It’s a truism that America has been gripped by tribalism, polarization and rage. But what if it were possible to have a civil conversation with an unlike-minded stranger? To find common ground and even persuade that person to think differently?
In early December in Doylestown, Pa., a group of canvassers trained by a liberal grass-roots organization tried to do just that.
Thirty of them set out with trepidation from the student center at Delaware Valley University to knock on doors in Bucks County — a swing district that Hillary Clinton won by only 2,700 votes in 2016. (Mr. Trump won Pennsylvania by just 44,300 votes.) Each canvasser had a list of several dozen registered but infrequent voters to approach and encourage to vote Democratic.
But these were not traditional canvassers. They were not working for a particular candidate, nor did they have a set of fixed talking points to hurriedly deliver. Instead, they hoped to engage people in a 10- to 20-minute conversation that would forge a connection based on shared values. Normally, canvassers seek to identify their party’s base and mobilize its members. These canvassers were trying instead to reach across the political and cultural divide.
Their technique is known as deep canvassing. It stresses active listening and empathetic dialogue, rather than facts and arguments. A leading advocate for it is Changing the Conversation Together, a shoestring operation in Brooklyn. In early November, the organization held a two-and-a-half-hour training workshop for 20 volunteers. It was led by its director, Adam Barbanel-Fried. A bearded 43-year-old who worked for years as a community organizer using the principles of Saul Alinsky, Mr. Barbanel-Fried began by describing the group’s success in the 2018 congressional race in New York’s 11th District. Made up of Staten Island and a slice of Brooklyn, it was the only New York City district to back Mr. Trump in 2016.
The organization recruited and trained nearly 300 canvassers to work in Staten Island in support of the Democratic candidate, Max Rose. They had more than 1,900 conversations — Mr. Rose won the district as a whole and took Staten Island by 1,800 votes. A postelection survey by the organization found that 65 percent of those who were canvassed reported voting Democratic, compared to 45 percent in the same neighborhoods who were not canvassed.
One of the few studies of the efficacy of deep canvassing appeared in Science magazine in 2016. The authors studied 56 canvassers who went door to door in South Florida targeting prejudice against transgender individuals. They found that a single 10-minute conversation that encouraged seeing the perspective of others “substantially reduced transphobic,” with the effects lasting at least three months.
Now Changing the Conversation Together is trying to use this approach at the national level. But it aspires to more than putting a Democrat in the White House. “We want to form a national corps of deep canvassers that embraces compassion and inclusion,” Mr. Barbanel-Fried said. “There’s a whole world of voters in the middle longing for connection.”
Storytelling is the key to achieving that connection, he said. Each volunteer is expected to tell voters a story about a person he or she loves — and listen to the voter tell a similar story. In a role-playing exercise, Mr. Barbanel-Fried talked about his 93-year-old father, who read history books to him when he was young. “He really taught me that history doesn’t just happen and isn’t just a random series of dates you have to memorize, but that they’re a series of choices that people make,” he said. “This year, when I vote, I’m thinking about my father.”
After the volunteers divided into subgroups to practice their own stories, each was given a two-page script. Canvassers were to begin by asking voters what they would say to President Trump if given the opportunity. Then, after acknowledging that they usually vote Democratic, they were to ask voters to rate their likely voting preference on a scale of zero (for unwaveringly Republican) to 10 (steadfastly Democratic).
Then came the personal story. “Try to use the word LOVE,” the script advised. After the voter told his or her own story, the canvasser was to note how the voter’s values seemed to conflict with those of the president, who, they would say, “appeals to the worst human tendencies.” At the end, the canvasser was to ask the voter to again rate her or his preference on the zero to 10 scale.
Some volunteers said they thought that talking about love was corny or too personal. Mr. Barbanel-Fried insisted that it was critical to connecting. There is a group of Trump loyalists whose votes can’t be affected, he said, “but there are people whose values we share, and we’re trying to show them that there’s a cognitive dissonance in their lives” between their love of people and their support for Mr. Trump. “We need to lead with love, not hate.” He ended by encouraging people to sign up for the December canvass in Bucks County.
Each of the 30 people, including some local residents, who showed up cfor it in December was given a list of people from across the political spectrum with spotty voting histories. I accompanied Cindi Sternfeld, a 58-year-old psychotherapist living in nearby Lambertville, N.J. She told me that she had been canvassing since she was 18 and had found deep canvassing more effective than the traditional kind. “I like canvassing that advances the discussion,” she said. “Being angry is not the answer because it pushes people away.”
At her designated neighborhood, she found stately three- and four-bedroom homes on spacious lots. After a string of unopened doors, Ms. Sternfeld spotted one of her target voters standing in his driveway, preparing to put up Christmas lights with his daughter. Tall and lanky, with closely-cropped hair, James genially returned our greeting.
“I’m usually Republican, but I go by the candidate,” he said. In the last presidential election he wanted change, and Mr. Trump seemed more likely to deliver it. He said he had a Trump sign in his garage. A neighbor had a sign saying, “Hate Has No Home Here.” James asked his neighbor if she hated Mr. Trump, and she said yes. “Then why do you have that sign?” he asked. Because of such encounters, James said, he would rate himself a two or three on the zero to 10 scale.
Ms. Sternfeld then told a story about her father — a special-education teacher who worked with older high school students with cognitive disabilities and who spoke to them as the grown men they were. Years later, when she became an educator, she said, she learned that people with cognitive disabilities are not often shown such respect. “My dad is gone,” she said, but his values of respect and dignity “still motivate me.”
“My dad’s gone, too,” James said. “And I was brought up the same way. I have a 45-year-old cousin with Down syndrome. I get fired up when people use the ‘R’ word.”
Ms. Sternfeld referred to their shared values, and James said that he could see “right off the bat” that he could talk with her.
After about 20 minutes, in which James described several friendships damaged by his support for Mr. Trump, Ms. Sternfeld asked James to rate himself again. “I’d say I’m a 5 now. I’m not adverse to voting Democratic. I could go either way.” He said he appreciated our having taken the time to talk. “You didn’t push me in one direction,” he said. “It was a conversation.”
Overall, in two hours of canvassing, Ms. Sternfeld had meaningful conversations with five people, including a 26-year-old woman terrified of Vice President Mike Pence’s views on women’s issues, a 37-year-old man so disgusted by President Trump that he asked for more information about how to get involved in canvassing, and a vehemently pro-Trump contractor who derided his laborers as greedy and ungrateful. For Ms. Sternfeld, however, James stood out. “He’s my favorite person ever,” she said. Back at the center, Mr. Barbanel-Fried urged the group to spread the word about the next Bucks County canvass on Jan. 26.
More than 90 people showed up, and they knocked on more than 700 doors. Voters were not the only ones changed by the experience. One canvasser said that when she saw a pickup truck outside one house, she assumed its residents were Republicans. “They invited me in,” she said. “The man looked like the ultimate Trump supporter, but he was a Never Trumper.” The lesson, she said, was not to judge so quickly.
Can such a labor-intensive effort be brought up to scale? Currently, Mr. Barbanel-Fried is Changing the Conversation Together’s sole full-time staff member, a reflection of the difficulties he has had raising money. “We’re outside mainstream Democratic thinking,” he lamented.
He said he hopes to have hundreds of trainers preparing thousands of deep canvassers to build an electorate bound by an emotional connection. That, he thinks, could change the national conversation on matters like health care and the environment.
“It’s very helpful to just talk human to human,” says Jennifer Jarret, an activist in Doylestown who helped the organization’s efforts in Bucks County. “We might not see things the same way, but if we can get past the idea of our neighbors as ‘others,’ that alone could help us as a community and a nation.”
Michael Massing is a former executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review and the author, most recently, of “Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind.”
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