George Pumphrey Jr. clutched a Harris campaign pamphlet, bent over a doorbell camera in his north Milwaukee neighborhood and began shouting into the tiny digital peephole.
“I’m a volunteer!” he called out, addressing the person inside the house, who could see through the window but was busy watching TV. Through the peephole a woman’s thin voice was heard asking Mr. Pumphrey to leave some pamphlets at the door.
When Barack Obama was running for president in 2008, Mr. Pumphrey, 75, knocked on doors until his knuckles bled. But now, he said, a combination of fatigue, misinformation and wariness of strangers has made that impossible. Reaching people in Sherman Park, the predominantly black neighborhood where he spent part of his childhood, became even more difficult.
“The only way to do this is to meet them in person,” he said as he walked down the street toward the next house on his list. “But with all the craziness going on right now, people don’t want that.”
Mr. Pumphrey’s experience does not, strictly speaking, signal the death of door knocking, but rather that it will be reinvented, especially in places where voters have difficulty accessing it. In battleground Milwaukee County, home to two-thirds of Wisconsin’s black residents, Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign is deploying a volunteer force and relying on data-gathering apps to supplement its traditional job of door-to-door canvassing. .
Technology may make it easier to avoid door knockers, but the Harris campaign is betting it can also help drive voters to polling places on Election Day.
A few miles from Mr. Pumphrey’s lawn in Sherman Park, Harris campaign organizers and volunteers walked among the crowd at a youth football game, asking residents if they were interested in planning to vote or volunteering. I was preparing to ask him. .
Organizer Star Walker, a 23-year-old who moved from her home state of Texas to Wisconsin to help Black residents of Milwaukee County vote, watched volunteers load an app called Reach on her phone. I helped.
When President Biden was still in the race and the campaign was his, officials tested the app in Milwaukee as a way to reach hard-to-reach people during the campaign. These types of people may move, change their address or phone number, or become less likely to respond to texts and emails.
Of the more than 7,000 users in Wisconsin who have downloaded the app, about one-third live in Milwaukee County. More than half of those users have signed up since Harris launched the campaign in July, according to numbers shared by the campaign. For every user who signs up, the app can map that person’s social network, provide Harris-specific content, and encourage more people to volunteer. Campaign officials say they reached 38,000 voters in Milwaukee County this way and now have access to the Reach app in all battleground states.
Reach allows voters who have joined the app to search social networks for people who might be persuaded to support Democratic candidates, research their political leanings, and ultimately provide that data to campaigns. can. (Authorities call this “friend banking.”) When done by a friend or loved one, preferably during an organized event like bingo or happy hour, it makes campaign data collection a little less onerous. )
Paid organizers are more efficient.
At a football game last Saturday afternoon, one of Walker’s first targets was a woman named Phoebe McToy, a 34-year-old beauty advisor. At first, she waved Walker off, saying she was voting for Harris, but allowed him to enter her name into the app anyway.
The app pulled McToy’s name and information collected through voter file data purchased by the campaign and provided answers.
“This actually shows you’re persuasive,” Ms. Walker said helpfully, reading on her phone. She spent a few more minutes discussing her thoughts about Ms. McToy and Ms. Harris.
Although she ultimately declined to volunteer, Walker and the app collected enough information in their interactions that more volunteers could follow up with McToy as Election Day approached. It became. Campaign officials say the goal is to get voters like McToy to plan their votes and make sure their votes go to Harris.
Elsewhere on the field, Tierra Drake, 40, gave Walker information but said there was little she could do to convince Harris to vote. Care director. She said she would vote for former President Donald J. Trump if she heard more about his economic policy plans and policies that provide better educational options for children.
“He does what he says he’s going to do,” Drake said. “It’s scary to think about what he’s going to do now, but that’s the most important thing.”
Her information was also captured and recorded by the campaign.
This individualized approach reflects a campaign that officials have long believed will be decided by close margins. David Plouffe, a senior adviser to Ms. Harris, told New York magazine this week that he thinks the race will likely be within “a point, a point and a half” in each battleground state.
“I don’t think people should focus too much on why it’s close,” he said. “It’s almost here. The question is how do we get a narrow victory in enough places?” That’s what I’m fighting for,” he continued.
The data-heavy approach taken by the Harris campaign outpaces the Trump campaign’s ground campaign across the battlegrounds, which relies heavily on traditional propaganda to reach people. In states like Wisconsin, which Mr. Trump won in 2016, Mr. Biden won by 20,600 votes in 2020 (combined with Milwaukee County support). Trump campaign officials are betting that door-knocking and a massive mail-in campaign will reach people across the country. 71 counties in the state.
Efforts in Milwaukee included opening an office dedicated to assisting Black voters and relying on volunteers to do traditional voter recruitment, Trump campaign officials said. Two officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the plan said the campaign is targeting messaging through platforms such as TikTok on issues relevant to local voters, such as the economy and school choice.
The campaign also released Trump Force 47. Officials say it’s an online tool that has recruited thousands of people to sign up for training sessions to become “captains.” Those volunteers are then presented with a list of 25 people the campaign has identified as persuadable voters. Their job is to talk about Trump and his policies. The campaign did not provide data on how many potential voters it was able to reach this way.
Back in Sherman Park, Pumphrey wrapped up his door-knocking campaign Saturday after arriving at only a handful of homes on his list. After several hours, no Trump campaign workers were found, but several other volunteers drifted from house to house across the street, pleading, “They’re on my turf!” Mr. Pumphrey exclaimed at one point.
As the knocks continued, he spoke for several minutes to residents about government officials controlling the weather. On another block, a woman said her religious views had prompted her to stay out of politics, but she would support Harris at her mother’s urging.
But outside most homes, Pumphrey typed notes into a recruiting app called Minivan: “Not home, not home, not home.”
The app silently saved the address as a home for other volunteers to try again later.
