#How to organize your stuff canvassing cracked

But Fleischer is wary of what he calls the “anti-discrimination declaration.” At the Leadership Lab’s two-hour pre-canvass training that morning, volunteers were warned about “fake 10s,” people who think of themselves as against discrimination - many of them Democrats - but who can nonetheless be swayed by emotion-based appeals that provoke prejudice and fear. Nancy, it seemed, was a supporter - no need to worry about her. “I have friends who are gay.”Ī typical canvassing conversation might have ended there. Fleischer asked her to rate that support on a scale from zero to 10. It could take awhile.” But instead he began with a simple question: If she were to vote on whether to “include gay and transgender people in nondiscrimination laws,” would she be in favor or opposed? Had he been completely honest, he might have said, “I’m here to make you less prejudiced. She smiled shyly and asked Fleischer, the Leadership Lab’s director, how she could help him. But after shooing the dog into another room, Nancy appeared in her doorway again. I wasn’t sure she would return the last two voters he’d met pleaded busyness. “We’re out talking to voters about an important issue - ” Fleischer began, only to have Nancy excuse herself and walk away.

#How to organize your stuff canvassing cracked

people, with a current focus on transgender discrimination - didn’t take to the golf-ball suggestion, but Fleischer wanted me to know that he is “not opposed to stealing a good idea from the Mormons.”Ī gray-haired Hispanic woman named Nancy cracked open the front door, though not enough to let her little dog eat our ankles. Fleischer’s staff at the Los Angeles-based Leadership Lab - which goes door to door to reduce bias against L.G.B.T.

“That’s what the Mormons use,” he said on this sunny, bird-chirping Saturday in February.

If he had his way, Fleischer would knock on doors with a golf ball. It was an enthusiastic knuckle-thump, the kind that arouses suspicion from dogs in yards halfway down the block but, crucially, can also be heard by humans watching cable news at high volume. Dave Fleischer - a short, bald, gay, Jewish 61-year-old with bulging biceps and a distaste for prejudice - knocked on the front door of a modest home in a middle-class neighborhood on the west side of Los Angeles.