Marie Gluesenkamp Perez talks to Heidi Spafford, left, in a Vancouver, Washington, neighborhood on Nov. 8, 2022. Spafford said she voted for Gluesenkamp Perez. (Daniel Kim / The Seattle Times)

Amid the punditry and late-night quarterbacking of the postelection season, a major lesson is getting lost: The importance of volunteers knocking on doors.

A case in point is the astonishing victory that an army of volunteers more than 500 strong, most of them young mothers, pulled off in the last weeks of the race in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District that includes Vancouver.

The pollsters at FiveThirtyEight had given Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a down-to-earth auto body shop owner and Democrat, a 2% chance of winning the district against Joe Kent, a career soldier and rising MAGA Republican star who was crushing Gluesenkamp Perez in their debates.

Frightened by Kent’s white nationalist extremism, hundreds of people volunteered for Gluesenkamp Perez. Tim Gowen, the campaign field director, a college friend of Gluesenkamp Perez, was swamped; but he was all in for marshaling these recruits.

Crucially, Gowen identified key volunteers and gave us a green light to form a “call squad” of 12 people — not to call voters, but to call volunteers, many of them first-timers, and dispatch them around the community to influence voters at their doors. Half of the squad were volunteers from the district, and half were people of color who had been trained by Base Building for Power, a school for grassroots organizers. A squad member phoned each volunteer several times a week, assigning shifts and offering encouragement and advice.

In all, the volunteers knocked on nearly 40,000 doors, narrowly clinching the race for Gluesenkamp Perez. FiveThirtyEight called her win “the biggest upset of the election.”

District 3 had been a red district represented by U.S. Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, a moderate Republican from Battle Ground, who voted to impeach President Donald Trump. In the primaries, she paid the price for her “disloyalty” and lost to Kent.

What Gluesenkamp Perez’s volunteers encountered at the doors were swing voters who had not made up their minds. Their positions tended to cross party lines. Some were pro-abortion rights and pro-gun rights; some were anti-abortion and anti-Trump; others were too busy raising kids to pay much attention to the race. Many said they were looking for a middle ground and felt left out.

There were Trump voters who regretted their decision; women who were angered by the Supreme Court’s reversal on Roe v. Wade but disliked President Joe Biden; voters who didn’t know who the candidates were; and voters who were confused by the competing TV ads.

More than anything, though, these voters blamed Trump for the extreme polarization that the country had fallen into. At the doors, our volunteers talked about how Trump demanded 100% loyalty: Look at how he punished Herrera Beutler by supporting Kent in the primaries, they said. Their message was, “If you don’t want Trump to have more power, vote for Marie.”

This was a new experience for both of us: We were used to talking to solid “blue” voters and just making sure they went to the polls. It was exhilarating to find common ground at the door with moderates and learn that they, too, were deeply concerned about the growing threats to our democracy.

When you knock on someone’s door, most people aren’t interested in debating you or hearing about policy positions. They want to know who the candidate is and what kind of people support them. It helped that Gluesenkamp Perez was so easy to relate to, and we like to think having friendly neighbors lending their faces to the campaign helped, too. It certainly had to create a meaningful contrast to the way the Kent campaign often presented itself.

Early on in Gluesenkamp Perez’s campaign, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee decided it had bigger fish to fry, leaving her largely to fend for herself. Just across the river, the party threw its weight behind Jamie McLeod-Skinner, the incumbent in Oregon’s District 5, south of Portland. The DCCC funded a field staff at least five times larger than Glusenkamp Perez’s but recruited many fewer volunteers. McLeod-Skinner lost by 2 points.

Most campaigns don’t believe that people will volunteer their time to save their country, and that’s a fatal mistake. Many elections that decide the future of the country come down to a handful of votes. Yet a number of voters hold a complex set of views and can go either way. A real conversation with a volunteer from their community is the most effective way to persuade them to go to the polls.

Harley Augustino is a former labor union organizer for UNITE HERE and founder of Base Building for Power, a school for grassroots organizers. He was co-leader of the call squad for U.S. Rep.-elect Marie Gluesenkamp Perez’s volunteer campaign.

Todd Lawrence is the coordinator of volunteers for a hospice in Vancouver, Washington, and co-leader of the call squad for U.S. Rep.-elect Marie Gluesenkamp Perez’s volunteer campaign.

Original Article: https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/volunteers-fueled-an-upset-wa-congressional-win-one-doorbell-at-a-time/