast with the rapidly fading impact
[[link removed]] of
television ads and mailers.

The experiments targeting transphobic attitudes yielded similar
results.

"The contexts in which these experiments took place also suggest
optimism for efforts for individuals and organizations to implement
the non-judgmental exchange of narratives at scale: none of the seven
organizations we worked with had previously implemented such an
intervention, nor had the canvassers had any such prior experience,"
Broockman and Kalla found.

More recently, during the 2022 midterm election cycle, DCI teamed up
with Broockman, Kalla, and advocacy organizations in Missouri, Idaho,
and Georgia to conduct a deep canvassing experiment focused on former
President Donald Trump's election lies, specifically the false claim
that mail-in voting is riddled with fraud.

"The experiment found, in a survey 10 days after the canvass, a 4.2
percentage point increase in agreement with the statement that we
should 'allow all Americans to vote by mail,' after a deep canvass
conversation with the script developed in collaboration with the Deep
Canvass Institute," DCI notes in its new report.

"Researchers similarly found a 1.9 percentage point decrease in the
belief that mail-in voting contributes to electoral fraud," the report
adds. "The data shows that deep canvass conversations were
particularly effective with political moderates and independent
voters. Furthermore, these deep canvass conversations had positive
results among voters both with and without a college degree."

Barrett of the New Conversation Institute, who helped develop deep
canvassing methods at the Los Angeles LGBT Center's Leadership LAB
project, told _Common Dreams_ that "with the research that has been
done over the last seven years, it has been proven that deep
canvassing can, in one conversation, have a lasting change on the way
people behave and think about issues and build more connection across
difference."

"I think it has the power to fundamentally change culture because
we're not having to go back to people time and time again," said
Barrett. "We are able to have that sort of meaningful, memorable
impact through one 10- to 20-minute interaction with someone, which
gives me a ton of hope about what organizing and field work can do to
really depolarize our country."

DCI's work to scale deep canvassing operations across the country is
imbued with a sense of urgency.

"Given the severity of the attacks transgender people currently face,"
the new report says, "it is essential that our movement is equipped
with the skills and knowledge to transform attitudes towards
compassion and empathy for transgender young people and adults."

The 2024 election, and the dangerous prospect of another Trump term,
also looms large.

In 2020, according to a report
[[link removed]] by
People's Action, a deep canvass phone program that connected with
voters in several key states "had a substantial impact on decreasing
Trump's vote margin among independent women, respectively 4.9% with
women and 8.5% independent women and an overall 3.1% impact on Trump's
vote margin."

"That is larger than the 2016 margin of victory in nine key
battleground states including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and
Florida which would translate to 108 electoral votes," the report
found. "This tactic is one of the only proven strategies to shift
presidential vote choice and is an estimated 102 times more effective
per person than the average presidential persuasion program, as
documented by academic research."

Such results have led prominent members of Congress to voice support
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techniques in their efforts to build public support for progressive
agenda items.

In late 2021, Rep. Ayanna Pressley's (D-Mass.) team engaged in deep
canvassing across her district to build support for student debt
[[link removed]] cancellation.

Daniela Michanie, Pressley's organizing director, said in a recent
interview
[[link removed]] that
the congresswoman's team used the common deep canvassing technique of
asking people how supportive they were of student debt cancellation on
a scale of one to 10, and then working to bump them up over the course
of the conversation.

"We were able to move people up this scale by an average of two
points," said Michanie. "That doesn't seem like a lot, but that is
really, really significant getting someone to admit to you that they
now approach an issue from a different perspective."

"I don't think that we're doing it enough," Michanie said of deep
canvassing, "especially with how effective we have found it to be."

For Taggart and DCI, deep canvassing is an antidote to hopelessness in
the face of immense challenges and high-stakes political conflicts.

DCI's new report opens with a quote from U.S. Surgeon General Dr.
Vivek Murthy, who said
[[link removed]] last
month that "our epidemic of loneliness and isolation has been an
underappreciated public health crisis that has harmed individual and
societal health."

Speaking to _Common Dreams_, Taggart said that "it really is
important for us to use deep canvassing as a way to inspire folks that
change is possible."

"Beliefs are not fixed," said Taggart. "We don't want to write people
off as unreachable. I think there's a real danger in that."

"We wouldn't even have deep canvassing if gay rights activists decided
to write people off who disagreed with them," she added. "This whole
tool was created with the intention to persuade individuals to lean
into our shared humanity."

_Jake Johnson is a staff writer for Common Dreams._

* Deep Canvassing
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* people power
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* Grassroots Organizing
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