Does canvassing do any good?

I was part of a team of five people who canvassed Summit Hill.  All of it.  Canvassing is not easy.  You run into unfriendly dogs and people, you are up and down porch steps, people don’t answer the door, and in Summit Hill it is colder and more windy than most of Carbon County.  I often wondered if any of it did any good.  The problem was that we didn’t have a control group.  

Or so I thought.  It turns out we did.  It was called New Jersey and New York.  Trump improved his performance by more than ten percentage points in those two states.  In Pennsylvania, where a small army of canvassers worked [two of the members on our team were from California; one from New York], Trump did three points better.  

Canvassers can move the needle a few percentage points.  That’s what we were attempting to do.  We evidently did that.  The problem was that the voters cared more about inflation and immigrants than they did about electing an obviously criminal incompetent and unqualified candidate.

Info on the statistics was taken from Campbell Robertson, “Ground Game in Pennsylvania Was No Match for Groundswell of Grievances,” New York Times (14 Nov. 2024), p. A17.