This Twist on Door-Knocking Could Help Harris Defeat Trump

Politics is a spectator sport for most Americans. And not an entertaining one at that — it’s full of dread, doom scrolling, and confusion over fluctuations in swing-state polls. As with most anxieties, the only antidote is action — and the 2024 contest has many avenues for Americans willing to make democracy a voter-contact sport. Are you someone who wants to heed Michelle Obama’s call to “do something?” Here’s something to do: 

Turn out your neighbors to vote.

One of the largest voter-turnout organizations on the progressive side is Indivisible, which went viral in response to the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and helped channel the anger of “resistance” Democrats into political power. Ezra Levin, one of the founders of Indivisible, is bullish on 2024 — and ambitious. “Our north star is taking the White House, the House, and the Senate,” he tells Rolling Stone, seeking to deliver a “Democrat trifecta so that we can reform the filibuster, codify reproductive freedom, and pass democracy reform.”

To put this dream in play, Indivisible is innovating the “ground game” used to get out the vote in 2024. With a program called Neighbor2Neighbor, Indivisible is mobilizing progressive volunteers to canvas where they live — and persuade neighbors who are like-minded, but infrequent-voters, to cast a ballot. 

This is different from routine GOTV canvassing, in which strangers typically drive into unfamiliar neighborhoods armed with long lists of contacts, and pester those folks to go to the polls. As Levin describes this traditional model: “You get 40 names. You spend an afternoon trying to contact those voters. You talk to three or four voters, and you go home for the day.”

Neighbor2Neighbor focuses instead on “relational organizing” — with volunteers mobilizing voters from their own communities, on their own schedule. N2N volunteers sign up online, plug in their home address, and “get 10 sporadic Democratic voters who are within a couple blocks,” Levin says. The terrain is familiar and so are the faces. “You can show up at their house when you see their car in the driveway. Whenever you’ve got time,” he says.

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Indivisible pioneered this neighborhood program during the 2022 midterm elections, in more than a dozen competitive elections, and the results were extraordinary. Local canvassers turned out nearly double the number of unlikely voters compared to conventional, stranger-to-stranger methods. “Voters talking to voters is just crazy impactful,” Levin says, describing the surge in turnout as “mind-boggling.”

The N2N program is not only superior for banking ballots, it’s a better experience for volunteer campaigners, Levin insists. “We found our folks loved it because you didn’t have to go through the technical and time-consuming aspect of traditional canvassing,” he says. The N2N program offers less friction for activists, who will aim to engage in one or two conversations with each unlikely voter on their neighborhood contact sheet. (For newbies, Indivisible offers a sample script to guide the conversation.) “It is intentionally a low lift,” Levin insists.

By every measure, the 2024 election is looking like a coin flip — which means for activists it is within the margin of effort. “That is nerve-wracking,” Levin says. “But from an organizing perspective, it is a good place to be. It means the work that we’re doing right now is meaningful. You can make that argument to volunteers: ‘This could come down to a few dozen or a few hundred votes outside of Phoenix or outside of Atlanta.’”

The N2N program is currently targeting 300,000 unlikely voters. “We’re pushing quality over quantity.” Levin says. The program is spread across battleground states and districts — including the presidential swing states; nine key Senate contests from Nebraska to Maryland; and select House districts in places as far flung as Oregon and Virginia. 

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Indivisible emphasizes the opportunity for N2N to impact House races even in blue bastions. “Your individual effort in your own battleground state in California or New York is going to do much more good,” Levin argues, “because you have much more sway over your own community, versus being yet another person who’s making calls or sending postcards” into the Great Lake swing states. (For voters outside the battlegrounds, Levin hastens to add that Indivisible is also “running traditional post-carding, text banking, phone banking programs.”)

Indivisible can make this neighborhood model work because it has chapters distributed deep into the target states. In Arizona, for example, there are 91 incorporated cities, Levin says, “and we’ve got folks doing Neighbor2Neighbor in 87.”

The 2024 election marks a return to on-the-ground organizing that was all-but-shut-down by the pandemic in 2020. The switch of party standard-bearer from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris in July has also fueled a resurgence of grassroots creativity and enthusiasm not seen since the Barack Obama campaigns of 2008 and 2012. 

It’s been a challenge to harness that coconut-pilled energy into political might, simply as a matter of mechanics. “The Joe Biden reelection campaign was not built around the idea that there would be a surge of volunteer energy,” Levin says, adding frankly: “It’s impossible to build up the kind of apparatus you would need in the course of weeks in order to soak up all that energy.” 

Indivisible has done its best by partnering with other organizers, in particular the White Women for Kamala conference call that became the world’s largest-ever Zoom event this summer with more than 200,000 participants. That call directly spawned 700 new “action teams” for Indivisible that have been mobilizing voters ever since. “To put that number in perspective, in seven years of Indivisible, we had just over 2,000 local Indivisible groups,” Levin says. “To have roughly 700 new action teams form in the course of weeks is pretty astounding for us.”

The N2N effort is a reflection of the constant need to innovate in GOTV efforts. Levin points to the decline in effectiveness of political texting. “Texting was so hot in 2017 — because it was very easy to do, and also because it was moving votes. Starting in 2019, 2020, as we were looking at impact, it just significantly went down. People were getting bombarded, and the marginal vote that you got out of a text just decreased.”

A recent FEC ruling that has opened the door to outside nonprofits directly coordinating with campaigns — leading the Trump campaign to effectively outsource its voter-turnout game to groups like Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA and Elon Musk’s America PAC. But Levin insists that Indivisible remains “squeaky clean” and independent from the formal Democratic Party efforts, which he describes as “a sophisticated canvassing operation being run by the party itself.”

Levin is not so impressed by what he’s seeing on the ground from “lackluster” MAGA forces. “The other side has allowed Charlie Kirk and Elon Musk to run their canvassing operation — which I love. I love seeing people who have no idea what they’re doing in charge of a major function of the Republican campaign.” He points to Musk’s dubiously legal $1 million giveaways to registered voters who sign his Super PAC’s petition.

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For Levin the goal with just over a week to go before election day is transforming progressives who might be “passively enthusiastic” observers into political participants, who are “actively contributing to the win, and not just the win — but what we want to do afterwards.”

If the effort pays off, he says, “It offers an opportunity for us to run through the tape — not just to win on Nov. 5, but to protect the election results, and then push past Jan. 20 to actually get legislation done.”