News — 2020Elections

The Pandemic Has Changed Their Plans. In 2020, Democrats were going to knock on a lot of doors. There won’t be any doors knocked—not now, not soon, and perhaps not until sometime after November’s ballots have been cast. Since the summer of 2019, the Democratic National Committee has trained more than 600 college students on the best methods for door-knocking, phone-banking, and party recruitment. In particular, the party focused on “relational organizing”—face-to-face conversations that typically leverage one’s own social network to develop long-term, community-building relationships. The initiative, called Organizing Corps, aimed to put 1,200 students—primarily from communities of color—on the...

In the fall of 1920, Warren G. Harding won the biggest popular-vote landslide in history without ever holding a rally. Instead of hitting the trail, the Republican nominee let the campaign come to him. About once a day, Harding emerged from his home in Marion, Ohio, to address a small crowd of voters and reporters, who wrote up his remarks for their readers across the country. A multimillion-dollar advertising budget took care of the rest. Harding’s “front-porch campaign” was a product of its time—a more dignified manner of politicking in an age when traditional campaigning was sometimes seen as gauche....