The view from the swing states: As campaigns spin and scramble, here’s what turnout looks like on the ground

MARSHFIELD, Wis. — The door to a ranch house opened, and Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler said hello.

“I’m checking with folks about the election,” he said. The voter, a middle-aged woman who appeared on his list as a likely Democrat, did not want to say directly who she supported.

“I do like that sign,” she said, pointing to a HARRIS-WALZ sign in a neighbor’s yard. “I do not like the sign over there,” she said, pointing across the street to a TRUMP 2024 sign. She confirmed that she had a plan to vote, and Wikler moved on.

Wikler, who Democrats elected to lead their party seven years ago, had developed year-round voter contact operations, which ramped up when each election got closer. This was the first presidential election of his party chair career with traditional canvassing; the party had incorporated lessons from 2020, when COVID caution kept many Democrats on Zoom calls, but its thousands of volunteers and 250 paid staff were now doing traditional outreach.

“Volunteers are knocking on doors in their own communities,” he said. “It’s not at all uncommon for someone to discover that they went to kindergarten with the person that they’re talking to, or go to the same church, or have kids that are in 4-H together.”

In the run-up to Nov. 5, Wikler was stopping in every Wisconsin county, meeting with the local Democrats, and getting a read-out on what they saw before helping them chase votes. At a meeting in Wood County — he delayed his entrance until after a come-from behind Packers win — he fielded questions about close polls, asked what local Democrats heard at the doors, and emphasized that the party’s final persuasion message should be simple.

“I feel like our two central arguments right now — one is around freedom,” he said. “That includes abortion, but also contraception and IVF. And then the other is around economic opportunity for everybody.”

He went back to the doors. Some voters didn’t want to talk; one was the brother of a former state legislator Wikler knew in Madison, and they took a selfie to send to him. Another voter, a woman playing with her toddler, wanted to know how exactly Harris would restore abortion rights. Easy, said Wikler: Harris needed a congressional majority to restore Roe.

“I’m not happy with how the economy has been during their current reign,” the voter said.

“When she was attorney general of California, she had a reputation for going after big corporations,” said Wikler, touting her plan to crack down on price gouging.

The toddler ran back and forth across her driveway. Wikler handed his mother more literature, urging her to look up the Harris agenda before voting. He moved to the next house.

APACHE JUNCTION, Az. — On the western edge of the Valley of the Sun, Turning Point Action’s year-long ballot chase strategy was in the capable hands of Ken and Barby.

Ken Taylor had signed up months earlier to canvass infrequent Republican voters, people who had skipped a few elections but would likely support Donald Trump. Last month, on the first Saturday of early voting, he walked from the home he shared with Barby Ingle and checked in on his neighbors, wearing a shirt from his wife’s state legislature campaign: Elephants NOT RINOS, Vote Barby.

“Would you like a lawn sign?” Taylor asked a neighbor who was reluctant to vote before Election Day. “I’m your man.”

He moved on to the home of Darla Talbot, whose dogs scampered out the front door as he offered to help her figure out the measures on Maricopa County’s ballot.

“They sent out a phone book this year,” he said, handing her some literature. “These are some conservative views on the ballot measures.” He helped chase the dogs back inside. There were 598 neighbors left to talk to.

Turning Point Action, the electoral offshoot of Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, was headquartered in the Phoenix suburbs. Its Chase the Vote program used relational organizing to encourage early voting, combating the skepticism Republicans felt toward voting before election day — some of it, previously, fed by Kirk.

“They’re locals,” said Tyler Bowler, the COO of Turning Point Action, talking through the strategy in his office last month. “They can literally knock on the door of a person who hasn’t returned a ballot and say: ‘I’m your neighbor.’”

The theory behind the campaign was that Republicans were leaving hundreds of thousands of votes on the table — sometimes literally, when mail ballots got ignored at home rather than being returned. In 2022, a significant number of voters in Maricopa County, who had heard two years of negative thinking about early and mail voting, showed up for Election Day and ran into problems with voting equipment.

The goal this time was to prevent that, and find more Republican votes. Taylor’s neighbors always intended to turn out (Talbot had a Gadsden flag in her yard and marveled that anyone could vote for the modern Democratic Party.) “A 5% increase would obliterate them,” said Bowyer. Once the early vote rolled in, on X, Bowyer marveled at how Republican turnout was indeed running ahead of 2020.

PHILADELPHIA, Pa. — Rafael Algarin set up his table outside of a Dollar Store, near the temporary offices of the Vote Rev Action Fund. For months, the 34-year old Algarin had registered Black voters, adding a few hundred to the rolls. When the registration period wrapped up, he pivoted to “site-based vote tripling” — getting voters to tell friends that they, too, should turn out for the election.

“Would you like anything from the table?” he asked one passerby. He pointed to the bottled water, Halloween candy, and wristbands behind him. She declined, but took a photo of the Vote Rev QR code, agreeing when Algarin asked her to send it to five friends.

That was enough. That was the whole point.

Democrats easily win West Philadelphia in presidential elections. In the precinct that Algarin was assigned to, Donald Trump won just 10 votes in 2020, to 355 votes for Biden. But Democrats have been winning the city by less and less in every election since Barack Obama left office, and the goal of Vote Rev executive director Robert Reynolds Gambhir was reminding people who were likely to vote Democratic to turn out.

“We have over a thousand canvassers doing this,” Gambhir said. “We are stationing them at high traffic sites, and waiting for pedestrians to come by them. They ask them to stop and they remind them to vote, and send that message to five friends.”

The canvassers did not attempt to persuade the passersby on policy or candidate virtues. There was no pro-Harris, pro-Democratic literature on hand, though it was nearby at several locations. Interest was mixed; at one stop, the number of people slowing down to talk to the canvasser was similar to the number taking a look at the “Final Call” newspaper flogged by a Nation of Islam member nearby. And some passersby sped up.

“I ain’t playin’ with those QR codes,” one said, shaking his head, crossing into a CVS pharmacy.

But Gambhir, who founded the group after Democrats’ 2016 shocker, believed that there would be enough quick contacts to drive up the vote. “These contacts are fueled by the very best form of voter contact, which is friend to friend,” he said. They had tried this in Arizona two years ago, and found that each canvasser could reach a total of 30 voters per hour. And that year, they won.

It’s dangerous to read early vote data or see a canvass and predict how an election’s going to break. Nothing I saw looked like it was flopping, despite some skepticism among political veterans in both parties about newer conservative efforts like Kirk’s, in particular. I followed some door-to-door labor work for Hillary Clinton in 2016 that didn’t seem promising for her, but I saw energy for Democrats and Republicans in each state I reported from this year.

There was, unmistakably, some standoffishness in Philadelphia. It would be hard to attribute that entirely to feelings about the Democrats; people are busy and don’t always stop for clipboard-holders who want their time. In Arizona, TP Action claimed to have located voters who skipped 2020 altogether. That wasn’t what I saw: Whatever lists they were using seemed to turn up solid Trump voters in our walk.

My main takeaway, which polling about voter enthusiasm picks up, is that both sides are well-organized and energetic. Democrats are facing some skepticism about Harris, but nothing like 2016, when voters marked as likely for Clinton were telling canvassers about the conspiracy theories they see online. Republicans have a massive pool of Trump lovers to draw on; I was less sure if they were converting anyone who who wasn’t leaning toward him before the campaign started.