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AAt the Latinos for Trump roundtable in Phoenix in August, Alma Rodríguez said she has not yet heard from Joe Biden’s campaign this cycle. But pollsters and Trump campaign volunteers have approached the 28-year-old several times, and she has started visiting the organization’s office.
“I go downtown and talk to people who just have a passion,” he said.
Part of this is by design. For months now, Biden’s campaign has focused on digital and phone messaging, avoiding traditional in-person polling efforts in hopes of curbing Covid-19 risks to voters and staff. They hope their caution sends the message that they take the virus and the welfare of their voters seriously.
Meanwhile, the Trump campaign says it has already knocked on doors of 19 million across the United States. And Trump has continued to hold political demonstrations across the country, many of which have drawn thousands of people without masks and are linked to Covid cases in Tulsa and Saginaw.
But on Thursday, the Biden campaign announced that it was changing course. After reports that Democrats were increasingly frustrated by the campaign’s decision not to have a solid ground game, he revealed a new effort to send several hundred volunteers to critical states such as Pennsylvania, Nevada, Michigan, and New Hampshire. .
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The coronavirus has gripped a bitterly divided election. The Trump administration has downplayed the severity of the virus since February and has refused public health interventions, such as widespread mask mandates and city closures.
Biden’s supporters say his caution this year, then, was fully justified. “I know if someone knocked on my door it would mortify me,” Moe Vela, a former senior advisor to Biden, said before the announcement. “I don’t know who touched what, who breathed what.”
Instead, Biden’s campaign has focused on new ways to reach voters, such as virtual yard signs in the popular Animal Crossing video game or drive-in-style rallies.
Still, volunteers say they haven’t been able to reach all the voters they expected. “It’s getting harder and harder to get people to talk on the phone,” Patrick Sullivan, a Biden volunteer who lives in the suburbs of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, told the Associated Press. “So being able to go to someone’s door and talk to them makes a huge difference.”
Biden’s camp opened 109 supply centers with campaign materials and voter education brochures to distribute, as well as a supply of personal protective equipment and thermometers to prevent an outbreak.
Volunteers have also been trained to focus on the voting process itself. An increase in vote-by-mail is expected this year as voters hope to avoid long lines during the pandemic, leading to further confusion and logistical problems with absentee ballots. In Pennsylvania, a pivotal state, voters could forget to use secret ballot envelopes, invalidating their votes. In Florida, hundreds of ballots have already been rejected because voters did not sign the envelope.
Republicans say the new strategy is hypocritical and possibly futile.
“President Trump’s re-election team has been knocking on doors safely for months. We now have an average of 2 million doors a week and we are growing, “said Steve Guest, spokesman for the Republican National Committee in an email statement. “Joe Biden’s campaign is trying to put together a dirt game with less than 33 days to go, but it’s too little, too late.”
But David Broockman, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who has studied voter persuasion efforts, said the value of organizing in person can be overstated, particularly during a pandemic.
“I’m more concerned that Trump is spending more than Biden on the air in Georgia and parts of Minnesota,” he said in an email. “I am skeptical that this is a safe and productive use of volunteer hours in relation to alternatives such as calling friends or writing postcards to voters.”
Mac Stipanovich, a retired Republican political agent in Florida, agreed. He said he did not think knocking on the door would have much effect in persuading people to vote for either candidate. Knocking on the door for Biden, he said, was “more cosmetic than substantive.”
“It allows the Biden campaign to show that, yes, they have people who are committed to the candidate, who are excited about the candidate and who will walk in the hot sun and knock on their neighbors’ doors,” he said.
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Although Biden’s campaign has been kept indoors until this month, other groups have been running initiatives in person throughout the year.
“If we don’t do this for our community, no one else will,” said Pastor Donna Foster, organizer of the nonprofit Black Mothers Forum in Phoenix, Arizona. The forum set up voter registration stations next to food distribution centers, where more people have visited due to economic difficulties during the pandemic.
Also in Phoenix, the non-profit organization Mi Familia Vota has been involved in a decade-long effort to win the Latino vote. When the pandemic hit, the group’s director of civic engagement said pollsters focused on reaching people by phone, but were only able to reach 2% of all the people they called, on a good day.
In August, they knocked on doors again. “And all of a sudden we started reaching maybe a quarter of the people,” Madero said. “It is more effective.”
Every day, the pollsters, wearing protective masks, have gathered at the organization’s headquarters in downtown Phoenix, where they have their temperatures checked and a health assessment form filled out, before being presented with a huge sticker. yellow that says “I have been examined.” Yvette Romero, 27, said she was not always heavily involved in politics, but decided to work as a colporteur this year after seeing her community devastated by the coronavirus and degraded by anti-immigrant rhetoric from those in power.
“We don’t tell people how to vote when we register them,” Romero said. “But we just presented them with options. And I tell people that it is important that we vote to support and protect those who cannot vote. “
With just one month to go on Election Day, both campaigns are trying to capture every possible vote, particularly in critical states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.
Time will tell if Biden’s latest stretch of scrutiny will have an impact on the election, especially since he saw record donations before the campaign’s announcement that he will send volunteers. Or if so-called timid voters will respond to Trump’s ongoing running game as they did in 2016.
But at least, Stipanovach said, the new door-to-door effort will send a message.
“That creates an atmosphere, so to speak, of the whole campaign that things are happening, there is momentum, we are winning,” he said.
