Did phoning for Harris do any good?

When I told people that I was going to phone call for Kamala Harris, most said, “Who would pick up the phone?”

I too expected the experience to be a washout, but my conscience nudged me to do something to oppose Donald Trump. How many Wisconsinites answered the phone was surprising. After reaching lots of Harris supporters and only a handful of Trumpers, I felt pleased.

Operation Swing State, about which I wrote in August, organized the phone bank. The group is mobilizing volunteers to reach voters in Wisconsin and Michigan, two of the swing states that are expected to determine the presidential election. I had volunteered to write postcards but didn’t get a response so signed up for a phone bank.

Thanks to technology, phone banks aren’t what they used to be. I didn’t even have to leave home. At 6 one recent evening, I joined a Zoom session with other volunteers to get instructions. The calling started at 6:30 using the technology Scale to Win Dialer, which syncs cellphones and computers so that volunteers can speak on their phones and see the script on their computer screens. Scale to Win does the dialing.

The script began with a question about support for Harris (strong, leaning, not leaning, no, undecided) and progressed to the same questions about Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Democratic Congressional candidates. It went on to how people would vote (mail, in person, early, day of), whether they would remind friends to vote, and whether they’d volunteer for Democrats. I clicked on the appropriate boxes to record the answers. After a call ended, I waited only seconds for the next one. 

Although I met with hang-ups and voicemail, I spoke to dozens of people in almost an hour and a half. The Harris supporters buoyed me, some even thanking me for volunteering. The Trump supporters were hostile — one said that “Democrats are awful people” — but fortunately were few. A couple of people lectured me that voting is supposed to be secret. Many said they’d already voted by mail.

When the session ended at 8, I felt that it had been time well spent. By the next morning, however, I realized that I hadn’t spoken to one undecided voter. I wanted to research the effectiveness of phone banking.

The campaigning platform CallHub says that phone banking increases voter turnout 3.8% — enough to swing a close election — but that statistic is based on a 2006 study of phoning by nonpartisan organizations. More recently, Vox reported in 2017 about an academic study that found that “outreach activity by political campaigns, including door to door canvassing, phone banking, direct mail, and even advertising, has basically no effect on voters’ choice of candidate in general elections.”

The study by UC Berkeley political scientist Joshua Kalla and Stanford professor David Broockman found, however, that campaign activity can turn out voters whose minds are already made up. 

I didn’t speak to any people who sounded like they needed encouragement to vote. 

Maybe it’s useful for the Harris campaign to know the names of those firmly in its camp. 

Someone wrote in a discussion on Reddit, “If phone banking was pointless, campaigns wouldn’t be organizing it all the time.” The person has a point in these days of sophisticated political campaigning. 

Not surprisingly, Operation Swing State is after me to do more calling. I’m thinking about it. Even if phone calling is inefficient, it salves my conscience about doing something.