In a suburb of Pittsburgh last week, a man walks out of the Washington County Democratic Party office after removing Joe Biden’s sign. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, Biden’s campaign is not knocking on the door in person.

Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP via Getty Images

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Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP via Getty Images

In a suburb of Pittsburgh last week, a man walks out of the Washington County Democratic Party office after removing Joe Biden’s sign. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, Biden’s campaign is not knocking on the door in person.

Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP via Getty Images

President Trump’s campaign claims it knocks on a million doors every week. Joe Biden’s campaign has not knocked on doors for months to speak to voters. Instead of meeting in person, Democrats focus on conversations that they can have virtually.

“While you can hear our opponent spend a lot of time talking about the millions of knocks on the door or the attempts they make weekly, those numbers don’t really affect voter outreach in any way,” says Biden’s campaign manager Jen O. Mally Dillon , – told reporters during a phone call last week, – downplays the apparent discrepancy between knocks on the door. “Our success rate, the numbers we look at and use, are conversations.”

In August, she reported that there were 2.6 million conversations with voters in the states on the battlefields during the Biden campaign. These conversations were virtual, by phone, by text message, or in person, “when it is safe and justified,” she said. (The campaign also intends to begin house-to-house visits soon, not for any face-to-face meetings, but for the distribution of campaign literature and voter education materials.)

Democrats’ strategy of mostly organizing from home using a laptop or mobile phone and abandoning traditional home polling is somewhat untested, but they rely on the assumption that it is more effective during a pandemic.

Democrats say they are not knocking on doors because safety is their top priority and they do not want to put people at risk of contracting COVID-19.

“We think voters are looking for responsible leadership now, and that comes from the vice president and what he says, but it also comes from the campaign,” said Molly Rietner, Biden’s deputy campaign director.

And because of the pandemic, Rietner, like other Democrats, believes that more Americans are at home, sometimes isolated, using their devices and wanting to talk.

“We found that we can actually connect to more people than in previous cycles over the phone,” Rietner said.

“A knock on the door is in our DNA”

But this isn’t just Biden’s campaign. The organization of Democratic parties in key wavering states and a number of leftist groups that would have helped Biden on the ground have changed.

Both BlackPAC and Working America have 10% to 20% of the paid organizational staff they had in 2016.

At that time in 2016, Working America, a group affiliated with the AFL-CIO, had about 100,000 conversations a week with people on their doorstep. The group has had nothing since it suspended its door-opening operation in March.

“The knock on the door is in our DNA. We believe that there is nothing – and the evidence supports this – that would be as effective as well-organized face-to-face communication, ”said Matt Morrison, Group CEO. “However, what we lost in texture and face-to-face interaction, we tried to compensate with scale.”

Working America has assembled an army of volunteers who write letters, call and text. And Morrison thinks it works. He says that when the pandemic first began, his group focused on convincing people to wear masks. They contacted people and noticed a significant increase in the use of masks after their correspondence because, in his opinion, they built a relationship.

“There is no opposition on the other side”

But for Republicans, this is not an either-or-operation. The GOP National Committee says it contacts millions of people weekly by phone. But their volunteers and organizers also knock on doors in person.

“Everything is one-sided on the ground,” said Joe Gruters, chairman of the Florida Republican Party. “We hold our many rallies, we run bus tours, we hold meetings and greetings. We do it personally. The difference is … there is no opposition on the other side. ”

Gruters believes Biden’s physical campaign “doesn’t exist” in Florida. “Virtual stuff helps,” he says, but in his opinion, “there is nothing that replaces basic blocking and campaign fighting, which is sidewalk banging, door-to-door walking.”

Trump’s team uses Obama’s book

In 2016, it was generally recognized that Hillary Clinton’s ground play was superior to Trump’s impromptu operation. Yet in this cycle, the Trump team boasts of building a “powerful field operation” compared to Democrats, whom it describes as leading an almost exclusive “air war.”

In an unusual reversal of roles, Trump’s team is modeling themselves as Democrats. Staff members are required to read a book about Barack Obama’s field operation called Pioneers: How Obama’s 2.2 Million Volunteers Transformed America’s Campaign.

One of the co-authors, Hari Khan, was surprised to learn that her book was a staple of Trump’s campaign, and she says she’s not sure if the campaign gets its message.

“So the Trump campaign, they read the book and then they say, ‘Okay, I need to go out and talk to the people at the door.’ Yes, it’s part of that, but it’s part of a larger locking system, said Khan, a professor at Johns Hopkins University. “In the field, in a sense, the most important work can often be the least visible.”

Khan means that it wasn’t just the tactical operation to knock down doors that made the Obama team so successful; His campaign helped build relationships even before it even got to the door, she said.

Political analysts and campaigners agree that face-to-face conversations outside the door are a proven way to marginally increase turnout. But, they add, such conversations are often poorly conducted.

David Brookman of the University of California, Berkeley has done extensive research on door knocking and persuasion campaigns. He says campaigns often exaggerate the extent to which they are actually involved in local organization.

“The vast majority of people, even in ordinary years, do not get access to the doors,” he said. “Just knocking on the door does not turn the voter. This is a conversation with a voter who turns out to be a voter. ”

And Brookman says you can talk on the phone. In fact, you can probably talk more because, as he notes, you save time when you don’t have to go from house to house.

But on the big question of whether Democrats are at a disadvantage in doing this job almost exclusively by phone rather than in person, Brookman says he is not sure.

“I guess it’s like one of the many other things in the campaign that makes a little difference, but is unlikely to be decisive for all of this,” he said.