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. It always comes down to just a few points.. It does seem as though the two-way nature of the conversations is essential for the canvassing technique to work. Give me a few years, and I know Ill be a 10!, How Do You Change Voters Minds? 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. LaCour's misconduct only made them more determined to do the study for real. There might be a couple of reasons for that. Jeffrey Fountain/Courtesy of Los Angeles LGBT Center After the dust. Its up to volunteers to add specific candidates, districts, elections, or geographically-specific voting information to our templated #KnockEveryDoor scripts. He also admitted to lying about having received funds for his study from several organizations, including the Ford Foundation. gets them to begin thinking hard about the issue. Grassroots, We have a national reputation for our success developing practical, positive, non-partisan, non-judgmental ways to connect with voters. Taken advantage of us. "We brainstormed every idea and tried every idea, overwhelmingly those ideas failed," he says. But research shows that the impact of our deep canvass conversations can last nine months or longer. Interacting with people different than me was a normal thing, and certainly not undesirable or scary. Contact Cambridge, MA, USA (617) 702-4787 caleb@owlfoxdean.com. A typical state or national campaign, even one with a ground-game focus, doesnt want its volunteers spending 10 or 15 minutes at a door. Giving grace. The watered-down intervention without the two-way exchange didnt move anyone to support undocumented immigrants. The effect of most campaign messaging is short-lived and can evaporate in as little as 3-5 days. A Qualitative Examination of Dialogical Elements in Anti-Racist Deep The leaders worked to keep the mood relaxed and optimistic. Youve probably had a time when people have judged you unfairly? he asked. Mehrdad Azemun is Senior Strategist at Peoples Action. Jackson grew up as a girl, but he knew even when he was 5 or 6 that he was really a boy. Without that theoretical understanding, its difficult to generalize and use the approach in other settings, Bruneau says. (One clinical therapist I showed it to said it sounded a bit like motivational interviewing, a technique used to help clients work through ambivalent feelings.) 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. It was only in his 20s that he started to tell his folks the truth, and he started making the transition to living as a man. These conversations arent arguments. That means not making assumptions based on the voters age, race or their religion. . It could take awhile. But instead he began with a simple question: If she were to vote on whether to include gay and transgender people in nondiscrimination laws, would she be in favor or opposed? These scientists keep proving that reducing prejudice is possible. Steve Deline has been organizing around the methodology of deep canvassing, across multiple movements, for 13 years. You've probably noticed this if you've ever tried to change someone's political opinion at a dinner party. The fraudulent study called into question the validity of the Leadership Labs deep-canvassing approach. The Leadership LAB works to reduce prejudice and change voters hearts and minds. To combat that, canvassers tried to get voters to reflect about challenging decisions they had made in their own sex lives or relationships or times they were judged harshly. You will also need a team of at least three full-time organizers, which is the majority of the budget, and you need a dedicated team of volunteers (ideally 200 or so). . There's this belief that if we just say the . What are the drawbacks of this method? If only I could have 10 minutes with Ted Cruz, Fleischer said once. Have a Conversation, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/magazine/how-do-you-change-voters-minds-have-a-conversation.html. 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. What does it take to divert someone away from prejudice and toward greater acceptance of others in order to build support for progressive causes? As part of the LA LGBT Centers groundbreaking Leadership LAB team, he helped create the original deep canvass approach. His deep canvassing career and vision took off in rural North Carolina, where hehelped change hearts and minds in our groundbreaking immigration deep canvass with Down Home North Carolina. And its this meta-perception, Bruneau finds, that then fuels ongoing conflict and dehumanization. Maybe, as The Wall Street Journal suggested, Fleischers efforts merely flattered the ideological sensibilities of liberals. But this week, a new study published in Science by David Broockman, an assistant professor of political economy at Stanford, and Joshua Kalla, a graduate student in political science at Berkeley, appears to serve as vindication of Fleischers work. The two other experiments in the study targeted transphobia. The woman eventually told Riley that she had voted against gay marriage in California, but that she now regretted that choice. Its also quite a departure from standard political canvassing. 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. Oh, yes, Nancy said. Then, last month, the North Carolina General Assembly passed a bill preventing cities and counties from enacting their own anti-discrimination legislation, stripping existing protections. 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. Those basic numbers tell you something about just how willing most Americans are to have an open conversation with a stranger about these ostensibly divisive issues, Broockman says. Whats missing here, she says, is a theoretical understanding for why the change is occurring. Beginning in 2014, the Leadership Lab teamed up with Planned Parenthood to canvass in support of pro-choice policies. She seemed to be connecting Jacksons experience to that of her gay friends. As a result, our elected officials are reflecting the communities they represent less and less. Knocking on a strangers door is scary, and a lot of that mornings training session was spent boosting the confidence of first-time canvassers. On the issue of transgender rights, the woman seemed mostly supportive but stopped at a nine. How to talk someone out of bigotry with deep canvassing - Vox As several studies have shown, deep canvassing, which involves deliberately developing a nonjudgmental, empathetic connection with a voter through 10 to 15 minutes of authentic conversation, canif done properlylead to persistent changes in people's attitudes on issues like immigration and transgender rights. Tennessee and the Central Valley have been the sites of large-scale workplace raids by ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] in recent years, she says, and various cities in Orange County have attempted to opt out of the California Values Act. Thats a state law that limits the collaboration between local law enforcement and federal immigration enforcement. Tweet The canvassers role is primarily to listen, to build trust and then to have a respectful conversation about areas where both parties may disagree. 5. Well use these conversations at the door to engage people who are currently sitting out elections, to recruit the people who are already with us to volunteer, and to persuade people who supported Trump but have a shared interest in our agenda of racial and economic justice. Share this page on LinkedIn, 7 Questions with Dave Fleischer on Deep Canvassing, Remote Work Culture: How to Boost Your Company Culture. hide caption. Eden Mayle Field Manager Maria Do Field Organizer Deep canvassing has since been proven to change hearts and minds and find common ground across differences by. Take a mental break with the newest Vox crossword, Sign up for the Green was skeptical that the canvassers were as persuasive as they thought they were. Who We Are The New Conversation Initiative Oh, okay, that makes a lot of sense, she says. Fleischers staff at the Los Angeles-based Leadership Lab which goes door to door to reduce bias against L.G.B.T. Leadership LAB - Los Angeles LGBT Center A 10, she said. It is a landmark study, according to Elizabeth Paluck, a psychologist at Princeton University who was not involved with the work. 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. Canvassers can get mugged, they can get lost, they can get attacked by wild geese, Michelson told me. Even as Trump was talking about the caravan, we see that Republicans in our study are moving.. "The LGBT community and our allies were shocked and upset," Fleischer says. In Pennsylvania and beyond, Eboni has also supported organizations on outreach, strategy, program management, leadership development and political education. And then we continue to ask open-ended questions based on what they just told us. The idea is that people learn lessons more durably when they come to the conclusion themselves, not when someone bitch-slaps you with a statistic, Fleischer said. But the researchers found that the persuasion attempts had zero effect, Broockman said. Advancement Leadership Lab People are what makes Advancement advance. Green, who was unaware of the deception, quickly requested a retraction. Canvassing with Love: David Fleischer Future Hindsight During a 2013 trip to New York City, he visited the Columbia University political-science professor Donald Green, whose experiments on voter behavior including his findings that canvassing is a more effective mobilization tool than telephone calls or direct mail partly inspired a focus on building a ground game, a strategy mastered by the Obama campaign. This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. He was only half joking. Theres a smaller finding nestled in Broockman and Kallas new paper, one that might not make headlines but is worth thinking about. All three places are experiencing demographic change, with a growing and diversifying population of immigrant residents, says Kim Serrano, the messaging research project manager at the California Immigrant Policy Center. The study's conclusions differ from the conclusions of the LaCour's falsified study from 2014 in one crucial way, Broockman says. The canvasser shares vulnerably about their own life and asks curious questions to create mutual understanding grounded in lived experience. #KnockEveryDoor The canvassers don't try to build rational arguments for why someone should think one way or another. Do you have a few minutes today to talk about transgender people?, Williams played a busy voter. 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. "I told him that my father is fighting cancer right now. Im with Black Lives Matter, and I know a lot of trans people, the woman told Riley. Thats likely a lot of people. However, a modern technique of deep canvassing developed by David Fleischer at the Leadership LAB encourages canvassers to engage in one-on-one conversations with the intention of gaining understanding, building empathy, and finding common ground. 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. Over a 2-hour shift, our volunteers will complete an average of 5 conversations. The new research shows that if you want to change someones mind, you need to have patience with them, ask them to reflect on their life, and listen. Your First and Complete Guide on Deep Canvassing | CallHub 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. It was developed by the Leadership LAB in Los Angeles and has been effectively employed to help motivate voters in multiple organizing projects across the nation. Deep Canvassing to Shift Hearts, Mind and Votes. Over the past few years, deep canvassing has been adopted by some progressive activist groups looking to not only change minds when it comes to policies on immigration and LGBTQ rights, but also to reduce prejudice toward these groups. Copyright 2021 by People's Action Institute and the New Conversation Institute. That changed everything, Fleischer told me. To get Nancy to a true 10 capable of withstanding opposition messaging, Fleischer needed to help her tap into her own empathy and connect emotionally to transgender people.. Neighbours United, formerly known as West Kootenay EcoSociety, developed their script over 1.5 years of script iterations, building off the learnings of many other deep canvasses and organizations, notably Montana Engagement Partnership, and in collaboration with the New Conversation Initiative, with support from Yale Program on Climate Change Communications. For me, I never had a transgender friend I was really close to until I was 56, he said, handing Nancy the picture. 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. Online training about deep canvassing 100,000 people door-to-door seeking to speak with marriage equality opponents. See also the AYCC website for more information about deep canvassing and an example of a useful Climate Conversation Report Tool. Deep Canvassing Scripts and Examples - The Commons In 2020, these seem like radical propositions. We are still in the process of figuring this out. (Its hard, he adds, to directly compare the two papers, though, since the 2016 effort focused a bit more on combating prejudice, and this one more so on policy. The news crushed Fleischer. In a way, they may be a form of public therapy for all sides involved. One group aired a lurid television ad of a man following a frightened, wide-eyed young girl into a bathroom stall. It usually isnt until Fleischer opens up about his own experience including feeling different in his small, conservative Ohio town that voters feel safe to get vulnerable, too, he says. Twitter is obviously full of the notion that what we should do is condemn those who disagree with us. Door to Door, One way you could think about our study is as an effort to try to use the insights of lab studies in real-world settings, he says. The video ends like this. And while the effects may be small, only moving opinion a handful of percentage points among those canvassed may be worth it, too. We trained our volunteers to connect with voters at the door on a personal and values level, not to talk at them with scripted talking points. Deep Canvassing in Action - The Leadership LAB As Fleischer returned to the discrimination she had faced, Nancy paused and said, It felt terrible. A few minutes later, when he asked her if she saw a connection between your experience and how you want to treat transgender people, she said she did. Dave Fleischer of The Leadership Lab joins The Great Battlefield podcast to talk about how he's spent most of his life fighting for equal rights for LGBTQ people and how deep canvassing can help us find common ground and reduce prejudice. After the canvass, the groups filled out four follow-up surveys, up to three months later. When working with new groups, new staff, on a new issue and at bigger scale, I think its natural to expect smaller effects, he says. It has also attracted controversy. That failed miserably, he said. Why Russia renewed large-scale aerial attacks against Ukraine, What comes next in the debt ceiling showdown. A few days before, the Human Rights Campaign released a report warning about 44 anti-transgender bills filed in 16 states. "Deep Canvassing" - What Political Campaigns Can Learn From It He and his colleagues started the effort in 2009, shortly after the Prop 8 constitutional amendment and struck down same-sex marriage in California. 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. #KnockEveryDoor serves as a nationwide hub for progressive canvassing training and deployment.

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