In Defence of Door-Knocking: Why Political Canvassing Remains Relevant

Door-to-door canvassing has long been a key component of political campaigns, seeking to directly engage with voters, hear their concerns, and rally support for a particular candidate or party. However, in an age when voters increasingly look to online sources when deciding how to vote, have such rigid party loyalties they simply refuse to be persuaded, or — conversely — are so disengaged that they view canvassers as mere nuisance callers, many have questioned the efficacy of in-person canvassing: is this means of campaigning fit for the modern world, or obsolete in our current political landscape?

As you will (I am sure) be shocked to learn, the idea that you don’t want to be woken on a Sunday morning by a friendly face from the Oxfordshire Conservatives is — devastatingly — nothing new. As early as 1906, The Times called the practice of canvassing ‘wrong, antiquated and, for the most part, supremely futile’; in 1910, a letter published in The Guardian argued that canvassing ought to be made illegal. (Interestingly, the most widespread objection to the practice was not that it was bothersome, but that it violated the principle of a secret ballot to ask people how they planned to vote.) Nonetheless, the practice continued — though it began to decline in the aftermath of the Second World War, when the ‘Michigan model’ of voter behaviour became conventional wisdom among political scientists: it held that voters had deep-seated party political loyalties, and that door-knocking did very little to sway them. Thus canvassing began to take on a different form; rather than attempting to persuade opposition or swing voters, parties concentrated their efforts and resources on convincing their already-loyal voters to turn out to support them. This was the basis for the ‘Reading System’, adopted by the Labour Party to win that constituency in 1945. Efforts to persuade non-supporters were neglected in favour of boosting turnout in areas that were heavily pro-Labour. (Hacks, take note: maybe it isn’t worth calling that person you met in the Union bar once three weeks ago.) 

However, canvassing began to experience something of a resurgence from the 2000s onwards: Al Gore managed to win the popular vote despite being down in the polls only days before the election, through an intensive campaign of election canvassing. In 2008, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign established more than 700 field offices across the country, most of them in battleground states. Empirically, this tactic appears to have been incredibly effective: for example, political scientist Seth E. Masket found that in Colorado, the counties with Obama field offices saw a significantly higher increase in Obama’s vote share, and no county with an Obama office saw less than a three-point increase in the Democratic vote.

From my own experiences of canvassing, there will, unsurprisingly, be many voters who are less than grateful for your well-meaning efforts to drag them out of bed and into a conversation about your wonderful candidate for the County Council elections several months away. (Personal highlights include the man who shouted ‘no thank you, I’m a Communist’ and slammed the door, the family who mistook the ‘Christ Church’ emblazoned on my college puffer for a sign that I was preaching on behalf of a slightly higher power than the local Tories, and — of course — the many, many houses marked down as “no response. Maybe they’re out?”.) In spite of all this, however, many voters do seem to be genuinely thankful to be canvassed. Particularly for less well-known or historically lower turnout elections (i.e. anything to do with local government…) it often makes a difference to people to know that your candidate cares enough to knock on their door to ask what they think, and even to ask for their vote. Moreover — whether or not canvassing is effective is a political tactic — surely candidates for election have a duty to show up, to be accessible, and to be accountable to their voters; in the name of democracy, it is right that we make the effort to connect with people and ask what they think. Therefore, because speaking to voters directly is both an effective way of campaigning and a duty to the electorate, canvassing is far from obsolete or useless.