Editor's Note: I wrote this back in May 2020 when the pandemic had forced our campaigns to pivot from door canvasses to phonebanks, and our largely millenial volunteer army was in mutiny over having to talk on the phone. This text was intended to be part of a multimedia portfolio of material published by the NYC-DSA Brooklyn Electoral Working Group exhorting people to phonebank on the grounds that "it's not that bad."
I start by logging in to ThruTalk, the "predictive dialer" we’re using to run the phonebank and record responses from voters.
A predictive dialer is a system that dials the phone numbers for you and throws away busy signals, disconnected numbers, etc. so that you only spend time talking to real people. (The Bernie Dialer is a predictive dialer.) Because of the way the predictive dialer works, the more people who are logged into the system, the more numbers the dialer will call, and then faster you get connected to a person.
Once I’m logged in, I see a screen that shows me that the system is dialing through the campaign’s list of voters and trying to connect me to someone who’s picked up the phone. After about a minute, I hear a "ding!" in my headphones that lets me know that I’m connected, and the person’s name and a copy of the phonebanking script pops up on my screen.
"Hi, is this Diane?" I ask.
"Speaking," Diane says. "Who’s this?"
I click a button on the screen that says, "Speaking To Correct Person." There are other buttons I can click to indicate that the person isn’t home or that we have the wrong number for them. These buttons record data that helps the campaign curate the list for future phonebanks.
"Hey, my name’s Julian," I say. "I’m volunteering for Phara Souffrant Forrest and Jabari Brisport, a nurse and a public school teacher who are running for local office. Have you heard of Phara and Jabari?"
Having phonebanked for Phara and Jabari several times already, I’m familiar with the script, but I still read the first few lines to the voter verbatim to keep me from stressing out at the beginning of the call. I can get more creative once I’ve talked to the person a bit more and figured out how the conversation’s going to go.
"I’m calling about the election," I say, "but also to check in and see how you’re doing in the midst of the pandemic. Are there any issues you’re dealing with right now, or issues in your community that you’re concerned about?"
"No," Diane says. "I’m alright. Everyone I know is doing okay, as far as I know."
This is true for some people. Others are reluctant to say that they’re struggling personally, but they’ll share observations about how their friends are doing or about what they’ve seen on the news. In case someone does tell me that they’re in trouble or need help, I have a list of local support services I can connect them with. But I can tell from the information on my screen that Diane is an older woman, and she might not have the patience to talk to me about the pandemic or how it’s affecting her personally. Maybe I should cut to the chase.
"I’m glad to hear you’re doing alright," I say. And I switch to talking about why I’m volunteering for Phara and Jabari. "There are so many people who’ve lost their jobs and can’t earn money to pay rent, but landlords are still insisting that they pay it. And that’s on top of the housing crisis that we were in before the pandemic. It’s really unfair." This part isn’t in the script explicitly, but I always find it easy to deliver because it’s something I’m sure is true - I always find it easier to convince others of something once I’m convinced myself.
This seems to really click with Diane. "Yeah, she says. And they’re spending all this time and money working on the outsides of the buildings but meanwhile there’s peeling paint and plaster coming off the walls inside. And they’re still asking you to pay every month!"
We go back and forth for a few minutes complaining about our landlords and the imbalance of power between tenants are owners, and then I try to bring it back to the campaign by pointing out that Phara and Jabari have called for a halt to rent payments during the pandemic, and a universal rent control program once we’re through the worst of it.
Diane agrees. "That sounds great," she says.
Before I started canvassing frequently, I used to worry about talking about candidates’ platforms because someone might ask me a question that I wouldn’t know the answer to about some detail of a proposed piece of legislation. But I discovered a few things: First, almost nobody does this. People want to talk about the material substance of our candidates’ politics, which almost never intersects with what kind of tax we’re going to use to pay for a particular social program. Second, if someone asks me something I don’t know the answer to, I know I can always say, "That’s a great question. I don’t know offhand, but if you give me your contact information, someone from the campaign can get back to you on that." This works 100% of the time.
I also used to worry about looking stupid in front of a voter for not knowing some key fact about my candidate or their platform, but after a while I realized that there are 8 million people in New York City, and I was probably never going to see that voter again. As long as I was friendly and helpful, it wouldn’t matter that they thought I was an idiot.
The conversation with Diane is going well enough that I figure I should read off a few more of Phara and Jabari’s platform planks, so I go through the parts of the script that talk about their support for the New York Health Act and the Green New Deal. Everything’s on the screen in front of me, so I’m reading it but adding a few strategically-placed pauses and "ums" to make it sound more natural.
Then I get to the "hard ask." "Can we count on you to vote for Phara Souffrant Forrest and Jabari Brisport in the Democratic primary on June 23rd?"
I always say that part exactly as written, even if it sounds a little stiff. That’s because I want to make sure that the voter is responding to a clear and explicit request for their vote, but also because if they say yes to an explicitly-phrased request, it increases the chance that they’ll follow through on their commitment.
"Sure," says Diane. "They sound like exactly the kind of people I want."
Because Diane’s supportive but hadn’t heard of Phara or Jabari before the call, I click the button in the script for "Lean Support." We’ll call her back some time before the election and assuming that she remembers Phara’s and Jabari’s names, the person who speaks to her then will have the option of giving her the highest score, "Strong Support."
"Great," I say. "Thank you so much!" Then I go through the part of the script that explains how absentee ballots are going to work this year and how she can apply for one online.
"Oh, my daughter takes care of all that for me," she says. "I don’t have a computer or an email." That’s okay. I make sure she writes down the web site so she and her daughter can request her ballot later.
Does she want to volunteer for Phara and Jabari, making calls like I’m doing right now? No, she doesn’t have time for that, but she’s going to remember those names so she can vote for them.
When I do a phonebank on a weekend afternoon, I look out the window at the clouds in the sky and at the little community garden off the street behind my building, which is mostly empty these days. During weekday evening phonebanks, I watch the sunset while I’m talking to people or waiting for a call, and that’s the image that I associate with their voices.
I thank Diane for her time and click the button in ThruTalk to indicate that I was connected to the right number and that I’m ready for another call.
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