These Bernie Alums Think They've Found the Secret to Reaching Trump Voters

Excerpt:

Knock Every Door—formed in January by a group of Sanders campaign alums and led by his organizing guru Becky Bond—is an oddity among the hundreds of liberal groups that have popped up in the wake of Trump's election. The name gives away its mission; the group is focused on reaching two groups of voters: people who voted for Obama in 2012 and then flipped to Trump four years later, and the people who simply didn't vote at all.

"We're just trying to get them to open up a little more."

Part of the mission is data-collection. Bond, who helped build Sanders' national field organization, believes that the party's fealty to Big Data and analytics caused it to miss something significant, and perhaps obvious, about the electorate. Knock Every Door wants to hear from the voters Clinton missed to make sure that doesn't happen again. "We find ourselves in an election and we don't know how to talk to people," Bond says. The group plans to turn over the info it gathers to local Democratic groups, so that candidates will know who to connect with and how.

But the group also believes that the style of conversation itself, known as "deep canvassing," could play a part in winning these voters over.

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These post-election exercises share a common inspiration in the work of the Leadership Lab and its founder, Dave Fleischer, who began experimenting with deep canvassing after his state passed Prop 8, a constitutional amendment prohibiting same-sex marriage. Fleischer has offered pointers to Knock Every Door but has no role with the group. "It reminds me of 2008 in California," he said of the climate on the left today. "The polls all showed the LGBT issue winning, and then we lost. We didn't understand what had happened."

Fleischer understood the anger at voters who had turned against his community, but where his peers turned to protest, he focused on persuasion. If enough Prop 8 supporters could have friendly—but candid—conversations with LGBT canvassers like himself, maybe it would move the needle. After years of tinkering, he settled on a script that appeared to work. Since then, progressive organizers have flocked to LA like Jedi to Dagobah, anxious to crack the code and try out his techniques in their communities.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/02/these-democrats-are-going-door-door-asking-trump-voters-simple-question