It’s the great political bet of 2020.
Knock or don’t knock.
It’s a simple — if not mundane — decision that could decide the fate of legislative candidates tip-toeing through the minefield of COVID-19 politics.
As COVID-19 cases continue escalating, candidates must decide how they should approach potential voters at the doorstep.
Do they knock, knowing they might alienate someone who fears for their health?
Or do they drop a pamphlet, leaving behind the chance to make a vital personal connection that would produce a vote?
“It’s so tricky,” said Democratic candidate Cole Fine, who is running for the Kansas House in Olathe.
Door-to-door campaigning “is a proven method to success, but you don’t want to turn off voters, and you certainly don’t want to get anyone sick,” he said.
It’s a tactical decision that some political experts warn could make a difference in tight races that will determine whether the Kansas Republican Party will hold onto its supermajorities in the House and Senate this fall.
Avoiding door-to-door campaigning is also something that some say could be used as a political badge of honor by Democrats during a public health crisis.
University of Kansas political scientist Patrick Miller recently singled out Democrats on Twitter for being reluctant to campaign door to door.
“I think avoiding in-person campaigning will cause some Ds to lose close races, especially downballot races with fewer voters (eg, state leg),” Miller posted.
“Some folks are vocal on social media that Ds should avoid doors and think voters will reward them for campaigning safely. I disagree,” he wrote.
Democratic strategists say they have a mix of legislative candidates making different decisions.
Some are going door to door, while others are turning to alternative tactics such as phone banking, texting, employing social media or mobilizing support through their friends, neighbors and professional connections.
“It’s been a difficult decision for everybody to make,” said Kerry Gooch, chief of staff for Senate Minority Leader Anthony Hensley.
“Obviously, door knocking and door-to-door campaigning is something that our Democratic candidates pride themselves in doing,” Gooch said.
“Without us being able to run the full door-knocking program like we usually do in campaigns, it’s made things a little more challenging and difficult for us,” he said.
Gooch said Senate candidates are left to decide for themselves the best approach, although they are urged to wear a mask if they are going door to door.
Some Republicans say the stakes are high for not going door to door.
They say they take health precautions, such as keeping a safe social distance from the door.
But foregoing door to door, some said, is an opportunity lost.
“I would think you’re making a mistake if you don’t,” Republican state Rep. Paul Waggoner said of knocking doors.
“I just think you kind of lose that voter contact. You’re just abstract if you’re not there in person.”
While there is little doubt that door-to-door canvassing produces results, there remain other ways to reach out to voters that may be effective.
Some experts believe that candidates can exploit social relationships in a way that can prove to be every bit as effective as walking a neighborhood.
Columbia University political scientist Donald Green says while candidates will surely take a hit if they forego door-to-door canvassing, the question is can they replace it with something as good or better.
“If it’s a bunch of robo calls, the answer is probably, ‘No.’ If it’s a mountain of direct mail, probably not either,” said Green, who has studied voter turnout extensively and coauthored the book “Get out the Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout.”
“The best alternative to face-to-face contact would be friend-to-friend contact in some COVID-friendly manner,” he said in an interview.
Earlier this year, Green published the results of a study that examined the effect of employing so-called campaign “captains” who each identified about 20 friends
or relatives who would be eligible to vote in the coming election.
The study focused on four municipal elections in November 2019, one in Ohio, one in California, one in Colorado and another in Connecticut.
Researchers set aside half of each captain’s approximately 20 contacts as a control group, leaving them alone to see if they would vote without any prodding.
The captains, meanwhile, were charged with securing commitments to vote from the other 10 or so contacts they identified.
The turnout rate was 13.2 percentage points higher in the group that was contacted compared to the group that was left alone.
Green reported that the estimated effect of the captain model was four times the size of the average door-to-door canvassing effort.
He said the results could partly be credited to the fact that less than 30% of people answer the door in a canvassing campaign.
“And therein lies the power of the captain model: While it is increasingly difficult to contact strangers, it is increasingly easy to contact one’s friends and acquaintances,” Green wrote in Scientific American.
The optimum replacement for the door-to-door campaign, Green said, is social networks.
“Door to door is better than the alternative, but not necessarily the best,” he said. “In some ways even better than door to door is friend to friend.”
Democratic Senate candidate Lindsey Constance is not knocking doors. As teacher and a member of the Shawnee City Council, Constance said her social circles give her an entree to voters in the community.
It’s something that could help as her campaign strategists focus on so-called relational organizing.
“You can’t replace canvassing with just one thing,” said Bryan Behgam, the campaign manager for Constance.
“We’ve made up for the volume of voter contact with increased phone calls and texts, but our most effective form of contact is from relational organizing,” Behgam said.
“It’s been shown that voters are more likely to take an action when they hear from someone they know,” he said.
“We’re leveraging Lindsey’s large support network to organize their own friends, family and coworkers,” he said.
Constance said she isn’t knocking doors, because she is making public health a priority.
“Since, I don’t know someone else’s comfort level if I knock their door, I just would rather err on the side of caution.”
Constance said she has already made thousands of calls and is regularly interacting with voters online.
“I am working nonstop,” she said. “Basically every minute where I am not teaching…I am on the phones and interacting with people online. We are working incredibly hard.”
Constance has tried the virtual approach to a front-porch visit with a video introducing herself at the door.
The video included a link to where someone could sign up to talk to her at a designated time.
Constance isn’t the only one who has tried that route.
Other Democratic candidates have distributed literature explaining why the pandemic makes it hard to make a personal visit for safety reasons.
They also provide phone numbers, inviting potential voters to contact them to discuss issues of the day.
Democrat Joy Koesten only started canvassing in recent weeks even as Republicans were already out in the field going door to door.
“We’re still trying to be somewhat mindful that there is pandemic out there and that people might be resistant to having a stranger walk up to their door,” Koesten said. “So we’re still doing a lot of things virtually.”
She said she thinks the Republicans have been more aggressive about going door to door, adding she doesn’t believe they’re wearing masks and that they’re “pretty nonchalant about the pandemic in general.”
“I don’t think they have an advantage because they have been talking to people door to door,” Koesten said.
“There are all kinds of ways to reach voters these day and we are crushing it on other fronts, and I am not going to lose sleep over what my opponent is doing,” she said.
“We are working really hard. We have a good, large team — a strong team — and we are fighting like the dickens to make sure we don’t yield this seat to Kellie Warren.”
Republican state Sen. Mike Thompson is running against Constance.
He has been going door to door, starting with the primary election in which he defeated state Rep. Tom Cox.
“I do think people like to see the person they’re voting for,” Thompson said.
“I think it helps solidify in their mind the kind of person you are if they can have a face-to-face talk,” he said.
Thompson said he gets very little, if any, resistance when he shows up on a front porch.
Like most candidates, Thompson said he knocks on the door and backs away to allow room for social distancing.
He doesn’t wear a mask, although he keeps one in case a voter asks him to wear one.
“I haven’t had that request yet,” he said. “I think it’s because we’re trying to be respectful of the distance as they come to the door.”
Rep. Waggoner said he’s doing “standard door to door,” although he takes a mask with him and stands a few feet from the front door.
He said he takes his cues from the voter who comes to the door.
“If they come to a door wearing a mask, you will tend to mask up,” he said. “You kind of read the body language.”
Republican state Rep. Nick Hoheisel said he was a little hesitant about knocking doors at first, not knowing how he would be greeted on the doorstep.
“Once you hit a few doors and you’re getting a good response and no pushback, you start to feel better about that decision,” he said.
Like others, Hoheisel said he and his volunteers take precautions. They wear masks and step 6 to 10 feet back from the door while canvassing.
Hoheisel said he thinks going door to door gives him an edge.
“People are wanting to come out, they’re wanting to vent,” he said. “They’re frustrated right now. They’re tired of being inside. They just want to vent to somebody.
“A state representative knocking on your door is a perfect opportunity (for voters) to let them know how they feel about what’s going on right now,” he said.
Democrat Stacey Knoell follows a similar pattern as she campaigns for the Senate District 9 seat in southwest Johnson County.
She said she is the only one in her campaign knocking doors. She follows the same basic protocol: wear a mask, knocks on the door and steps back.
“I like having conversations with people,” she said. “Often times, if I talk to someone I can look them in the eye and have a conversation about whatever is important to them or explain what is important to me. It’s helpful.”
Knoell said she approached going door to door with some trepidation.
“As a challenger with no name recognition, I have to do everything I can.”
Democratic state Sen. Dinah Sykes has been relying on phone banking and socially-distant campaign gatherings in lieu of knocking doors as she seeks a second term.
Syke said she thinks she gets about the same number of responses with phone calls as she did going door to door when she ran in 2016.
“Everything is so different this time,” Sykes said. “Everyone has to weigh their own risk assessment. I have family members that I have to be very cautious about.”
On a national level, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee haven’t been sending campaign workers to the doorstep, instead relying on other ways to reach voters.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee have amped up their efforts on the ground, claiming they’re knocking on a million doors a week.
“I think it’s in a way part of the Democrats’ messaging to say, ‘We’re not doing door to door because there’s this pandemic that is still not under control,'” suggested Melissa Michelson, a national expert on voter mobilization at Menlo College outside San Francisco.
“You can even theoretically spin it to say it’s better for the Democrats not to try to go door to door because that kind of suggests it’s not OK to go around outside talking to people face to face,” Michelson said.
The Biden campaign recently argued its more about having “conversations” with voters than just contacting voters by knocking doors.
“What is most important is the conversation and the engagement,” Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon told The New York Times.
“It is not the tactic that gets to the engagement. That’s how we’re building the program and reaching voters every day.”
Republican political consultant Jared Suhn said GOP candidates are sensitive to the issues presented by the pandemic.
“We’re probably not as aggressive as we’ve been in past cycles,” he said.
In the past, he said, 50 people would show up on a Saturday morning and start knocking.
Suhn said candidates and their volunteers are now trained to step back from the door once they knock.
He said candidates and their supporters follow local and state health guidelines, which require masks outdoors when individuals can’t maintain a physical distance of 6 feet.
Suhn believes the door-to-door approach is integral to a local campaign.
“These races are ultimately decided about your personal connection with the candidate,” he said.
“Unlike a race for the U.S. Senate, Congress or the presidency, you’re in many cases able to have a conversation with these candidates,” he said.
“When you do that, it becomes much easier for candidates to break through and to break people out of their normal partisan behavior when they can actually sit there and have a conversation with them and understand what drives them, understand what their story is and what motivates them to run for office,” he said.
Others don’t believe the door-to-door is the holy grail of campaigning.
“It’s still possible to get out the vote and to organize people to vote for you without going door to door,” Michelson said.
She said her studies have found that two rounds of phone banking can be as effective, if not more so, than going door to door.
“My experience with two-round phone banks was that they made phone banking just as effective as door-to-door, and produced more consistent increases in turnout,” she said.
“And I’d repeat my caveat that it matters who is doing the asking,” she said.
“Door-to-door canvassers and phone bankers who are a trusted messenger are far more effective.”
And that ties back to Green’s point about social relationships.
Michelson points out that in the digital age, it’s probably more effective when friends are reaching out to friends on social media than merely buying a banner ad on a web page.
Digital ads “can be effective if done properly,” she said. “It matters what you say and who’s saying it.
“If I talk to my personal friends on Facebook…and say, ‘Don’t forget to vote next week,’ that’s going to have a much bigger effect on your propensity to vote.”
Candidates “buying these digital ads probably have minimal movement on people,” she said.
“When it’s your friends, when it’s your social network…people that you know in your community talking about voting or a group you love and feel a connection to, when they talk about the importance of voting, then you’re more likely to listen.”
