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Steven Demastus cracked open his storm door, peering warily at the woman on his front steps.
Looking up at him in gold-rimmed glasses and Birkenstock-style sandals was Melanie Mitchell, a member of Down Home North Carolina. A white woman in her 30s, she looked relaxed, leaning against the wood railing. She told him she wanted to talk about abortion.
Demastus, also white and 41, stepped outside, rubbing his tattooed arms as he felt the August evening’s unseasonably cool air. His west Burlington neighborhood’s crepe myrtle trees flashed magenta against the drizzly, gray sky.
“I have teenage daughters,” Demastus told Mitchell, “so I am 100 percent against the government telling women what to do.”
She’d hoped to hear something like that, but had been trained not to take this kind of statement at face value. Many people’s political opinions are surprisingly superficial; they haven’t really processed how their ideas about politics relate to lived experience.
But research has found that there is power in facilitating that connection. With open-ended questions, nonjudgmental listening, and the sharing of vulnerable stories, minds can be changed and people can be moved to action. That’s what Mitchell was there to do.
Down Home, a progressive-leaning organization focused on North Carolina’s small towns and rural counties, is running the biggest test of the idea in state history this election.
Going Deep
The technique, known as “deep canvassing,” dates back to the aftermath of the 2008 election, when 52 percent of California voters approved a ban on gay marriage. The result shocked the LGBTQ community, whose polling and focus groups all predicted the measure would fail.
That election left many wondering, “Is the progress we’ve made in our heads, but not in our hearts?” said Dave Fleischer, the founder of the Leadership LAB at the Los Angeles LGBT Center.
Fleischer had an idea to do something that practically no one does after an election loss: Ask people why they voted that way. “We went into the neighborhoods where we got crushed,” he said. Over the course of thousands of conversations, the canvassers discovered not only that people were willing to talk, but also that none of their ideas about how to persuade people actually worked.
Eventually, they discovered two things that seemed to shift people’s views: telling personal stories and asking voters to do the same. They started recording videos of the conversations to study them. Six to nine months later, they called them back to see what they recalled about the conversations.
“It turned out they only remembered two things,” Fleischer said. “They remembered we were nice, and they remembered what they told us. They didn’t remember my story, but they remembered their story.”
Fleischer sought external validation of what they were seeing, and the peer-viewed journal Science published a paper about the experiment two years later.
The paper, by UCLA graduate student Michael LaCour and Donald Green, a renowned Columbia University political scientist, challenged the conventional wisdom among political consultants that you can’t really change people’s minds, at least not for long. They concluded that a 20-minute conversation with a gay canvasser “produced a large and sustained shift in attitudes” that persisted for at least nine months.
The findings inspired new campaigns and redirected funding—but then the study was revealed as a fraud after two political science graduate students, who earlier studied under Green, could not replicate the experiment. They laid out a series of concerns about LaCour’s work, prompting Green to request a retraction.
“It turned out they only remembered two things. They remembered we were nice, and they remembered what they told us.”
Dave Fleischer, founder of the Leadership LAB
The two grad students, David Broockman and Josh Kalla, forged ahead with their own randomized, controlled study in Miami. Their paper, published in Science in 2016, found an even stronger effect from deep canvassing. They released their data in full and had their work independently verified.
The researchers sent a baseline survey to 68,000 Miami voters, randomly assigning 1,825 of them to be canvassed about either transgender issues or a placebo issue—recycling, in this case. Then they sent out follow-up surveys three days, three weeks, and three months later.
They found that after 10-minute conversations, one in 10 changed their attitudes about transgender people. “It’s basically the largest effect I’ve ever seen for any political tactic, so much so more than phone calls or mail or other forms of canvassing that I’ve seen,” Broockman, now an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said in an interview on This American Life.
Subsequent experiments showed that the Miami results were not an anomaly. Researchers found substantial effects reducing prejudice against other groups, like undocumented immigrants, and increasing support for a particular candidate, like Joe Biden. They found that the conversations didn’t necessarily have to be in person; stories exchanged by phone could also durably change minds, though at a somewhat reduced level. And they found that the shift in attitudes withstood attack ads.
In more recent research on deep canvassing, Broockman and Kalla had another surprising finding. “The most important story is the canvassers’, their personal story,” said Kalla, now an associate professor of political science, statistics, and data science at Yale University. “It doesn’t matter who the canvasser is. What matters is that it’s a really good story.”
The duo did only one experiment where they found deep canvassing had no effect: abortion.
Just Say the Word ‘Abortion’
In early 2024, Down Home organizers were looking for ways to impact the governor’s race. They opposed the Republican candidate, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, perceiving him as an extremist at odds with key parts of the group’s platform, which focused on issues like fair wages and health care for all after holding listening sessions with working-class people in rural and “countrypolitan” areas across the state.
Deep canvassing had been a core part of Down Home’s strategy since its founding in 2017—they participated in some of Broockman and Kalla’s early studies—so the group reached for that trusted tool again. Canvassers hit the streets, talking to people about different issues related to Robinson’s campaign, searching for a topic that sparked conversation.
First, they tried transgender issues, said Bonnie Dobson, Down Home’s deep canvassing manager. But in the canvassers’ conversations with voters, the issue didn’t really seem to resonate.
Next, they tried education, but that topic didn’t take either.
Finally, they tried asking about reproductive rights, an umbrella term for issues like abortion and birth control access. “That started to get some traction,” Dobson said. Then Planned Parenthood advised them to just say the word “abortion,” and they took the advice.
“We found that no matter your zip code or your color, any of that, people were willing, people definitely had strong opinions about one way or the other, and you could actually have a real conversation about it,” Dobson said.
The team aimed to hire 500 canvassers and knock on 100,000 doors between April and Election Day. By the end of August, canvassers had knocked on 114,000 doors and had more than 14,500 conversations.
Down Home organizers say they have a sense that the campaign is working. Their optimism stems in part from involvement in a 2020 experiment applying deep canvassing to the presidential race. Canvassers spoke with 695 voters by phone, swapping stories about the ways friends and neighbors took care of each other during the pandemic and their struggles with getting health care or making ends meet.
Canvassers also offered their personal reasons for supporting then-Vice President Joe Biden. Broockman and Kalla found that for every 100 completed calls, canvassers were able to generate 3.1 new Biden supporters.
Down Home figures that in-person canvassing will be much more impactful. Kalla agrees and sees the Biden experiment as a pretty good analog. While there hasn’t been much research on how conversations about a particular issue convert to votes for a particular candidate, Kalla said, Down Home’s canvassing could raise the salience of abortion in the governor’s race and teach people with pro-choice views that the Republican candidate is out of step with them on an important issue. That strategy is well-supported by research, he said.
A New Era for Getting Out the Vote?
Historically, abortion has not been a particularly motivating issue for voters. “The literature is almost completely unified in saying that abortion as an issue seldom, if ever, determines the outcome of an election,” said Ziad Munson, a Lehigh University sociologist who studies abortion politics. “For exit polls that ask voters, ‘What are the key things that motivated your vote?’, abortion is almost never a response.”
This year, however, could be different, given the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health to send decisions about abortion back to the states. Tara Romano, executive director of Pro-Choice North Carolina, said there’s abundant evidence that people are engaged on the topic this year, pointing to efforts like the network of Triangle-area faith communities advocating for full access to reproductive rights, from abortion to IVF.
North Carolina was among dozens of states that restricted abortion access following Dobbs. The new law, passed by a Republican legislative supermajority over the Democratic governor’s veto, reduced the time period abortion is legal from 20 weeks to 12, in most circumstances.
In that context, Planned Parenthood Votes South Atlantic, the reproductive health organization’s political arm, decided to launch an unprecedented $13 million voter engagement campaign in North Carolina, with field offices in four counties. (For perspective, it spent about $3 million in 2020.)
The group’s executive director, Alison Kiser, expects abortion to be one of the most motivating issues for voters this year, based on polling. Last year’s legislative elections in Virginia demonstrated both that abortion got people to vote and that they made the connection between the issue and the candidates, she said.
On top of the 1 million doors Planned Parenthood intends to knock on in N.C., it has started its own deep canvassing program and plans to continue it year-round and in other states as part of a long-term investment in reducing abortion stigma.
The program is based on a 2018 experiment in Maine that applied a new twist to deep canvassing. Planned Parenthood canvassers listened for an individual voter’s moral values and then tailored their messages accordingly. For example, if a voter alluded to fairness, a canvasser might say, “Women who decide to end their pregnancies should be treated fairly; we should not prejudge their decisions, just like with any other medical decisions,” then ask the voter to reflect. Other values that might come up were protection from harm, loyalty, or protection of the sanctity of family.
“The literature is almost completely unified in saying that abortion as an issue seldom, if ever, determines the outcome of an election.”
Ziad Munson, Lehigh University
That experiment found strong evidence that canvassers changed people’s stated willingness to take action, like writing a letter to Congress, but was inconclusive about whether it worked to change policy views or reduce stigma. Still, Kalla, Broockman, and a collaborator from Johns Hopkins University deemed the application “promising.”
While deep canvassing has mostly been adopted by left-leaning groups, there’s no reason right-leaning ones couldn’t employ it too, researchers agree. The Center for Campaign Innovation has attributed the uneven uptake rates to structural differences between the two major political parties. Republican field organizing tends to be more concentrated in the party and less reliant on issue-based groups, which have pioneered the tactic to date.
The North Carolina GOP’s voter mobilization strategy this year has stressed recruiting poll watchers over canvassing and other tactics. Turning Point Action, with a key role in former President Donald Trump’s ground game, has announced plans to hire hundreds of organizers in battleground states and employ research-backed tactics until now primarily used by Democratic-aligned groups, but they haven’t said if they are using deep canvassing.
One thing that’s clear is that progressives aren’t the only ones trying to sway voters in direct conversations about abortion this year. Canvassers with Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America and an affiliated super PAC have knocked on 300,000 doors in North Carolina’s major metro areas since November and are “seeing votes change before our very eyes,” the groups said in a press release. They are targeting “persuadable and low propensity pro-life voters” and casting Democrats as “the party that endorses abortion in the seventh, eighth, and ninth months.”
“By talking with hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians face-to-face, we’re ensuring abortion extremism costs the Democrats on Election Day,” North Carolina State Director Michelle Ashley said in the release. A spokesperson didn’t clarify whether they are employing any of the hallmarks of deep canvassing.
A Fleet of Door-Knockers
Inside a Burlington storefront that used to sell Confederate memorabilia, Bryant Crisp has been assembling a canvassing team that reflects Down Home’s mission: to build a multiracial movement of and for rural, working class people. When he’s done hiring, he expects a team of 40 for Alamance County, half veterans and half rookies, mostly parents, representing a wide variety of ages, races, and ethnicities.
The group pays $22 an hour plus mileage, with some canvassers working as few as eight hours a week and others working more than 40. Some are also doing gig work; one canvasser arrived for an August afternoon shift after an Instawork job at a gas station.
Down Home has put together teams in more than a dozen counties, from Watauga in the west to Pitt in the east, but Alamance, where it has been organizing for years, is arguably where it has the deepest roots.
The area, where farmland meets the rapidly developing bedroom communities between the Triangle and the Triad, had one of the most persistent Black Lives Matter protests in the country in 2020 and 2021. Several Down Home leaders came out of that movement, as did some currently elected local government officials—including Crisp, now a member of Gibsonville’s Board of Aldermen.
The easel paper affixed to the walls inside the storefront makes the current campaign plain. One sheet asks, “Why are we here?” then provides a three-item list: beat Mark Robinson, break the supermajority, and build our base.
Another list summarizes team members’ more personal motivations: family, community, GOD!
As the first canvassing shift of August 6 began, Melanie Mitchell, one of the team’s leaders, sat on a white couch underneath a poster of Robinson with devil horns and fangs. She asked the other seven canvassers in the room if they had seen the lieutenant governor’s recent campaign ad. In it, Robinson tearfully describes he and his wife’s decision to have an abortion more than 30 years ago as a “silent pain between us that we never spoke of” and concludes by saying he supports the current law in North Carolina, which provides some exceptions to the 12-week ban.
Mitchell said she didn’t buy Robinson’s new presentation: “It took you that long to come across as sad?” More vivid in her mind were past Robinson comments featured in a recent campaign ad for his opponent, Attorney General Josh Stein, which used a clip of a video of the Republican candidate saying abortion “is not about protecting the lives of mothers” but rather about “killing the child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down.”
Others agreed with Mitchell, while also expressing sympathy for what Robinson’s wife may have gone through. They talked through what to highlight for voters who might mention the ad, including Robinson’ statement last year that if he had the authority, abortion would be completely illegal in the state. “He’s still going to ban it if he gets in there, whether he says he’s going to or not,” Mitchell concluded.
The canvassers walked to their cars as Tropical Storm Debby’s outer bands began to spit rain. Some would be knocking only on the doors of Black voters who their data predicted were already sympathetic to Down Home’s slate of endorsements, but might need a nudge to vote. Those conversations would be quick, with no exchange of personal stories.
Other canvassers, like Mitchell, would also be knocking on the doors of white voters predicted to need more persuasion—those they targeted for deep canvassing. It was the only type of conversation Mitchell and the others had been assigned for months, but that initiative was now shifting to other counties.
Since the deep canvassing started in April, Mitchell had knocked on more than 3,000 doors and received seemingly every sort of reaction. One man tried to run her over, she said. Others called 911. In some cases, hostility turned to tears. Some voters already supportive of abortion rights cried, too, as they told her stories about deaths from back-alley abortions in the days before Roe. And one married couple seemed to learn that they held diametrically opposed positions about abortion only because of their conversation.
But on some days, like this one, not a single targeted voter opened the door.
‘I’ll Consider Your Guy’
In Steven Demastus, Mitchell found a willing conversation partner.
“Was there ever a time someone you knew needed an abortion?” she probed.
No, Demastus said. But he kept talking. He was 16 when his first daughter was born, and his second child came just a year later. Both had disabilities. Eventually, he had four kids and was a stay-at-home dad. “You create it, you take care of it, you know?” he said.
Mitchell shared her own story. Pregnant at 19, she got incredibly sick. Her weight dropped precipitously. A friend took her to the emergency room. “Doctors told me it was me or the baby,” she said. She chose to have an abortion.
Demastus nodded. He said, “I want my daughters to be able to make the decision for their own body.”
Mitchell turned the conversation toward November’s election. “Do you know much about the governor’s race?” she asked.
No, Demastus said. He’d recently relocated from Cleveland, Ohio, and didn’t really follow politics. He learned most of what he knows about it from his parents, who are avid Trump supporters. He considers himself “a Trump guy,” and though he’s registered unaffiliated, he usually votes a straight Republican ticket, he said.
Mitchell told him that what she cares about most are local races because they have the greatest effect on people’s day-to-day lives. In the governor’s race, the choice on abortion is stark, she told him. Robinson has said he is a “no compromise person when it comes to abortion,” but is “mature enough to live with the consensus” position of state legislators. Stein has said he considers abortion until the point a fetus is viable outside the womb to be a fundamental freedom and as governor would oppose further restrictions.
She pointed out that Demastus seemed to care deeply about the choices his daughters would have—perhaps he would consider this as he voted this fall?
“I’ll consider your guy,” Demastus said. They talked to about 10 minutes, and before he turned to go back inside, Mitchell invited him to join Down Home and to tell anyone he knew that was looking for a job that they were hiring. “All right,” he said.
Mitchell walked to the next house on her list, just a few doors down, where a banner said a spoiled dog lived inside. That door opened too. Nancy Hamby, a 66-year-old white woman registered as unaffiliated, and a terrier named Grayson greeted Mitchell.
She started at the top of the script Down Home provides as a loose guide. “Abortion is illegal in many states, and it’s going to be up to us to decide if that trend continues in North Carolina,” she said. “What are your thoughts on that?”
“Personally, I’m not for abortion, but I think it’s a private matter,” Hamby said. “It shouldn’t be left up to the government.”
Mitchell agreed, leaning down to pet the dog. When Hamby’s husband, David, came onto the porch, Mitchell asked him too. “I think it should be legal,” he answered.
Mitchell again recounted her decision to have an abortion and confided that earlier in her life, she had stopped speaking with a friend who had an abortion because she just couldn’t understand it.
“That’s so sad,” said Hamby, her eyes welling with tears. She shared that the couple had been unable to have children of their own.
Mitchell told Hamby that she now had two daughters. Hamby told Mitchell she was leaning toward Stein.
Not every conversation that day was so easy.
One man in his 80s said he adamantly opposed abortion: “We can always help the kids.” He appeared to soften a bit after Mitchell told her story, saying that some things were “up to the doctors.”
But when Mitchell asked him who he planned to vote for in the governor’s race, the man would only say, “the good guy.” Mitchell walked away not entirely clear whom he meant.
She estimates that over about four months of nearly full-time canvassing, she shifted the views of about 20 people.
Several told her they didn’t know her case would be considered an abortion. One father, who is Muslim, told her he was reconsidering his opposition to abortion in all circumstances: “I will talk to my kids about this. You have really made me think.”
An Investment In Conversations
One of the biggest outstanding questions about deep canvassing is: Can it scale?
The data show that an unparalleled number of voters change their minds when canvassers can reach them and have a full conversation. But the tactic is labor intensive and, therefore, expensive. Can enough voters be reached to make a difference in a statewide campaign? That’s part of what Down Home is testing.
Each door knock costs about $4.20, said Gwen Frisbie-Fulton, a member of Down Home’s communications team. Up-to-date figures on the organization’s overall budget and its deep canvassing program weren’t available. In 2022, the group’s two nonprofit entities spent a combined $4.6 million, tax filings show. Frisbie-Fulton said fundraising since then has risen.
The steep cost of deep canvassing compared to other tactics doesn’t dissuade Down Home’s leadership because they see it as helping achieve multiple goals at once. They’re working toward an electoral outcome, Frisbie-Fulton said, but also reducing prejudice, building a team of organizers, and deepening community relationships.
“Thankfully,” she said, “it’s a very fundable strategy because not only does it get results, but we find that people are very, very interested in deeper, more meaningful conversations being had in the field because they produce more long-lasting effects and seed the ground for future organizing.”
“It’s a very fundable strategy because not only does it get results, but we find that people are very, very interested in deeper, more meaningful conversations.”
Gwen Frisbie-Fulton, Down Home N.C.
At least one other North Carolina group that has used deep canvassing sees the return on investment similarly. ONE Wake, for example, a coalition of about 50 religious congregations, neighborhood associations, and nonprofits in Wake County, sought training from Fleischer, the founder of the Leadership LAB at the Los Angeles LGBT Center, because they knew about his ground-breaking experiments. They then used the tactic in a campaign related to flooding they expected to follow a major commercial development in south Raleigh, and those conversations seeded subsequent campaigns promoting financial relief for longtime residents of gentrifying neighborhoods and new affordable housing.
Organizers of the four-year-old group credit deep canvassing for building the foundation for their political wins—the developer’s $3 million investment in a community-controlled fund to mitigate flooding and a county pilot project to subsidize utility costs for low-income residents—but also for identifying new leaders and transforming the communities in which they work.
Stephon Whitley, ONE Wake’s deputy lead organizer, said Rochester Heights, the neighborhood where the expected flooding was concentrated, seemed different after the deep canvassing—more energized. “It seemed like it gave people a chance to say, you know, we are something collective again,” he said. “I thought that was a bigger takeaway—to be able to try to bring people back into community, to engage with each other and feel proud to be citizens who lived in a community.”
The Rev. Jemonde Taylor, whose congregation, Saint Ambrose Episcopal Church, is in that neighborhood, noticed that too. “Deep canvassing builds relationships, builds engagement, and people are more invested,” he said. “I see that in the community, and I see it with my church members.”
Devin Ross, ONE Wake’s lead organizer, is happy to see Down Home “pioneering a much more at-scale approach.” The rural organizing group recently decided to run a randomized controlled trial to measure their deep canvassing’s effect on the presidential race.
But like the Raleigh-area organizers, Down Home gives major weight to the less measurable knock-on effects of the tactic.
“So many of our canvassers sign up thinking this won’t work—and discover it does, Frisbie-Fulton said. “It helps them see how transformational it can be to engage with people across differences and to listen, share, and converse with people they may not have trusted or been in community with.”
Mitchell was one of those skeptics. When Down Home’s leaders said they wanted canvassers to engage people in personal conversations about abortion, her reaction was: “Y’all are crazy as hell. There’s no way people are going to talk.” But the experience has changed how she views people. She is more willing to withhold judgment, she said.
Kalla and Broockman’s research shows deep canvassing has similar effects on practitioners as it does on the targeted voters; animus toward political rivals declines.
Dobson, the Down Home’s deep canvassing manager, has experienced both sides of the conversation. In 2019, a canvasser knocked on her door in Mebane to talk about immigration and health care. “They listened to me, they didn’t argue with me, they didn’t spout facts at me,” she said. By the end of the 30-minute conversation, her views had shifted.
Now, knocking on doors herself, “people will tell me, ‘You know, no one’s ever asked me before,’ and I love that,” Dobson said. “I love it when they say that, because it’s true. No one just ever asks, ‘How do you feel about this?’”
“We actually talk to people, and it makes a difference. They trust us because we listen.”
Carli Brosseau is a reporter at The Assembly. She joined us from The News & Observer, where she was an investigative reporter. Her work has been honored by the Online News Association and Investigative Reporters and Editors, and published by ProPublica and The New York Times.