With the Feb. 24 mayoral elections around the corner, armies of voter canvassers—some paid professionals, some volunteers—will work their way through entire zip-codes knocking on front doors never knowing with absolute certainly the sort of reception that awaits them.
In one of seven myths about voter canvassing, the website Voter Gravity stated "as hard as it is for people to believe, the average person doesn't mind having a campaign volunteer tell them what they need to know about a candidate to make an informed decision. It saves them time, and effort. They feel like they are getting decent information because it is straight from the source, and if you do your job right, it doesn't take that long. There will, of course, be exceptions."
In a Los Angeles LGBT Center video entitled The Key to Change: Voter Canvassing, a young canvasser named Laura Gardiner has knocked on the front door of a home. She is dressed in a nondescript purple T-shirt and her hair is pulled back into a pony tail. The gentleman who has answered is half shielded from Gardiner by his front door. He frowns at her first question.
"How do you feel about marriage for gay and lesbian couples?" Gardiner asks.
"Their choice." The man replies with a careless shrug.
"If it is on the ballot again, would you vote in favor of marriage for gay and lesbian couples?" Gardiner presses.
"I don't think so," he answers. "A man and woman should be married and that's what it says in the Bible."
Gardiner goes on to ask him if he knows anyone who is gay or lesbian. When he states that he doesn't, Gardiner tells him matter-of-factly that she is. "For me, it absolutely was not a choice to be gay," she adds.
Over the course of the next few minutes, she engages him in an impassioned description of how it felt to have her right to marriage summarily removed following the 2008 passage of Proposition 8 in California. She then asks him again whether he would vote in favor of marriage for gay and lesbian couples.
"Probably," he replies and when Gardiner asks him what made him change his mind, he steps from the safety of his door and joins her on his front porch. "I think a person deserves to be whoever they are and be happy," he says.
The man's reactions formed the basis of a one-year study on voter persuasion conducted by the Los Angeles LGBT Center the results of which were published in the December 12, 2014 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Science.
"Can a single conversation change minds on divisive social issues, such as same-sex marriage?," lead researchers and political scientists Columbia University Professor Donald P. Green and UCLA's Michael J. LaCour wondered. "The results, measured by an unrelated panel survey, show that both gay and straight canvassers produced large effects initially, but only gay canvassers' effects persisted in three-week, six-week, and nine-month follow-ups."
Gardiner is the national mentoring coordinator for the Leadership LAB at the Los Angeles LGBT Center—a massive non-profit that for 46 years has provided LGBT programming in the areas of health, social services, housing, culture, education, leadership and advocacy. Both Gardiner and Field Organizer Ella Varrezt talked with Windy City Times about the study's extraordinary discoveries which began shortly after Proposition 8 put a temporary halt to same-sex marriages in California.
"We started having conversations with voters in 2009," Gardiner recalled. "Our ultimate goal was to better understand what they thought about the specific issue of same-sex marriage and, not only to find out if we could persuade them, but if we could also have a positive impact on their feelings towards [LGBT] people in general."
Like most canvassers, Gardiner and the team did not know what to expect. "We were pleasantly surprised that voters would talk to us about this," she said. "Our average conversation ended up being 22 minutes at the door."
The volunteers did not use a carefully scripted list of talking points. "We were having a personal conversation," Gardiner said. "We asked [the voters] a lot of questions about their own lived experiences and about the gay and lesbian people in their lives. We discovered an unprecedented way of talking to conservative voters and changing their minds."
The Leadership LAB needed to be certain that they were having an impact. "So we wanted it to be independently measured," Gardiner recalled. "That was when Mike and Don agreed to lead the experiment. So in 2013, they measured all of our conversations that we had with voters at the door."
Varrezt focused on the recruitment and leadership development of the study's volunteers—the majority of whom were found on university campuses like UCLA. "We found that LGBT people in general are incredibly interested in this work—talking to folks who are against us," she said. "When I first started, I was terrified. I didn't think that I could come out at a [front] door. The piece that I love about our work is that we involved our volunteers in the thinking; learning from canvas to canvas how to do this better."
The volunteers intentionally canvassed those districts of Los Angeles County that had been supportive of Proposition 8. "We went to specific areas where we lost two-to-one knowing that we would be able to find socially conservative voters," Gardiner said. "Whether they remembered or not how they voted on Prop 8, we knew that in general they weren't fully supportive of LGBT people."
After over an hour's worth of training each morning with a conversation recipe built around personal, lived experiences, the volunteers set out. Canvassing began with an introduction and questions designed to rate the voters feeling on the same-sex marriage issue. "Shortly after that we'd dive into a personal conversation," Gardiner said. "We'd ask them questions like 'are you married?' and ''what has that been like for you?' and then we would reciprocate and share our own personal stories. We would encourage all of our canvassers to come out at the door either as LGBT or as a straight ally and talk about why this was something they cared about."
"A lot of the responses we got from folks were of empathy and wanting to understand us," Varrezt explained. "What we did in return was to have a two-way conversation. It was something that was honest, truthful and completely non-judgmental."
"When we're vulnerable and being honest about our experiences it sets the tone for the voter to feel comfortable sharing their own stories," Gardiner noted. "So when I'm having a conversation with a voter about my coming out, suddenly that voter is comfortable telling me about the first gay person they ever met or the relative they have who is gay but cut off from their family. These stories have emotion, feeling and memories attached to them. It helped create the impact that Mike and Don found lasted for up to a year after out LGBTQ canvassers had left the door."
Other than rejection from some voters who refused to talk about politics or personal ideology, Gardiner said the canvassers experienced very few closed-doors.
Ultimately, Gardiner described Green and LaCour's results as "unprecedented."
"They are in sharp contrast with the hundreds of other attempts at voter persuasion and prejudice reduction that have been measured over the past several years and shown no lasting impact with voters," she asserted. "Our conversations with these conservative voters have moved them to be more supportive of the specific issue of same-sex marriage five times faster than their neighbors [the control group] who we didn't talk to."
They are results that could one day free a canvasser to go off script—something many campaigns refuse to allow because, according to Voter Gravity, "they are afraid you will say things that they don't want you to say. The problem is that people don't respond to scripts. They respond to people."
