Ryan Erickson, 19, walks up to a run-down house with brown wood siding in Bensenville, Ill., a middle-class suburb 20 miles west of Chicago. The house smells of marijuana. Shrugging, Erickson rings the doorbell and waits for an answer. An unshaven middle-aged man in raggedy jeans and a white T-shirt opens the door. “Hi there, how ya doin’?” Erickson asks, taking a tiny step back and letting out a deep breath. “I’m going around asking everybody if they’ve heard of Tammy Duckworth.” “Is it about voting? I don’t want to hear it,” the man replies, shutting the door in Erickson’s face. Few of the people Erickson talks to react differently, and the other door-to-door canvassers have similar experiences. But Erickson’s bosses, the full-time staffers at Tammy Duckworth’s campaign, are convinced their ground assault is working. “We’re hitting these people again and again,” a lanky, gray-haired campaign staffer, standing on a chair and awkwardly raising his hands to about hip level, told the canvassers before they hit the streets. “If 80 percent are frustrated and 20 percent (listen), then you’re doing a great thing.” Finding the 20 percent who listen is a challenge for Erickson, a sophomore at Northwestern University majoring in history. When he takes a turn at convincing Stephanie Osborne of Bloomingdale, Ill. — another west Chicago suburb, but far ritzier than Bensenville — she, too, tries to shut the door in his face. Holding a child and standing with the door barely open, she says she’s heard so much political advertising that it makes her not want to vote at all. “The campaign methods that are being used, I’m not sure how it’s legal,” Osborne says. “Everyone is saying negative things. It’s out of control.” Osborne tells him she’s also frustrated by the mailings and telephone calls she receives on behalf of candidates. “It should be illegal for them to call and leave messages. We need a do-not-call list for politicians,” she says. “It’s just like the telemarketing calls to me.” Looking straight into Erickson’s eyes, she says, “We were at church, and someone put a flyer on our car. That should be illegal, too.” As he knocks on doors, Erickson finds that Osborne’s reaction isn’t uncommon, and he doesn’t feel good about it. Walking along the street to the next house, he says, “I have a lot of sympathy for canvassers. We get the shaft. I mean, I feel for people who do this. I feel for myself right now.”   The candidate Erickson was trying to help, Tammy Duckworth, went on to lose a close race for Congress as a Democrat in Illinois’ sixth district. The seat has belonged to Republican Henry Hyde — perhaps best known for serving as the lead House manager during President Clinton’s impeachment — since 1975. This year Hyde is retiring. His district includes a small part of Cook County and much of DuPage County, an affluent collection of suburbs with the second-highest per-capita income in the state. Duckworth, an Iraq war veteran who lost both her legs in a helicopter accident while serving in the Army, lost by 51 to 49 percent — about 4,250 votes out of 170,000 total — to Peter Roskam, a Republican State Senator from DuPage County. The race had been the closest one for Congress in the Chicago area, and two polls, conducted at the end of October, showed Duckworth leading by one percentage point. The local newspaper, The Daily Herald, called this “the nation’s most-watched Congressional contest.” Within a week of Election Day, RealClearPolitics.com, a prominent web site that aggregates polling data, ranked the race as the seventh closest among all Congressional races in the country. With all this media attention, and massive discontent among the public over the Republican-controlled Congress, experts were saying that victory in the sixth district would be key for Democrats if they intended to take control of the House of Representatives. Because the stakes were so high, the Duckworth campaign said, it decided to put an unprecedented emphasis on door-to-door campaigning, or canvassing. “Our campaign in particular made it a priority to have as many people on the pavement as possible, to make those direct connections with the voters,” said Lauren Lowenstein, the campaign’s research director and one of three recent Northwestern University graduates (class of 2006) working full-time for the campaign. She estimates that canvassers knocked on 280,000 doors before Election Day, trying to convince voters to choose Duckworth. Of course, the campaign also used other means of persuading voters, like TV ads and phone banks. What’s unique, though, is that Duckworth’s staffers decided to emphasize canvassing more than typical campaigns do — and certainly more than Roskam’s campaign. Lowenstein explained, “Our campaign manager is a field guy and thinks field work is more important than anything else.” Every weekend, from the beginning of school in September to Election Day, the Duckworth campaign paid for a school bus to bring Northwestern students, whose campus is an hour away, to canvass in the sixth district. Each time, the students were paid $10 an hour, and the rate went up on Election Day. (Usually, canvassers are volunteers.) The Northwestern students were just a small part of Duckworth’s team: about 200 canvassers worked each day the weekend before Election Day. That’s not just because the head of the campaign happens to like going door-to-door. All that canvassing “was critically important to identifying supporters and turning them out on Election Day,” Lowenstein said. “There is no other way to do it.” Because of how much the campaign canvassed, and because of how effective canvassing is, “we would have been blown out of the water” if not for canvassing, she said.   Back on the streets, the voters aren’t having any of it, and Erickson, who’s canvassed for Duckworth about 10 times before, is growing tired. “Some life, this canvassing,” he says. “Some day, hopefully, I’ll be doing something a little better, ideally running for office. I’ve always wanted to be a senator.” Erickson says he mostly doesn’t like canvassing, except for those few instances when a voter engages him in a conversation. He estimates this happens about three times each day he canvasses. “I wish you could have been here two weeks ago,” he says as he walks along the street, in a tone that suggests Santa Claus showed up, or perhaps Bill Clinton. He continues, “I go up to this guy with Roskam signs. I argue with the guy for 45 minutes. By the end of it, I was so proud. He said, ‘Wow, I didn’t know that. I’m going to reconsider my vote.’” Erickson’s most obvious characteristic is his size: he’s big, and a little tall. When canvassing, he looks like an average guy, though, wearing blue jeans, gray Adidas sneakers and a large, brown V-neck sweater over a white T-shirt. He pauses often when he speaks, as though to consider every phrase, and when he talks to voters his pace becomes even slower. He has whiny way of speaking that sounds worn out — grandfatherly, almost — though he only looks about 25 years old (actually, he’s a ripe 19). The vice president of Northwestern’s College Democrats, Erickson is a self-proclaimed political junkie. “New Jersey is the (state) second most dissatisfied with Bush,” he announces. Rattling off more trivia, he says, “(Ohio Senator) Mike DeWine’s going to lose. So is (Rhode Island Senator) Lincoln Chafee. The most uncharismatic guy ever, Sheldon Whitehouse, is going to win, and Bernie Sanders of Vermont is going to be the first democratic socialist in the Senate in 100 years. I’m telling you this is a momentous year.” Only a few weeks later, every single prediction Erickson made would come true, but in the battleground sixth district, nobody seems to care much about politics. Early in the afternoon on a Sunday, most people are either not home or not answering the door. Of the ones who do talk to Erickson, few are eager for a discussion of the issues. “I don’t mix politics with Sunday,” one woman in Bensenville says to him curtly, shutting the door in his face, like the disheveled man whose house smelled of marijuana. “I don’t mix politics with Sunday. I don’t mix politics with Sunday,” repeats Erickson, both perplexed and giggling, on his way to the next house. Another woman says she is not registered to vote and is just dog-sitting for a friend. Erickson says to her softly, “I’m so sorry for upsetting the dogs so much. Sorry, I didn’t mean to upset the dog. You said you were dog-sitting, right? Here, just, oh, leave this in the house.” He’s kind and apologizes for things that aren’t his fault — he always says he’s sorry if a dog barks — because he finds it’s the only way he can get people to listen. “I think it’s a lot easier to get people to smile at you” that way, he says. “When I first started doing this, almost always people would say, ‘Oh yes, well, I was in the middle of (something).’” Despite Erickson’s best efforts at politeness, many of the people he speaks to say they’re tired of being told how to vote. “I’m sorry, so sorry for bugging you,” he says to 89-year-old John Tumino, who has wispy white hair and takes about 10 seconds to limp 10 feet from his TV to the door. “It’s very annoying,” Tumino says after Erickson leaves. “We’re doing better things, trying to relax,” he adds, gesturing to his wife on the sofa. He says they already have decided to vote for Duckworth on Election Day. Erickson, who has totaled about 75 hours canvassing, realizes that one might doubt he’s accomplished much of anything in light of voters’ reactions. “There’s this general attitude that there really is nothing to be won if you go door to door and do something so tedious, and you figure, ‘How many people can I possibly get in touch with?’” Erickson says. Still, convinced he’s making a difference, he downplays canvassing pessimists. “I mean, a lot of people don’t understand,” he says. Research indicates Erickson is exactly right: canvassing is effective, contrary to what many people might say — and contrary to statements from some of the voters Erickson spoke to, the ones who insisted they would not be swayed. That’s not to say canvassing is proven as a vote-generating powerhouse. According to Donald P. Green, a political science professor at Yale who many call the preeminent get-out-the-vote researcher, canvassers garner one additional vote per 14 people they speak with. While that might make persuasion seem simple, it takes canvassers an average of 70 minutes to reach that many people, Green says. “The basic finding is that that any kind of face-to-face contact is successful,” he says. “The more credible and more proximal the social connection, the more effective.” Though nearly every canvassing operation is effective, the statistics vary wildly from one campaign to another: some canvassers are simply better than others, and some canvassing operations are better designed. “What really seems to make the difference is whether the canvasser can strike up a kind of personal, credible relationship with the person at the door,” Green says. Several factors contribute to that “kind of personal, credible relationship”: It helps if the canvasser is the same ethnicity as the voter, and it’s also worthwhile if the two are similar ages, Green says. Oddly, the canvasser’s exact words are not particularly crucial. “We don’t find a whole lot of evidence for scripts mattering, for the nuances of what’s being said,” Green says. Ultimately, it all goes back to canvassers’ credibility in the eyes of the voter, and canvassers’ ability to connect with voters on a personal level. “Some of the groups that are effective year in and year out are groups that canvass inner city neighborhoods that they live in,” Green says. While it’s impossible to know just how effective Erickson was, his youth, plus the fact that he lives outside the district, may have made it harder for him to connect with adult voters, Green says. One study indicates youth will have difficulty persuading voters more than 30 years old. When it comes to finding willing canvassers, though, excluding teenagers and college students means cutting back a campaign’s labor force significantly, because youth make up a large portion of those willing to knock on strangers’ doors. “If you can hire high school or college students to canvass, then you’ll have a consistent, reliable canvass program that can go out daily and on the weekends,” says Nick Fixmer, a campaign staffer who has worked for seven campaigns, most recently as a field director in New Jersey. Conventional wisdom among campaign staffers like Fixmer holds that paying canvassers is a necessity in any close congressional election. But with so much attention on Illinois’ sixth district, voters were bombarded with messages from candidates, and many became turned off to canvassers like Erickson. “Us going door to door, it wouldn’t be any kind of a big deal at all if it weren’t complemented by the phone calls again and again and again,” Erickson says. “People are saying 14 times a day or seven times a day or three times a day. Who knows how many times a day it actually is. It’s enough to keep people annoyed.” On top of that, the Illinois sixth is a congressional district that’s been safe for over 30 years. Just as canvassers are a necessity in a close election, the opposite holds true in uncompetitive elections: canvassers, TV ads and phone calls are rare, and candidates rarely bother — or possess proper funding — to compete. Prior to the Duckworth-Roskam race, a competitive congressional election was a foreign concept to most people in Illinois’ sixth district. With respect to canvassing, none of this matters much, Green and Fixmer say. The canvassing still works, perhaps even more if voters are bombarded by phone calls and TV ads. “When you get that much bombardment, and you get bombarded with those ads … it becomes saturated to the point where they (voters) don’t know who to believe,” Fixmer says. “When you have somebody at the door, it’s just that much more effective. … When you have someone at the door, face to face, that voter’s attention is squarely on that person in front of them. It’s a very persuadable message.” Lowenstein, the Duckworth campaign research director, says there’s more that’s good about canvassing. “There’s something old fashioned about knocking on doors,” she says. “When Dick Gephardt first ran for alderman in St. Louis, he knocked on every single door in his ward. It’s old fashioned politics and expanding it beyond the politician to a core group of volunteers. It’s why we’re Democrats; it’s democratizing. It’s expanding the capacity for candidates to reach out and help the voters have access to someone on behalf of the campaign.”   Prior to Election Day, Erickson predicted that any canvasser’s work — perhaps his own — might have made the difference between Duckworth’s victory and loss. “It’s going to be close,” he said. “It’s going to be determined by maybe a few hundred votes. It is. It’s quite a contest.” Now, looking back, he’s loath to say he miscalculated the closeness of the race. “Maybe it’s just my own stubbornness, but I would choose to believe that certain Republican attack strategies pulled through for them in the end,” he says. The attack strategies he’s referring to are Republican-funded, automatically-generated calls known as RoboCalls, which began, “Hello, I have a message for you about Tammy Duckworth,” and bothered some undecided voters two or three times per hour. Erickson estimates that he convinced about one voter for every two hours he spent canvassing. In the 16 days he worked for Duckworth, he guesses he convinced about 25 people. That’s a low estimate, according to Yale Professor Green’s research, which suggests Erickson’s work may have added 65 votes to Duckworth’s column. Either way, Erickson left a small footprint on the district — Duckworth lost by 4,275 votes. According to Green’s research, it would take canvassers about 5,000 hours to obtain that many votes. That means they needed 65 more canvassers with Erickson’s time commitment, or about 500 canvassers working two days. Looking back on the election and faced with these statistics, Erickson points out what’s most important about the effects of canvassing. “Strictly as one person, I don’t know that I had a potential impact,” he says. “As a larger group, you can have a very big impact.” Still, Erickson says canvassing is all worth it. “It’s annoying, it’s trivial, egregious, just horribly, senselessly tedious work sometimes. It’s just like, why am I doing this? Why am I squeezing a tomato through a keyhole? But it gets better. And you realize if you talk to someone, you have actually done some good.”   Feel like canvassing for 2008? E-mail David at d-spett@northwester.edu