My checkered past includes a long stint as a field canvasser on consumer and environmental issues in the very state of Ohio that has secured the win for the Democrats. I find door-to-door canvassing almost as fascinating as my current work of devising strategies for direct-marketing community food producers, so I have read a great deal about ground strategy this fall. Having friends who knocked on doors in this campaign season up there, I was privy to some of their pre-election training as it is laid out in this NYT article and it strikes me that there are lessons in here for the community food movement.

First is the awareness that how people poll is not the whole story. The primary reasons that the Repubs say they thought they had this election won was that they believed that the minorities that had carried the Dems last time were surely not going to vote that strongly this year and that they believed that the white vote would be theirs at a larger rate. All of those assumptions may have been true at the beginning and maybe with their antiquated general polling it seemed very true throughout.
Ultimately though, the sophisticated approach that the Dems used to get out the vote in a massive field campaign and Facebook style messaging worked wonders: it allowed them to focus on training their field campaign workers to then spot and communicate with likely voters and to encourage connections between neighbors to get them out to the polls. And on the media end, to offer a combination of positive (sometimes very localized) campaign messages and then to switch up those message regularly. This was the one-two knockout punch that the Repubs did not see coming. And maybe the media too: since except for 538 blogger/analyst Silver, most misjudged the final numbers. In other words, established centers of decision makers and analysts misjudged the effect of individuals making decisions based on real facts about their wealth and health.
Any of that sound familiar to community food organizers?

These very strategies would be useful for the food movement to study and to adopt (oh, I don’t know, maybe during the Farm Bill negotiations?) such as doing in-depth social science studies of our likely shoppers and to make more connections between those early adopters of ours and their “strong” and “weak” social ties to then reach more potential community food activists, shoppers and producers. I understand that many organizers are slightly appalled by the idea of using sophisticated scientific and marketing methods to support regional food systems, but something else the Dems have shown is a win is a win friends, and action from those emboldened winners will surely follow this historic day.
Let me also point out what many of you may have also noticed: the excitement and engagement from citizens on all sides – even in states that had no contest and therefore no campaign – was impressive.
Even though we’re probably not going to raise and spend a billion dollars to win on issues that benefit our movement, if we were to simply embed what seems to me a level of respect and follow through in identifying and understanding on a one-to-one level who the 21st century idiosyncratic citizen is and how they make decisions as the Dems did in this election, I can only imagine the deep ties we would create.

‘Dream Team’ of Behavioral Scientists Advised Obama Campaign – NYTimes.com.