And when she returns to college this month, she’s going to tell her friends this story and why it makes it doubly important to register and vote this year. “With purpose.”
We ask voters who opened their doors if they were registered to vote at their current address and if they have the required photo ID they need to cast their ballot. We remind Georgians just how important it is now to have a photo ID to vote and how we will help them get one, if needed.
We canvass with an Issues Questionnaire that allows voters to tell us what is on their minds. We use it as a conversational check to guide volunteers through their dialog at the door. It makes it easy on our volunteers as provides us with vital data that will be entered in VAN (the Democratic database) before Labor Day.
Our major focus has been the Issues Survey. Normally, about 60-65% of the voters we talk to answer some or all of these questions. Each week, we ask voters about what issue they think is the most urgent facing America right now. This week, voters said The Economy (and the prospect of a Recession) was their most pressing concern. Education was the second concern and funding for Public Schools was specifically mentioned. Agricultural Concerns or Worries was the third most frequent response this week. Many of the counties where we are canvassing are rural and Farm Loans remains an issue.
Voter views of President Biden continue to improve but they are nowhere near that of Rev. Warnock. 64% of the voters we talked to expressed approval of President Biden in Florida on Saturday. 7% expressed disapproval in the job the president was doing. We continue to get feedback from voters that they wished Biden could do more about the price of gas, inflation and help with farm loans.
81% of the voters we talked to approved of the job Rev Warnock was doing in the Senate. 4% expressed disapproval this week. We knock on doors of Democrats and Independents, and not all nine counties we canvassed on Saturday were predominantly Democratic. We don’t knock on doors of Republican households (although we do knock on the doors of mixed households).
Governor Kemp did not fare so well. 11% of the voters we talked to approved of the governor’s work, while 53% disapproved. In Georgia, we are also asking voters what they think of Stacey Abrams and 64% expressed approval; 11% said they disapproved. We enter all this data we collect into VAN, the shared Democratic database, which is made available to all Democratic candidates who use it after the primaries.
Hope Springs from Field PAC has been knocking on doors in a grassroots-led effort to prepare the Electoral Battleground in what has been called the First Round of a traditional Five Round Canvass. We are taking those efforts to the doors of the communities most effected (the intended targets or victims) of these new voter suppression laws.
Obviously, we rely on grassroots support, so if you support field/grassroots organizing, voter registration (and follow-up) and our efforts to protect our voters, we would certainly appreciate your support:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/2022senateswing
Hope Springs from Field PAC understands that repeated face to face interactions are critical. And we are among those who believe that Democrats didn’t do as well in the 2020 Congressional races as expected because we didn’t knock on doors — and we didn’t register new voters (while Republicans dud). We are returning to the old school basics: repeated contacts, repeated efforts to remind them of protocols, meeting them were they are. Mentoring those who need it (like first time and newly registered voters). Reminding, reminding, reminding, and then chasing down those voters whose ballots need to be cured.
We registered 19 new voters and re-registered or corrected Voter Addresses for 201 voters last Saturday. It seems our organizers are in some sort of competition with what we are doing in North Carolina, and continue to push updating voter addresses and identifying who needs a Voter (photo) ID before Labor Day.
We also ask voters if they have any concerns about the upcoming elections. Last year, we walked with lit about the changes in voting laws in Georgia, but we also asked voters about their fears and experience in prior elections. Voters who say they have experience voter intimidation or other problems with voting are asked to fill out Incident Reports. We found 15 voters who wanted to fill out Incident Reports in Georgia on Saturday — mostly in counties we had not started canvassing in until right before the primary. We collate these Incident Reports, to be shared with local, state and federal officials in charge of voting, as well as use them to plan out our Election Protection strategy in the fall. They could also be used in court cases.
Like last summer and fall, we have been asking voters if they have any local infrastructure issues they would tell elected officials about. In Georgia, we have consistently found people who wanted to fill out Constituent Service Request forms. 208 voters raised some area that they wanted addressed.
Constituent Service Requests are handed over to (hopefully Democratic) office holders with responsibilities for the area of the request. Q-slips will be sent directly to the campaigns of Democratic candidates. Comments from Observation Forms are entered into VAN, as well, and any questions we collect are forwarded to the appropriate campaigns (or elected officials). We are building a data goldmine that Democrats (who use VAN in November) can deploy for their own voter contact purposes.
If you are able to support our efforts to protect Democratic voters, especially in minority communities, expand the electorate, and believe in grassroots efforts to increase voter participation and election protection, please donate:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/2022senateswing
Thank you for your support! This work depends on you!
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