Common reservations about phone banking

Q: Why are we calling Trumpers and Republicans?
Answer: This phone bank includes high-propensity voters who the campaign considers “persuadable.” Anecdotally, our volunteers do talk to some who were Rs but who indicated they would be voting all D or at least supporting some or all of our candidates. We also know that the voter lists we get are only updated during election cycles, so the data is messy and can be several years old, which may account for some misses! The important thing we’re doing right now is cleaning the lists, so that the campaigns won’t have to spend any more time/money reaching out to Trumpers and crazies when it comes time to get out the vote. So while it is certainly difficult to talk to unreachable voters, it is a big help to do so and to capture that data. It means we’ll know exactly who we need to mobilize to win in November.

Q: Why don’t we leave voicemail?
Answer: The campaigns prefer that we do not leave voice mail for voters, because the point of the calls is to collect information from the voter–whether they are supporters or not, whether we have the correct contact info or not, etc. If we leave voice mails without speaking to the voter, we cannot collect any information from the call! Instead, we mark these voters as “not home,” which means they will remain in the phone bank until a volunteer can reach them in person.