Interviews for Resistance

Interviews for Resistance


Knock every door, talk to everyone, with Becky Bond

June 08, 2017

In the wake of Trump's election, Becky Bond says, people began to ask her what they could do. Beyond just donating money to campaigns or showing up to protests, she says, people wanted to be active in their communities, talking to their neighbors. She and some of her Sanders campaign colleagues decided to create a platform for people to do just that, and thus KnockEveryDoor was born.

The big data strategy is where essentially you hire a bunch of data consultants to run a bunch of models to find out “What is the smallest number of people you can talk to and win? Who are those people and what do they care about?” We need to talk to everybody. When you talk to a small group of people, they may not reflect back what the campaign needs to hear and about what is really going on with most of the constituents in that race. I think that campaigns need to hear from the majority of the people how policies are affecting their lives. Then, that could really change what politicians decide to talk about and fight for.

One of the things that I really learned from talking to people across the country is that the people that are not participating in elections, the so-called “low information voters,” it is not that they are ignorant people at all. In fact, time and time again, when I talk to them I come away feeling like they have a very sophisticated political analysis and they are choosing not to participate in politics. Not because they don’t know, but because their liberation is not on the ballot or they don’t see how voting is actually going to materially change anything in their lives. I think that reestablishing the feedback loop of talking voters is doing an important thing. That the concerns from the people that are not participating can also be something that politicians take into account, not just the narrow slice of voters who they think will put them over the top.