If you had two minutes to talk to President Trump about the job he’s doing for you and your family, what would you tell him?
That’s the ice-breaker question Adam Barbanel-Fried and his fellow canvassers ask people who come to the door. It gives them a quick sense of where the conversation might go, and how much time to invest.
Here’s how Gasper Zerelli, a retired baker in Staten Island, replied on a recent evening: “I would tell him it’d probably be better for him if he stopped tweeting. What he says is right, but the way he phrases it kind of upsets the other side.”
Barbanel-Fried next asks him to rate how likely it is he’d vote for a Democrat in the upcoming election, on a scale from zero to 10.
Zerelli quickly replied zero
Barbanel-Fried thanked him for his time and headed to the next door.
Some zeroes are movable and some aren’t. Few, if any, shift all the way across the scale, from totally Republican to totally Democratic. But that isn’t really the point. Barbanel-Fried’s group, Changing the Conversation Together, is pragmatic as well as idealistic.
They aspire to modest but meaningful gains in the midterm elections and are hoping to pick up the ‘undecideds’ and, especially, voters who chose Donald Trump in 2016 but have grown disenchanted. Their method is based on a peer-reviewed behavioral technique that has changed minds about 10 percent of the time.
But for members in the group, the means is as important as the end: They want to persuade people about the deeper, personal importance of political action by connecting their life stories to their ballot choices — and they want it to last more than one election cycle.
Conventional canvassing is largely a quick-touch numbers game: Get as many people registered on your side as possible and focus on your base. Trying to persuade dug-in opponents, like Zerelli, is considered a mug’s game — it’s either impossible or too labor-intensive. There are only so many volunteers to knock on doors and make calls, and there’s a vast ocean of voters to get to the polls.
Changing the Conversation Together is pilot-testing “deep canvassing,” an intensive approach that features long, in-depth and emotional conversations. The technique has been uniquely successful in changing conservative attitudes toward LGBT people. Barbanel-Fried wants to see if it can work in electoral politics.
Deep canvassing was pioneered by David Fleischer, a lawyer and community organizer at the Leadership LAB in Los Angeles.
Fleischer’s success has been something of a roller-coaster ride: one study by a social scientist tracking his work that was published in Science made national headlines — only to be debunked and retracted, when other researchers presented strong evidence that the initial study was built on fabricated his data.
But when those researchers used Fleischer’s “deep canvassing” method and measured its effects more reliably, the results were even better than initially reported. Their study, too, was published in Science.
Barbanel-Fried, a longtime community and union organizer, considers Fleischer a mentor.
Distressed about the election of Donald Trump — and what it said about the disconnect between people of different political tribes — he decided to see whether deep canvassing could win over at least some Trump voters.
He set up a political action committee, raised money and began training volunteers. Initially they hoped to test deep canvassing on several contested Congressional seats, but with the available time and resources, he and fellow organizers decided to focus on New York’s 11th District.
The district encompasses Staten Island and parts of southern Brooklyn. Democrats outnumber Republicans in this area. But while it’s regularly elected Democrats to at least some local and state offices, it’s sent Republicans to Capitol Hill for all but two of the last thirty or so years.
And Staten Island is the only borough in New York City that voted for Donald Trump.
Incumbent Republican Dan Donovan, the former Staten Island District Attorney, has been leading challenger Max Rose in the polls. Rose is a 32-year-old Army reservist, Afghanistan veteran and healthcare executive who’s also worked in the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office.
When the deep canvassers knock doors, they generally don’t mention Rose by name, and they don’t spend a lot of time talking about political party, either. Nor do they talk about public policy specifics.
They’re not trying to win people over with facts and positions. They’re trying to appeal to something more primal.
And that’s why they almost exclusively discuss the president.
“We really try to say that whoever [the candidate] is, if you have a Republican Congress, there’s no checks on Trump,” said Julie Fraad, one of the volunteers.
On a recent evening, Fraad and Barbanel-Fried were part of a team of six canvassers spreading out across Staten Island’s Rosebank neighborhood. Together they knocked on dozens of doors over the course of two-and-a-half hours.
Barbanel-Fried had several short exchanges, like the one with Zerelli — including one with Zerelli’s diametric opposite, a man eager to vent about the president.
Barbanel-Fried also had three long conversations. Each time, he asked people about their votes and how they connected political choices to their personal life and their families. He told long stories about his family and values and tried to solicit stories from them, with mixed success.
They had good reason to believe Rosebank would yield many “Obama-Trump” voters, because as a whole, it voted Democrat in 2008 and 2012 but not 2016. They were also armed with individual voter records, though those only show people’s participation rates over the last several elections, not how they cast their ballots.
All three of Barbanel-Fried’s extended conversations were with former Obama voters. Two of them voted for Trump, and one sat out 2016. Two expressed reservations about Hillary Clinton.
One of them, a Chinese immigrant, said he had heard Ms. Clinton wasn’t good for Asians.
Another, who clearly felt uncomfortable discussing her vote, said she was undecided about the upcoming election and asked Barbanel-Fried to tell her more about the local Congressional candidates.
He politely demurred, trying instead to draw her out with lengthy stories about some of his experiences that he hoped would get her to share parts of her life that he could connect to current political events. She wearily listened but refused to budge. She only wanted to know about the candidates.
Afterward, I asked Barbanel-Fried why at that point he didn’t switch gears and tell her about the two candidates — presumably making the Republican look bad and the Democrat look good. Wasn’t the whole point to flip the seat and turn the Congress?
“We are hoping to get people to ultimately vote for [Rose], but for us it’s not just about this particular race,” he said. “It’s really about how do two citizens talk to one another other from different communities.”
If this voter was a determined fact-finder, he reasoned, best to let her choose her candidate her way and move on to the next voter. He’d already invested about 15 minutes at her door, and she was clearly growing fatigued.
His next lengthy conversation was with Thomas Dituri, a builder. At first, Dituri said he’d use his two minutes with President Trump to tell him he was doing okay. But Dituri’s mood quickly changed when asked how likely it was he’d vote for a Democrat in the upcoming midterms. Dituri scored himself an eight.
“Well, I’m beginning to sour on Trump, to be honest with you,” Dituri said. ”Mostly, his morals don’t sit well with me.
Another kind of canvasser might have seized the chance to mention his candidate, but standing on the porch as the twilight faded, intent on forging a deeper bond, Barbanel-Fried talked about his 92-year-old father, who was born in Germany.
“When he was 7 years old, he came home crying because the local youth parade wouldn’t let him march, because he was Jewish,” he said. “It was the Hitler youth.
He talked about his family’s exodus to America before fast-forwarding to the current political moment and white supremacists marching in Charlottesville — this was before an anti-Semite’s recent massacre of Jews in Pittsburgh — and to President Trump saying there were “good people on both sides.”
“Have you or anyone close to you ever been the subject of hate or discrimination?” he asked.
“No, I haven’t been,” Dituri replied. “But I try to put myself in their position, and it’s terrible. It’s horrible.
Barbanel-Fried asked Dituri if he thinks about how things affect his family, when he votes.
“I try to think about what the future and how I hope the world will be better when my granddaughter becomes an adult,” he said. “And hopefully that will play out better by who I vote for.”
Barbanel-Fried pivoted to the president and Congressional Republicans, and asked Dituri if thought the country needed checks and balances on President Trump. Dituri agreed, said the Democrats could count on his support on Election Day. Barbanel-Fried again asked him to rate his voting prospects on the ten-point scale.
“Ten — because I believe I made a mistake, and I would definitely vote Democrat this time around,” he said.
The group of canvassers met back up at a nearby Dunkin Donuts and debriefed. Not everyone reported netting a previous Trump voter, but they were all upbeat about moving the needle a bit.
“I talked to some Democrats. I talked to some Republicans. I talked to some people who were 5s and 10s and 0s,” said Meghan Duffy, a speech therapist originally from Buffalo. “And that’s, I think, a really cool conversation to have.”
For Lisa Mann, an architect from Brooklyn, deep canvassing is an opportunity not only to help change the political landscape but also “to get outside my bubble.”
“One of my great fears is that we’re really, really not speaking to each other,” Mann said. “And this goes a long way towards bringing people to the same place.”
One criticism of the Democratic party and many of its candidates is that they’ve been so focused on Trump that they’ve failed to offer an affirmative vision of what they’ll do in office. Barbanel-Fried doesn’t refute this critique, but he thinks right now it’s a defensible approach.
“For many voters, winning them over with policies and facts just is not what’s going to make the difference,” he said.
In the study published in Science — the second, legitimate one — deep canvassing techniques changed the minds of about one in 10 people. Barbanel-Fried has been studiously tracking his group’s data — not for scientific publication, but to see whether it’s working. In about 750 conversations, more than 10 percent of voters have moved four or more points over the course of the conversation.
“That doesn’t mean they’ll vote Democratic or wouldn’t have, anyway, but it’s still very encouraging,” he said.
And in phone follow-ups with a small sample of these, those scores have held up or grown more positive, he added.
Since Changing the Conversation Together is a political action committee, it cannot coordinate canvassing or anything else with the Max Rose campaign. But Barbanel-Fried sees his work as complementing what the campaign is doing and persuading people they might not otherwise reach — enough, perhaps, to tip the scales in a close election, if not this time than in the future, if done on a much larger scale.
“If you could get one in ten out of several thousand people, that’d be enough for Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania,” he said — referring to the razor-thin margins that led to Trump’s Electoral College victory.
Barbanel-Fried would like to expand the group to take on more in 2020. But for now, they’re focused on the 11th Congressional District.
“There’s only one test, and it’s next Tuesday,” he said.