Its about sharing and listening, all the while nudging people to be analytical and think about their shared humanity with marginalized groups. Had he been completely honest, he might have said, Im here to make you less prejudiced. Fleischer is especially interested in learning whether deep canvassing can affect peoples thinking on two issues racial prejudice and abortion rights. But remember, the impact of these conversations can last nine months or more. Massachusetts voters chose to protect trans rights, and Topping believes deep canvassing helped. Deep canvassing, it appears from the research, has an effect that can last for several months. The activists and scientists I spoke to for this story all agree that you cant change everyones minds. But I dont have any friends like I do my gay friends., Fleischer nodded and removed a picture of his friend Jackson from his wallet. Fanned out across the neighborhood were more than three dozen Leadership Lab volunteers, many of them local college students, as well as progressive activists from around the country hoping to learn about changing voters minds. Why is deep canvassing relevant to the world we live in today? That changed everything, Fleischer told me. Mehrdad Azemun is Senior Strategist at Peoples Action. LaCour appeared to be breaking new ground, showing that one brief but memorable interaction could reduce prejudice. Are Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney in love, or are they good actors? Dave Fleischer, the Project Director at the Los Angeles LGBT Centers Leadership LAB, has big ideas on how campaigns can improve their deep canvassing efforts. The numbers get a bit bigger when you just focus on people who actually entered into the conversation, he says. But even if that happens, he says, it at least will encourage people to think deeply about the issues they're going to vote on. What does it take to divert someone away from prejudice and toward greater acceptance of others in order to build support for progressive causes? That doesnt tell you about the person inside., On this particular day, volunteers would be canvassing in a predominantly black neighborhood, so Gardiner reminded them to be sensitive to experiences of race-based discrimination. Some folks may have a crucifix on the door. They may come in organically through the website. (This definition is sourced from The New Conversation Initiative). Topping, whos nonbinary, and others, went door to door. This tactic is the only thing that has been proven to work on nondiscrimination, so without it we wouldnt have been able to win, they say. But this work isnt about that. This family is a 10!, Several of Rileys conversations proved poignant. Advocacy Trainings: 7 Questions w/ Martn Diego Garcia, Clean Your List Email List Hygiene Makes for Better Email Marketing, Patch-Through Calls: What Are They & When to Use Them. LaCour denied the misconduct in a statement to The New York Times last year. ", The Leadership LAB of the Los Angeles LGBT Center trains people in canvassing techniques aimed at reducing prejudice. Thats a new finding. Dave Fleischer a short, bald, gay, Jewish 61-year-old with bulging biceps and a distaste for prejudice knocked on the front door of a modest home in a middle-class neighborhood on the west side of Los Angeles. She talks about being picked on at work and feeling different. There are three things. Had it all been wishful thinking? I have to teach my hamster to speak Finnish today., Gardiner turned to the volunteers. Whats the coolest thing about this method of canvassing? Susmik now works on Peoples Actions National Field Team, supporting deep canvassing and movement politics work. If a canvasser sends us scanned copies of their data entry sheets, we will have a team of data entry volunteers enter them into a Google sheet. activists in another state. Broockman points out that this graph shows the impacts of deep canvassing among all people who came to the door to answer the canvassers questions. Three months after the canvass, Broockman asked participants to fill out the survey again. How long does a deep canvass program typically take? Support our mission and help keep Vox free for all by making a financial contribution to Vox today. So the research suggests that deep canvassing works. And finally, this method dramatically changes who volunteers on a campaignwe get a more engaged and self-motivated volunteer base when we tell volunteers to interact with voters as human beings rather than as robots. He vowed to keep at it, but soon there was no need. Volunteers went to the other half and started the conversations that Fleischer thinks can help change minds. It has also attracted controversy. I drew from a variety of models and teachings. Ellas earliest organizing focus was on developing innovative tactics to recruit, train and retain large, dedicated volunteer teams with the Oregon Student Association at the University of Oregon. If you would like to see first-hand what these one-on-one conversations are like, we encourage you to. Training resources will include a structured training pipeline of live calls and webinars, training guides, recorded videos, and volunteer-to-volunteer coaching calls. Staying grounded in our real lived experiences instead of opinions. people, with a current focus on transgender discrimination didnt take to the golf-ball suggestion, but Fleischer wanted me to know that he is not opposed to stealing a good idea from the Mormons.. The canvassers also share their own stories: about being an immigrant, about being a member of the LGBTQ community, or about just knowing people who are. Theres still a script, but its designed to help the canvasser build a good rapport with a voter. Let's say you want to beat Candidate X who won in Michigan by 10,000 votes. I made a mistake, she said. Those who had discussed prejudice they'd experienced felt about 10 points more positively toward transgender people, on average. She said she was trying to evolve on the issue, though. Their main hypothesis is that it works because its not threatening. Copyright 2021 by People's Action Institute and the New Conversation Institute. It is a landmark study, according to Elizabeth Paluck, a psychologist at Princeton University who was not involved with the work. There wasn't, however, any indication that those who started out with very negative feelings about transgender people were particularly resistant to the conversation. Keep in mind the media environment the canvassers were working in. YANSS 080 - Deep Canvassing - You Are Not So Smart Deep canvassing was born - and can be boiled down to two key skills: Vulnerability and curiosity. Center, which houses the Leadership Lab, and proposed an unusual idea to his new colleagues: Canvassers should talk to Prop 8 supporters about why they had voted against same-sex marriage. The study made international news and seemed to confirm what many gays and lesbians believed in their guts: that knowing a gay person is a powerful antidote to anti-gay bias. I felt like I could deal with facing the possibility of losing my dad and I could deal with the possibility of being rejected by the people I loved. Without that theoretical understanding, its difficult to generalize and use the approach in other settings, Bruneau says. The truth is, theres not much out there in scientific literature on what can change a voters mind. Give me a few years, and I know Ill be a 10!, How Do You Change Voters Minds? Volunteers working a 2-hour shift, on an average, can complete 5 conversations. KnockEveryDoors canvassing methodology is based on the groundbreaking work of the Leadership LAB at the Los Angeles LGBT Center. Green, who was unaware of the deception, quickly requested a retraction. 2. Who can you reach with a deep canvass? An excellent introduction to deep canvassing and the work of the Leadership LAB can be found in an April 2016 feature article in the New York Times Magazine: How Do You Change Voters Minds? Its a type of conversation thats closer to what a psychotherapist might have with a patient than a typical political argument. I dont like seeing people mistreat Jackson. Broockman says they didnt set out to find the exact mechanism. To me, protecting transgender people with these laws is just affirming that theyre human. Fleischer then steered the conversation to Nancys experiences with discrimination. David Broockman and Josh Kallas measurement of this projects impact become the landmark study that brought deep canvassing into the national spotlight, proving that it had the power to lastingly reduce prejudice. Change the conversation from the ground-up with climate deep canvassing Webinar, Climate Advocacy Lab, 2022. I came out two years ago now, and one of the hardest things for me has been talking with folks who dont understand [gender identity], and not immediately writing someone off because they dont immediately get it, Topping says. Though not all voters would engage emotionally, I was surprised by how many did. LaCour and an advisor, political scientist Donald Green at Columbia University, published the findings in Science in 2014. He and several collaborators struggled for years to get to this point. The woman eventually told Riley that she had voted against gay marriage in California, but that she now regretted that choice. About Us - The Leadership LAB Armed with a no men in womens bathrooms message, anti-L.G.B.T. Leadership LAB Conversation with a Voter about Transgender Rights, 2016(Video 8:30 mins). Its too bad that the takeaway was that only gay people could persuade people about gay marriage, Broockman says about LaCours retracted study. The video ends like this. The key to changing peoples minds is to be curious about what other people think. Deep Canvassing in Action - The Leadership LAB The mans daughter, though, would have none of it: She practically pushed him out of the way to tell Riley they were a 10. Eboni Taggart has over 15 years of experience in community-building, she has maximized the leadership skills of community members, teachers, youth, and parents to advocate for transformative systemic change on issues that impact their lives. How to talk someone out of bigotry with deep canvassing - Vox Join us for the following two webinars on Effective Lobbying and Deep Canvassing, both presented by Olivia Chow and the Institute for Change Leaders in partnership with the Sustainability Network. Feel free to reach out to learn more about how to get involved. After the dust settled, Broockman and Kalla went on with their experiment on transgender prejudices. If I would have only talked to people who agreed with me, I would have only talked to my mom and dad, he told me. The first of the three experiments was pretty much a replication of the 2016 study, but on the topic of rights for undocumented immigrants. The study claimed to find that though both gay and straight canvassers were effective at the door, only voters contacted by gay canvassers remained persuaded nearly a year later. The Leadership Lab, provides a much needed road map for that change.", Hap Klopp, Founder of The North Face, Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Hult University " The Leadership Lab rightly shines a white hot spotlight on the need for 21st century leaders to be thinking about gender and provides a valuable snapshot on how to get . Then they should try to change the voters minds. Jeffrey Fountain/Courtesy of Los Angeles LGBT Center He called everyone involved with the work and every reporter who had covered the study. gets them to begin thinking hard about the issue. Broockman and Kalla (2016) assessed the impact of the . He ran a phone program in the 2020 general election that canvassed over 15,000 people in battleground states, and also led the deep-canvassing phones program in support of the Minneapolis public safety charter amendment in 2021. The news crushed Fleischer. What do social scientists know about reducing prejudice in the world? But what weve learned by having real, in-depth conversations with people is that a broad swath of voters are actually open to changing their mind. But not both.". Its a reminder that our political opponents arent always as rigid or ideologically severe as they appear in our minds. In addition to being a strong persuasion medium, for some issue areas, the deep canvass can also help to serve as an effective voter research tool as well. But things fell apart when David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, then graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, tried to use LaCour's methods to study prejudice against transgender people. "We had a certain sense of responsibility.". In Maine, using deep conversation to reach voters, NPR, 2021 (Podcast 4 minutes), Deep Canvassing Toolkit, Neighbours United, 2022 (5 pg PDF). It also takes time to get a canvass up and running and for volunteers or paid staff to get good at delivering. In 2004, for example, some 3,500 orange-hat-wearing Howard Dean supporters (many bused in from around the country) managed to annoy Iowa voters days before the states Democratic caucus. Talking about marriage brought up deep emotion. He was only half joking. #KnockEveryDoor issues, he believes this kind of canvassing could change peoples thinking on everything from abortion and gun rights to race-based prejudice. In 2014, Science published a study claiming to show that an approximately 20-minute conversation with a gay or lesbian canvasser trained by Fleischers team could turn a gay-marriage opponent into a supporter. Among those who started the conversation, there was a 7 percentage point increase for granting legal status to people brought to the US as children, he says, for example. Across the street, a man in his late 30s who said he was liberal and pro-L.G.B.T.-rights moved to a five from an eight, explaining that he was deeply worried about the bathroom issue. The mans concern seemed informed by his experience in a New York City nightclub; he hinted at his discomfort standing at a urinal next to a drag queen. Oh, okay, that makes a lot of sense, she says. Broockman and Kalla published the results in Science on Thursday. And now, a new peer-reviewed study a series of three placebo-controlled field experiments soon to be published in American Political Science Review replicates the findings and gives us new insights into the conditions for lasting opinion change and reductions in prejudice. In 2016, Broockman and Kalla showed that a 10-minute deep canvass conversation could reduce transgender prejudice for at least three months (you might recall this study was a redo of a previous experiment, from a separate team of researchers, which was retracted due to falsified data). Typically, the conversations begin with the canvasser asking the voter for their opinion on a topic, like abortion access, immigration, or LGBTQ rights. "When we were nonjudgmental and vulnerable with them and when we exchanged our lived experiences about marriage and gay people, that's when we started changing people's minds," he says. Here is a collection of resources about deep canvassing scripts including script examples and ideas, video training and podcasts. But Fleischer is wary of what he calls the anti-discrimination declaration. At the Leadership Labs two-hour pre-canvass training that morning, volunteers were warned about fake 10s, people who think of themselves as against discrimination many of them Democrats but who can nonetheless be swayed by emotion-based appeals that provoke prejudice and fear. Most notably, Ella led the LABs collaboration with SAVE, Miami-Dades leading LGBT group, to develop and measure a deep canvass model that could reduce transphobia. One group aired a lurid television ad of a man following a frightened, wide-eyed young girl into a bathroom stall. For instance, Donald Trump won Michigan by 10,000 votes. The biggest gift you can give someone whose mind you want to change is a supportive environment that lets them think about their experiences and how those experiences affect their opinions on issues. But David Fleischer, the director of the Leadership LAB of the Los Angeles LGBT Center, thinks he's found a way to begin changing people's prejudices with just a short conversation. This is why since 2008, the Leadership LAB has used deep canvassing to connect with infrequent voters (folks who have missed 1-3 of previous major elections), in order to help voters reflect on one of the biggest motivating factors to take action and vote - the love and hope they have in their own lives. In 2020, Susmik moved to New Hampshire to work as a field organizer for Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. Youve probably had a time when people have judged you unfairly? he asked. groups argued that transgender people (or those pretending to be) would pose a threat to children in public restrooms. As part of the LA LGBT Center's groundbreaking Leadership LAB team, he helped create the original deep canvass approach. And thats exciting, because it offers the possibility that we could get past the current paralysis on a wide variety of controversial issues.. Share this page on LinkedIn, 7 Questions with Dave Fleischer on Deep Canvassing, Remote Work Culture: How to Boost Your Company Culture. And the data shows it works. For me, I never had a transgender friend I was really close to until I was 56, he said, handing Nancy the picture. The canvassers then ask if the voters know anyone in the affected community, and ask if they relate to the persons story. Leadership LAB - Los Angeles LGBT Center (You can read the full deep canvassing script here on page 47.). In his work, Bruneau finds that political partisans have a skewed view of how they think their opponents think of them. The effects of most efforts to change peoples minds on an issue, if successful at all, tend to fade over time. graduate student in political science and statistics, who said he could design a study to assess the long-term effectiveness of Leadership Lab canvassers at increasing support for same-sex marriage among voters in Los Angeles who had supported Prop 8. Please enter a valid email and try again. Her passion for social justice and teambuilding began in the woods of Timber, Oregon, where her family built a large community home around the core value of radical acceptance. Even as Trump was talking about the caravan, we see that Republicans in our study are moving.. UC Berkeley, Stanford study finds canvassing conversations reduce For her, the video seemed to clarify that Fleischer was specifically asking her about transgender people, a group she had no experience with and seemed to have little inherent empathy for. The study got a huge amount of attention. An excellent introduction to deep canvassing and the work of the Leadership LAB can be found in an April 2016 feature article in the New . The distinguishing feature of a deep canvass is you take a lot more time to talk to voters and have a bona fide two-way conversation about real experiences that shape their thinking about the issues. Cutting edge political science research shows that canvassing is one of the most effective tactics in an activists arsenal (to read more about this, check out Deep Canvassing 101). As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Contact Cambridge, MA, USA (617) 702-4787 [email protected]. I see transgender people as the same as I see myself, Nancy told him. In 2014, Fleischer and his team modified their canvassing work to persuade and mobilize voters by phone. He and his colleagues started the effort in 2009, shortly after the Prop 8 constitutional amendment and struck down same-sex marriage in California. A gray-haired Hispanic woman named Nancy cracked open the front door, though not enough to let her little dog eat our ankles. Steve Deline - Netroots Nation Im a campaign person; youd do anything for 3.5 points, says Fran Hutchins, the deputy director of the Equality Federation who worked on deep canvassing efforts reported in the new study. Fleischer headed west to work with the Los Angeles L.G.B.T. Hes married to a woman now, and hes so much happier. That means not making assumptions based on the voters age, race or their religion. Could it be used to wage conservative culture wars? Sharing narratives gets around that: The persuasion happens because in talking about themselves, the voters realize a more tolerant attitude is consistent with their self-image. Thats refreshing and useful. Instead of pelting voters with facts, we ask open-ended questions and then we listen, Dave Fleischer, the LGBTQ rights organizer who developed the technique, told me in 2016. In many campaigns, polling data and focus groups tell us that very few people are persuadable, so we ignore those voters and stick with talking to the voters who are already on our side. In New Hampshire, Susmik reached out to immigrant and refugee communities in the state, which has a particularly high number of Bhutanese refugees from Nepal. Ellas earliest organizing focus was on developing innovative tactics to recruit, train and retain large, dedicated volunteer teams with the Oregon Student Association at the University of Oregon. Kalla says some people came away from the canvasser feeling very differently and some people not so much at all. A 2016 study in Science proved it was possible. director of the Leadership LAB at the . Its much easier to put all your volunteers in a cozy phone bank where everyone gets to hang out and eat pizza.. All Muslims are often blamed for single acts of terror. It also seemed to bolster the contact hypothesis theory of prejudice reduction, which finds that personal contact decreases bias against a minority group. Give me a five., Nancy wasnt the only person to significantly decrease her support after watching the video. But he also knew that political persuasion had not been studied often. Ella Barrett has a deep love for building dynamic teams and innovative systems to create measurable social change. I wasnt sure she would return; the last two voters hed met pleaded busyness. Nancy, it seemed, was a supporter no need to worry about her. Listening to a political opponents concerns. In the runup, conservative news outlets were blaring headlines about a scary immigrant caravan marching north through Mexico to the US southern border. As Riley prepared to leave for the next house on the block, the woman called out. What an African-American person has faced because of their race is not the same as the discrimination that Ive faced for being bisexual, or that my friend has faced for being transgender, she told the group. Deep Canvassing - Western Wisconsin Votes Jeremy Bird, a Hillary Clinton adviser who was the national field director for Obamas 2012 re-election effort, told me that his team conducted a number of experiments to try to have a greater impact when canvassing. Its not easy to confront people whose votes would seek to hurt you, and then try to change their minds. The impacts these conversations had on feelings of prejudice, Broockman admits, are about a third as strong. But research shows that the impact of our deep canvass conversations can last nine months or longer. Typically, in a political canvass, an activist might list a bunch of facts or statistics about why the voter should support their cause. Danny Timponais Movement Politics Field Director for Peoples Action. Broockman, now an assistant professor of political economy at Stanford University, says asking someone questions face-to-face like, "What are the reasons you wouldn't support protections for transgender people, or what does this make you think about?" Prejudices are often deep, obstinate beliefs. Deep Canvassing in Action - The Leadership LAB Deep Canvassing in Action The Leadership LAB works to reduce prejudice and change voters' hearts and minds. The payoffs are small and incremental, but they are real. Have more questions about long form or deep canvassing? After the first canvass I attended, the Leadership Lab project manager Ella Barrett seemed uncharacteristically sullen. You've probably noticed this if you've ever tried to change someone's political opinion at a dinner party. David directs the Leadership Lab at the Los Angeles LGBT Center. Caitlin Homrich-Knieling, Deep Canvass Coordinator at We the People Michigan in the United States talks about script development and how they come up with script as well as a useful tool called The Cone of Curiosity.
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