TO BE FULLY A CITIZEN:
Hitting the Doorsteps: There may be no better way to get involved in politics than canvassing – knocking on your neighbors’ doors and taking time to listen. (Daniel Payne, May 12, 2025, Plough)
An MP’s campaign has the feel of a community project, with a shambling cast of characters you might at other times find involved with the local scout troop or running a church fair. For six weeks the office was full and loud with activity. All available space was crammed with the latest batch of leaflets, the windows blocked up with boxes, desks piled with literature or deliveries to be processed. Volunteers piled in to stuff envelopes, expecting to be paid only in cups of tea.
My job was to help arrange the candidate’s schedule and prep him for awkward and difficult questions he could get thrown – anything from his thoughts on China invading Taiwan, to single gender spaces, to unpopular plans for a new housing estate. And, of course, all those of us who could were expected to hit the streets to canvas voters. As someone who had urged other Christians to engage with politics, here was a chance for me to put it into practice. What better way than by canvassing!Canvassing is simple. An app has the registered voters of an area logged. You knock on a door, tell them you are campaigning for so-and-so, and ask if they have thought yet about how they might be voting. You log their response in the app and move to the next door.
It is exhausting work. Each door is an unknown. One door could be friendly, chatty, open to questions. The next could be utterly uninterested. The next could chew your ear off about proportional representation and the need for voting reform. The next could be coming off the back of a terrible day at work, with the kids acting up and the dinner burnt, before you knock on the door asking for a vote. I had the demoralizing record of waking up sleeping babies two doors in a row.
Canvassing requires good walking stamina and a thick skin. Don’t take a sharp word or a slammed door to heart. Always beware of the dog.
Once you knock on enough doors in communities like these, you start make connections.
After visiting all (then) 106 Superfund sites in NJ on the campain trail in 1985, and canvassing with the candidate (who had first been elected to the NJ Senate by knocking on every door in his district), I went to work for a Naderite organization, the New Jersey Environmental Federation. We raised money to lobby for a bill requiring the polluters to pat to clean up the toxic waste sites they had created (taxing the externalities) by doing door-to-door canvassing. People were rather uniformly courteous and a perhaps surprising percentage supported the effort. It’s one of the most worthwhile experiences you can have, meeting your fellow citizens.