Hope Springs from Field PAC [website] volunteers started knocking on doors March 2nd in Arizona and Florida, and we added 12 other states as they warmed up. Georgia, Maryland, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin were added to Arizona and Florida, starting with Georgia, North Carolina and Texas on March 9th. Minnesota and New Hampshire were added last week at the campaign’s request.
To say Biden’s performance at the debate freaked everybody out is to state the obvious. We are a data-driven grassroots group, which means we track a lot of data. A lot. And that isn’t always a good thing! LOL. It is actually a good thing, but it can lead to misinterpretations.
We had a growth curve that we believed would drive Democrats through the election. We like (hope) to think about volunteer turnout and, thus, doors knocked in any (successful) campaign exhibiting exponential growth, or what some people call “hockey stick” growth. State field directors follow this data closely.
The dip two days after the debate was deep and suggested we were off the track. In the graphic below, the blue (2024) line came way too close to the red (2023) line. But it was also the start of the holiday week and a lot of people took the week off. In fact, the next weekend (July 6th) was equally unusual in that we had a lot of outside volunteers come out with us. These things happen. But more data, more better.
But it does seem like things are returning to normal. Sure, some of our volunteers pulled away after watching the debate. But volunteers also seem to have been also motivated by Biden’s performance, doubling down, as it were. We’ve been tracking some semi-debate issues that has also stirred some volunteers to come out just to see if their sense of the campaign was verified by what they found at the doors.
4,708 Volunteers showed up on Saturday, 4,599 of them returned in the 12 states we’d been canvassing all year. As you can see from the graphic above, if follows the same pattern we’ve seen in previous years. Return to normal, so to speak. (Remember, we canvass in swing states/swing districts, mostly suburban, not the safe blue districts where, for example, college campuses reside.)
But our trainings remain somber, a little freaked out. Still, we persist. Lots of our volunteers believe that we just can’t stop, no matter what. But it’s not the bubbly, infectious pre-canvass trainings like before. Somber is the best word i can think of here.
One thing we did differently on Saturday was to redo our volunteer survey. It will take some time to digest these, but organizers felt like it was something we needed to do again. It will be interesting to compare results from Saturday’s survey with the one we did earlier in the year. One thing we didn’t have last time was survey results from any Divine 9 groups because they hadn’t started up yet. So there’s that.
If you are interested in supporting our efforts to mobilize and protect Democratic voters, especially in minority communities, expand the electorate, and believe in grassroots efforts to increase voter participation and election protection, please help. It’s time (our printing expenses has really shot up this year, having left more than 4,583,711 pieces of literature at voter’s doors):
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/hopemobilization2024
You can follow that link for our mailing address, as well (for those who would rather send us a check). Thank you for your support! This work depends on you!