The Trump campaign in Florida has boasted for several months about how they have knocked on millions of doors this election year, while Democrats have relied on less direct methods of interacting with voters during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Now in the final weeks of this election cycle, the Joe Biden campaign and various third-party progressive groups supporting his candidacy have also resumed door-to-door operations in Florida. Is it too late? Or is the idea of meeting voters directly overrated when there are so many other ways to connect?

“Since day one of this campaign we’ve been committed to meeting voters where they are and have built a holistic voter contact program focused on engaging Floridians across many platforms,” said Jackie McGuinness, a Biden spokesperson in Florida. “Whether our teams and volunteers and organizations we’re working with are speaking with voters through texts and phone calls or dropping literature with personalized notes at targeted households, we are working every single day to get out the vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.”

The Trump campaign says that they have made over 17 million phone calls and knocked on over 2.8 million doors this year.

“Unlike Joe Biden and the Democrat Party who are parachuting into the state at the 11th hour, the Trump Campaign and RNC never left Florida after 2016 and invested early in the most sophisticated, data-driven ground game in history. Welcome to the show, Democrats, you’re about 2.8 million doors behind,” said Trump Victory Spokesperson Emma Vaughn.

Republican officials may have reason to feel that their efforts have already had tangible results when it comes to their work in narrowing the registration gap with Democrats.

In the new count reported by the Florida Department of State last week, Democratic registration lead over Republicans is now at less than one percent, which has been labeled a historic low since such statistics have been reported (Democrats now make up 36.7 percent of the voters in Florida, Republicans are at 35.8 percent and independents are at nearly 26 percent). 

POLITICO reported last month that Republicans added a party record of almost 58,000 new voters in August – 41 percent more than the number of new Democrats who registered. 

Florida Democrats have said since the pandemic took hold that they have been extremely successful in quickly pivoting to texting and phone banking operations. And in many counties, they’ve been doing “lit drops” where they leave packets of information about their candidates on doorknobs, without directly engaging with voters. They’re also boasting about their more than 400,000 voter advantage in vote-by-mail as early voting began on Monday.

In addition to the Biden campaign, Michael Bloomberg announced in late September that he was providing $4 million in funding for canvassing efforts across the state to three progressive organizations. He followed up a week later with an announcement that he would provide another million and a half dollars for the Florida For All coalition, with those funds designed to boost field operations for engagement with underrepresented voters of color in six counties, including Pinellas, Hillsborough and Orange counties.

Roxey Nelson with 1199SEIU (Service Employees International Union) says that her union has been engaging with voters in black and brown communities for months via text, email and phone calls, but said last week that now was the time to start (figuratively) “touching” voters.

“The more you can touch- the more that you can have direct contact – the more likely they are to vote,” she says. “And we think that this election is so important at this point in time that we feel that we need to get in front of them, and do everything that we can, try every tactic that we can, to get them the information that they need so that they can exercise their franchise.”

“What we’re trying to do is figure out what is the number one topic that influences them the most when they go into the voting booth. From getting Trump out of office, from the economy from security to Black Lives Matter, for Racial justice, all these things are trying to find out what motivates them to get out and vote,” says Yadir Yero, a member of the Miami-based group Hard Knocks Strategies, part of the Florida For All coalition.

Republican Party of Florida officials have been on the ground for months. Spectrum Bay News 9 observed Republican Party of Florida Chairman Joe Gruters address about 20 people who gathered in South Tampa’s Fred Ball Park in early August to canvass for President Trump.

“It starts today,” Gruters said, accompanied by RPOF vice chair Christian Ziegler and David Huston, the Tampa Regional Field Director with the Trump campaign. “Walking door-to-door and doing other basic things that people aren’t willing to do, we’re going to go do it. And we’re going to win,” he said, adding “it’s amazing what you can do walking door-to-door. The people you can meet, and how it all builds together.”

Like the Trump campaign, many other Republicans down the ballot have been knocking on doors for months, like Matt Tito, running in the House District 68 seat in Pinellas County. 

“I usually place my flyer on the door, ring the doorbell, and take 6-7 steps back just to respect the social distancing protocols,” he writes in an email.”99.9% of the time people are totally fine with it and we have a great conversation. Only a handful of people have yelled at me for knocking but I can’t tell if it’s because of the pandemic or they just don’t want to talk to anyone.”

Some local Democrats have also resumed door-to-door efforts.

“The Crist for Congress field team has been safely organizing contactless canvassing efforts since mid-September,” says Charlie Crist spokesperson Amina Spahic. 

There are two kinds of canvassing, and they’re fundamentally different, says Don Green, a professor of political science at Columbia University. “One would be persuasive canvassing where you’re reaching over to the other side and try to bring them over to your preferred candidate. That’s hard and often burns out canvassers. They don’t react well to having doors slammed in their faces and things like that,” he says.

“But the other kind of canvassing is really easy,” he adds. “Targeting people who are already like-minded. They’re already supporters of your candidate. And what you’re trying to do is say a ‘low-propensity voter’ to be an actual voter.”

Green said it was understandable why philosophically Democrats have preferred not to go door-to-door in the year of this pandemic, but “there’s feeling on the left that a big advantage that they had in 2018 was being squandered in 2020.”

“As things really heat up, there’s a sense of urgency among the base to get out there,” he added.

Will such direct contact with voters make a significant difference in the end? We’ll find out in a few weeks (hopefully).