It’s Neck and Neck: If we want to stop Trump, we have to do better engaging the voters who are up for grabs

We’re in trouble

They’re tied! That’s what the New York Times/ Siena College late July 2023 poll shows for November 2024. President Biden and former President Trump each has support of 43% of the electorate. The remaining 14% were mostly thinking of voting for someone else or not voting at all. You don’t have to be Nostradamus to see that a handful of votes may decide the election and determine whether our country remains a democracy.

Now approaching the crossroads of hope and doom

To defeat Trump, we need to get more voters on our side. Luckily, his brand of extremism is highly divisive; and the higher the stakes, the closer the elections. Last year, Republicans barely took control of the House of Representatives, winning their 5-vote majority by 2145, 1787, 1600, 584, and 554 votes. That’s a mere 6,670 votes combined.

2020 was even closer. Not only was former President Donald Trump’s loss very narrow in multiple swing states; Republicans also won 83% of the close Congressional elections, flipping the three closest by 333, 109, and 6 votes. These are margins so tiny that any of us, pulling together a group of friends, could have made the difference.

We can help some people change their minds

In fact, that’s my job. For more than ten years, I directed a team determined to get much better at voter persuasion. Sometimes, that meant we needed to reduce a voter’s prejudice, or their susceptibility to disinformation.

Even more often, getting voters on our side meant overcoming their disconnection from voting; because we live in a country where one-third of all eligible voters didn’t vote in 2020, even though many of them find Trumpism repellent.

By trial and error, we discovered a new approach to persuasion. We call it “deep canvassing.” It is what I do and what I teach. It’s almost the opposite of what you might expect.

And its big advantage: it works, even though most other attempts at persuasion don’t. We know this because independent political scientists have measured deep canvassing in the most rigorous way possible, in multiple randomized controlled trials (RCT’s). David Broockman (now at UC-Berkeley) and Joshua Kalla (Yale) were the first when they published in the trusted journal Science in 2016 (“Durably reducing transphobia: a field experiment on door-to-door canvassing.” Science, 352(6282): 220-224).

What is deep canvassing

A deep canvass conversation is a dialogue in the face of disagreement, where we offer the other person unqualified, unconditional respect.

If you’re already thinking you don’t want to talk to MAGA maniacs, much less offer them respect, I hear you.

But there’s no need to talk to the most extreme Trump supporters.

The voters we need to engage are the ones up for grabs. There are two types of them, and here’s the first.

The non-voters who would vote with us—if only they voted

First—most numerous—and most important—are the Americans who almost never vote, even in Presidential elections, even though they fear or despise Trump and anyone like him.

When I say this group is “numerous,” I am talking 99 million Americans who did not cast a ballot in November 2020. This is one-third of all eligible voters. A reasonable estimate is half lean Trump and half quite the opposite. So 49 million more people would likely have voted with us in 2020 if they had voted.

Why don’t these people vote? Apathy? Stupidity? That’s not what I’ve found in my 50 years of doorknocking and campaigning.

The non-voters we need have become disconnected. They work minimum-wage jobs, gig jobs, part-time jobs, or multiple low-paying jobs and, as a result, they move a lot compared to people with more money. If they are registered to vote, it’s probably not where they currently live. The voter list gives us their name, a wrong address, and a wrong phone number.

This is why, although it is great when a state board of elections mails an absentee ballot request to everyone on the voter list, infrequent voters are the least likely to receive it. It was mailed to their old address, or a relative’s address, or an address where they live but only part of the year.

So it’s impossible to reach many of our friendliest non-voters—much less persuade them to vote—if we rely on a phone call or text or junk mail.

Yet, in person, it’s easy to find them. When I lead out a team to go door-to-door in the neighborhoods where many of our infrequent voters can afford to live, we carry the voter list; but we also realize it’s mostly a yellowed snapshot of who lived in the neighborhood back in 2008 when the Obama Campaign registered them. So we knock on every door and talk with every person we meet, whether or not they are on the list. When we find someone on the voter list who still lives in the same place, great, we talk with them. But even if the person on the list doesn’t live there, someone does, and we talk with them. Their financial circumstances and their view of Trump generally matches the person who used to live there.

Conflicted conservatives

The second group of voters up for grabs is conflicted conservatives. It’s smaller, but still a big group. It’s 10-20% of registered Republicans every time they’re polled, sometimes even more. It’s at least 7 million of Trump’s 74 million voters in 2020. These voters had serious concerns about Trump but also a habit of mostly voting Republican. On their own, these voters try to be in sync with their Republican family and friends and the buzz on Fox news. But when we help these voters reflect—which is what happens when we deep canvass—some realize they want to change how they vote. We could make Trump and other extremists unelectable if we help them hemorrhage 10% of their base.

What this means for me and you

If we want to do better than the new, post-Trump normal—cruelty and lies, with the sense that chaos is coming—we need to stop giving up on other people before we know them. When we listen, there is more to them than we would have guessed.

What I’ve learned in all my years involved in elections is that you and I have far more power than we realize. The great secret of politics is that we have more voters to reach than campaigns bother to reach and more solutions available than campaigns actually use—solutions that work, that you and I can initiate, that help us find common ground with the people who decide close elections.

The truth is: good people are out there who aren’t yet voting with us. We need them. And they need us.

But we have to start. Dialogue takes time. That’s why I’m writing, posting a new piece on Substack every two weeks: I want to help all of us become better persuaders. I’ll share conversations my team and I have had with all kinds of voters: Democrats, Republicans and independents; progressives, liberals and conservatives; African-American, Latino, Asian-American and white voters; and people we already knew—family and friends—and strangers we met at the door. You’ll get to see for yourself what works and what doesn’t. My hope is you’ll find something surprising you might want to try.

Because based on everything I know from a lifetime in politics, it will take a team of us—each talking one-on-one with at least one of the voters up for grabs—if we are going to save our democracy. It’s going to be that close.