Three million of us erupted out of our homes for the Women’s March after Donald Trump was elected. Twenty-three million of us marched for Black lives after George Floyd’s murder. Mass protests are critical in changing the political weather and what is politically possible, and a simple additional act could help us double down on the world we’ve been fighting for. If even a small percentage of those of us who care about Black lives or women’s rights knocked on our neighbors’ doors, we could change their voting behavior, change their beliefs about what kind of a world is possible, and rebuild the sense of community that so many of us felt while marching arm in arm.
If we’re going to end white supremacy, stop climate change, prevent the rise of fascism, stop the war machine, and win a fair economy for all, we’ll need to reach out to folks we don’t yet know to share conversations about the issues, get them to the polls and enlist them in the movement. I’m a retired community organizer, so door knocking is nothing new for me, but knocking on my own neighbors’ doors is a more recent development. Turns out, it’s a great way to meet the neighbors and very effective at election time. It also gives me hope for the possibility of deeper change. But how can a little door knocking do all that?
I began to learn about its potential when I moved to my northwest side neighborhood in Chicago some three decades ago. A neighbor from a couple of blocks over knocked on my door and introduced himself as the precinct captain, asking me for my vote for their chosen list of candidates. A voting precinct is a portion of a neighborhood that includes about 500-1500 voters who all vote at the same polling place, and precinct captains like my neighbor visited us on behalf of the local Democratic party machine. This “machine” was the system of incentives, relationships, and organizations used to whip up votes and ensure long-term political power for the party, regardless of which actions their politicians actually took while in office.
An Old Model, a New Way
Here’s how it seemed to work: my precinct captain would chat with the neighbors about the election, letting us know who “we’re voting for” this time around. Many of the neighbors would appreciate that, because they didn’t really know much about most of the races and trusted a neighbor’s opinions. They also knew that once they agreed to vote with the precinct captain, they could ask him for city services, like a new garbage can or to have a tree trimmed. The captain would make sure that the voters got the services they wanted most of the time.
The precinct captain would typically get a patronage job in a unit of local government, which he would keep as long as he delivered his precinct’s votes for the machine candidates on election day.
As I watched with great curiosity how the old Chicago Democratic Party machine worked, it was impossible to ignore the possibilities for building a people’s organization. While I hated its insidious support for white supremacy and corporate dominance, its foundation was a neighbor who knocked on doors. Why couldn’t progressives have a system like that? We have lots of motivated people on our side, so why not build the people’s machine, starting with the foundation: volunteer precinct captains?
I got the chance to try it out once I retired. Some young progressives who had moved up to the northwest side in search of increasingly elusive affordable housing formed a local progressive political organization in my ward during the pandemic. I jumped at the chance to join the 39th Ward Neighbors United, a group that wanted to move our majority-white northwest side area from machine conservative to independent progressive.
When Delia Ramirez ran for a newly drawn Congressional district in 2022 that included my precinct, I was as excited as anyone in the organization. Delia was a state representative who had led the successful fight in the state legislature for healthcare for undocumented immigrants and an elected school board for Chicago; the prospect of electing her to Congress was very exciting. Though only ten of her precincts were in our 39th ward, we all felt that her race provided us with a great opportunity to test what our incipient organization could contribute. We also had another candidate, Michael Rabbitt, who was running a progressive race for state rep against a machine candidate, so we decided to work for both candidates, using the precinct captain model.
My husband, Keith Kelleher, and my neighbor, Nancy Aardema, joined me in serving as volunteer precinct captains for our neighborhood. Another 14 volunteers signed up to work the other ten precincts we began with, and we were off. I had been part of campaigns where a few great canvassers served as precinct captains, but our 39th Ward Neighbors United group was the first in my experience to make the precinct captain approach its dominant method of election work.
On my block, for instance, a majority of our neighbors agreed to vote for Michael and Delia, and a dozen of them posted a yard sign or two for our candidates. That was very, very unusual –– to have some 20 yard signs up for candidates opposed by the machine –– but we had three volunteers all from the same block, so it was going pretty well.
But in a Chicago machine ward like ours, if you post a yard sign for an opposition candidate, it will disappear in the night. That is just the way things work here. Sure enough, in early June 2022, Vilma from down the block called me one morning to report that all of our yard signs were missing.
I texted the neighbors to see what they wanted to do about it. (I had their numbers because we had shared them as I knocked on their doors.) Sheila across the street shared a video from her doorbell camera showing a white guy walking quickly across her lawn with one of Michael’s signs visible under his arm. Mary had found a large footprint in her garden. Everyone was up in arms over what felt like a violation. I’m not sure how committed to our opposition candidates my neighbors had been before the theft, but now they were ready to fight for their right to support the candidates of their choice.
Rebuilding Community
We decided to create a block festival for a Saturday before the late June primary election. We organized coffee and homemade muffins, and added new yard signs with balloons and bells and flags attached to make them more cumbersome and noisy to steal. Our state rep candidate came by to meet the voters and make a speech, along with neighbors who spoke about their outrage at the theft. Then we reposted the yard signs,now putting up thirty thanks to additional neighbors wanting to express their defiance. This time, no one dared to come around to remove them. We had become an organized block, thanks to our new volunteer precinct captain model.
Local volunteer precinct captain systems have the potential to deliver the kind of permanent and political relationships with our neighbors that build the community and connection we want and permit us to have recurring political conversations over time about a variety of issues. We discuss everything: racism, policing and criminal justice reform, immigration, climate change, the threatened loss of what democracy we have. We don’t leave the conversations at mere opinions. We convert them into action: voting for progressive champions in primaries, for instance, or direct action at local electeds’ offices. We remain friendly when we disagree because we’re neighbors and because we believe change happens over time as we hold each other safe.
This kind of community relationship-building is very local: a voting precinct can be a large apartment building, a portion of a small town or about 10-12 blocks of a city. All the residents vote at the same place and election results get reported by precinct, so volunteers who work a precinct get data on our results. That kind of accountability is one of the best things about this approach.
Our small experiment with the precinct captain model in Chicago demonstrated some hopeful results. In eleven precincts with volunteer captains, our neighbors delivered an 8% higher vote to Delia Ramirez in the 2022 primary (74% in the captained precincts compared with 66% in the district overall).
Delia did well without our captains, but the results in the state rep race were even more interesting. Michael Rabbitt, a white progressive, ran in a state rep district that had been controlled by the old Chicago machine for decades if not forever. Though Michael lost by roughly 500 votes in a 10,000-vote race, he performed well in precincts with volunteer captains, getting an incredible average 20-point bump in those compared with the previous contested state rep primary. In the precincts without captains in our same ward, Michael performed the same or worse than the previous challenger. It was a hard loss for everyone, but a striking success for the volunteer precinct captain approach.
In addition, smart precinct captain models build relationships among the volunteers.
Forging Connection
When neighbor and skilled organizer Bridget Murphy agreed to coordinate the precinct captain approach in our 39th ward, she already knew that volunteers wanted connection and community. Many of our volunteers had jobs, kids, and crazy schedules, but all of them wanted to get to know neighbors who shared their politics. Bridget made sure there were multiple chances for get-togethers at a local coffee shop before heading out to canvass on Saturday mornings. She also held backyard gatherings to get petitions notarized which created an esprit de corps among the captains. They wanted to be held accountable to group goals because they cared both about the goals and about each other.
At one point when Bridget was worried about the captains hitting too few doors, rather than call them out for their slow start, she created an ambitious collective goal with a short deadline.
“Hello, precinct captains,” Bridget typed into the precinct captain text thread one evening. “We’re considering a goal of 400 signatures over the next two weeks. Is that the right goal?”
Captains began posting photos and gifs in response, like the meme of minions saluting their leader. Another posted a video of their two kids wearing bunny ears, hopping to the doors to get their signatures.
We blasted through the goal.
The connections were especially sweet because so many of the precinct captains were parents of young children. When they saw their children building relationships with each other at the various events, they realized that this precinct captain model was, in effect, a model for community building among the captains and their families. Their children would be growing up with other children of the movement, able to share in their developing awareness of what their parents were up to.
Precinct captains also build relationships with voters. Bridget’s block had never held a block party before she started door knocking, but now they’ve held two very successful ones. The one on our block had been waning as newer immigrants moved in with a variety of languages, but we have seen a doubling of participation in ours for two years running, with a Filipino neighbor regularly running the karaoke and outdoor movie showing, a Mexican neighbor in charge of the water balloons and piñata, Vietnamese neighbors sharing their delicious barbecue, and a Serbian neighbor handling face painting and a bouncy house. We all contributed dishes to the potluck table that represented our immigrant origins. What had begun with a yard sign theft developed into a much more cohesive block.
When homeless tents appeared in our local park this summer, and separately thousands of asylum-seeking migrants sent to Chicago by Texas politicians relied on shelters already over capacity, we attended a couple of community and police meetings that attracted loud MAGA folks demanding that the police arrest the homeless and send the migrants back where they came from. Instead, we moved a petition at those meetings for a bill called Bring Chicago Home that aimed to create more housing for the homeless. Many of our new volunteer precinct captains took on the job of moving petition signatures and calls into the alderman’s office, and to our surprise, our very machine alderman voted in favor of putting the issue of housing for the homeless on the ballot. It feels good to have a crew of committed folks who can move into action to reach the voters directly on an issue of such importance and immediacy, without ceding the turf to the meanest voices.
Changing the World
But what of the even bigger challenges we face: white supremacy, climate change and its catastrophes, war and the threat of fascism? Can precinct captains matter on that scale?
Precinct captain systems can make the difference we need in elections. Studies by Yale’s Donald Green and Alan Gerber have shown that voter turnout increases by 7-9% with personal contact, even more with a trusted messenger like a neighbor.
So, precinct captains in the swing states have the potential to stop totalitarianism in the upcoming presidential election, as an important beginning.
There are approximately 175,000 voting precincts in this country, averaging about 1200 voters in each. If we want three precinct co-captains in each one—this work should be joyous, after all, so why not do it with good people, rather than alone?—we would need something like 525,000 precinct co-captains.
Three million women and our allies joined the Women’s March in 2016, many of us white, living in neighborhoods where the problem is located, among white voters. Twenty-three million marched for George Floyd and Black lives in 2020. There are likely at least a half million of us from those moments who are going to be lying awake on election night, hoping against hope that we won’t have to risk our lives to block a fascist President’s actions. Instead, we might prefer to knock on a few doors starting this year, scary as that seems, rather than find ourselves in the streets putting our lives on the line for basic rights.
For deep change, we will need our neighbors to do more than vote. We’ll want their support for direct action, boycotts, and strikes that finally stop the corporate power that has kept everything stagnant for so long. To win that support, wherever we are in this country, we can start with our neighbors, by knocking on their doors.
Precinct captains make us more successful in electoral and issue campaigns, and they build connections that we long for, connections that are the source of our ability to move forward toward a bright future. Take a deep breath and knock on some doors on your block. Don’t even try to be the expert, just ask them what they are worried about and what they want to do about it. If you’re like me, you’ll be scared each time you begin; door knocking, after all, is the definition of vulnerability. But along the way you’ll find the surprise and joy of connection and the beginning of community. A pretty great payoff when it comes with a much more hopeful America.
