After a series of unanswered doorbells, Marquez Brown remained undaunted as he bounded down a side street in Euclid, a working-class suburb of Cleveland.
A longtime union official, Brown was looking to chat with union members and retirees about the November election. Specifically, he wanted to win support for Democratic U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown (no relation) and Issue 1, a proposed constitutional amendment that would change how boundaries for state lawmakers are drawn.
Guided by an app on his phone listing names and addresses of workers, Marquez Brown was feeling lucky as he saw a man mowing his front lawn.
Bingo. The app showed Willard Fulton, a retired First Energy employee, lived at that house.
For years, Brown has knocked on doors campaigning for the Democratic Party as well as for organized labor. The Cleveland regional director for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Ohio Council 8, Brown prefers to knock on doors and ring doorbells as a union man.
“I try to take out the whole partisan lens and just talk to them about somebody being a pro-worker candidate,” he explained to Signal Cleveland as he walked the neighborhood on a recent Saturday morning. “So when someone wants to get into an argument with me over politics, I say, ‘Let’s do this: We don’t have to talk about party. Let’s just talk about pro-worker policies.’”
I try to take out the whole partisan lens and just talk to them about somebody being a pro-worker candidate. So when someone wants to get into an argument with me over politics, I say, ‘Let’s do this: We don’t have to talk about party. Let’s just talk about pro-worker policies.”
Marquez Brown, a local AFSCME union official, on campaigning for organized labor.
Brown wore a bright green t-shirt with AFSCME in white letters on the front, which introduce him as a union member.
After Fulton turned off the lawn mower, Brown launched into his campaign spiel. He didn’t assume Fulton knew what Issue 1 is all about or even what the term gerrymandering means. But Fulton did and explained that gerrymandering gives a political party an unfair advantage in elections. That explanation allowed Brown to jump right into the union’s pitch.
Credit: Mark Naymik
“We’re trying to make sure it [redistricting] is a fair process that’s going to be taken out of the hands of Republicans and Democrats and put in the hands of folks who have a best interest to make sure that the lines are drawn evenly and fairly,” Brown said. “ Can we count on your support for Issue 1?”
Fulton said yes. Brown then shifted the conversation to Senator Brown, a Democrat who has for years outperformed other statewide Democratic candidates. This year he faces a well-financed challenge from Republican businessman Bernie Moreno, who has been endorsed by former President Donald Trump.
“I am hoping that we can count on your support for Sherrod Brown,” Marquez Brown said.
Fulton paused.
“He’s our current senator, who’s fighting hard for working families,” Brown quickly jumped in to fill in the silence.
“I had to think for a second,” Fulton said. “I know who he is.”
With a brief, nervous laugh, Brown asked him: “Can we count on your support for Sherrod?”
Fulton said yes, but he reminded his visitor that he should have asked him about another candidate.
“What about Kamala?” Fulton said, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee. “That’s the name I know.”
Why the AFL-CIO is not actively pushing Harris-Walz ticket
Like Fulton, most of the people Brown spoke with brought up Harris’ name.
Brown had barely introduced himself to Gwendolyn Griffin, a retired member of the American Federation of Government Employees union, when she mentioned the Democratic nominee.
“Harris has got my vote,” she said with enough gusto to be heard above her barking dog, Louie.
She then listened to what Brown had to say about Issue 1 and the Democratic senator.
“We got you for Madam Vice President Kamala Harris?” Brown said, wrapping up his conversation. “We got you for Sen. Sherrod Brown? We got you for Issue 1?”
With Griffin in support, he moved to the next house on his list.
The AFL-CIO has endorsed Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. However, the union’s nearly 500 volunteer canvassers aren’t actively campaigning for the ticket because the voter math doesn’t add up, said Brian Pearson, political director for the North Shore AFL-CIO Federation of Labor.
Since Trump won Ohio by 8-point margins in 2016 and 2020, the labor organization no longer considers this a swing state. The AFL-CIO considers Ohio a battleground for the U.S. Senate because Brown performs well here and his reelection potentially keeps the Democrats in control of the Senate, he said.
While the AFL-CIO has overwhelmingly supported Democratic candidates and issues, some of the unions that make up the federation have leaned Republican. This factor plays into the AFL-CIO’s campaign for Senator Brown. His longstanding support for such issues as manufacturing has kept him popular among many union members. These include Republicans and Trump Democrats, who voted for the ex-president because he said he would support manufacturing and other blue-collar issues. Pearson said the AFL-CIO is going after this type of union member throughout Ohio.
“We know there’s got to be a lot of Donald Trump/Sherrod Brown voters,” Pearson said. “Sherrod can appeal to everybody. We’re talking to Republicans, even some die-hard Republicans. A lot of union members just vote their union values on either side of the ticket.”
The national AFL-CIO president, Liz Shuler, was in Cleveland the Saturday before Labor Day rallying for Senator Brown and joining local AFL-CIO members in canvassing for him in Kamm’s Corners, a West Side Cleveland neighborhood and Fairview Park, a neighboring suburb.
Canvassers aren’t prohibited from urging union households to vote for Harris-Walz, Pearson said. If someone opens the door and wants to discuss the Democratic presidential ticket, canvassers can engage them. Still, they won’t deviate from their main reason for knocking on the doors of union households. These volunteers want to know if the union members will vote for Senator Brown and Issue 1.
“We want to ID where they stand and see if we can persuade them, if we need to,” Pearson said.
Does door-knocking help win an election?
Justin Buchler is an associate professor of political science at Case Western Reserve University whose expertise includes elections. He said changing voters’ minds is unlikely.
“There’s very little that campaigns can do to influence election outcomes,” he said.
Buchler said factors such as the state of the economy usually have greater sway than canvassing and other political campaigning. In a U.S. Senate race, factors relating to incumbency or the “quality” of the challenger, such as their personal characteristics, will influence voters more than a visit from a fellow union member, he said.
Buchler said there are reasons people aren’t open to persuasion via campaigning. Chief among them is that a voter’s party affiliation will influence who they vote for at least 80% of the time. Getting people who don’t consistently vote to cast votes is challenging, he said. A common reason is that they are often politically disengaged.
“If the election is close enough, you can make a difference,” Buchler said. “And remember that both sides are mobilizing. So, think of it like a tug of war where everybody is mobilizing, and hence symmetric efforts are going to cancel each other out.”
The AFL-CIO is not only confident in its ability to sway voters but also to get them to cast ballots. Pearson pointed to an AFL-CIO analysis of voter turnout in battleground states showing that union members vote at higher rates. (Ohio is included because it is a battleground for the Senate.) The analysis shows that union members vote at a rate that is 10% higher than their nonunion counterparts. For some demographic groups, it is significantly higher. For example, Black men who are union members vote at a rate that is 18.5% higher than their nonunion counterparts.
Given such high voting rates among union members, volunteers are hopeful that it will take only a few nudges to get less consistent voters to cast ballots. In essence, the volunteers speaking with these union members and persuading others to support Brown and Issue 1 are applying a little peer pressure. Pearson thinks it’s a good thing.
The AFL-CIO also crunches numbers from a variety of databases, Pearson said. Among them is data from public records about how often a union member votes and their party affiliation, other public data, including the make and model of the cars they own, and membership data from the unions. The AFL-CIO then uses a formula to analyze the data. Each member is assigned a score from 1 to 9. The lower the number, the more likely the member is to vote – and vote for Senator Brown and Issue 1.
Volunteers then visit the union members to confirm they support Senator Brown and Issue 1 or to determine if they can be swayed. The goal is to contact these union members three times.
Credit: Mark Naymik
“We’re knocking 2-8 right now during the ID and persuasion phase,” Pearson wrote in an email to Signal Cleveland. “We’ll knock 2-3’s during the final month for the GOTV [Get Out The Vote] campaign. So, we’re reaching people of every political stripe right now — with hopes of bumping them to a 1, 2, or 3 by October.”
The AFL-CIO is confident it has found just the right strategy.
“We think that we’re positioned to be a real game changer in this particular election,” Pearson said.
🗳️For more on this year’s November election, visit our Election Signals 2024 page.
Canvassing Cleveland and the suburbs
Luck strikes again for Brown, the AFSCME official, as he canvasses the Euclid neighborhood. Just as he is ready to ring Mary Marzette’s doorbell, the retired teaching assistant opens the door.
She looks a little startled. Marzette had opened the door to fetch a newspaper from her yard. She didn’t know someone was on the other side of the door.
“Generally, I don’t open the door if I don’t know someone’s coming,” she said. “When I opened it and saw his smiling face, it made me not say, ‘Go away.’”
Soon the two were talking politics. Marzette said she would support the Harris-Walz ticket, Senator Brown and Issue 1. She said it was the first time a union member had ever stopped by during an election. Marzette was glad she opened the door, even though it wasn’t with the intention of receiving a visitor.
“This is so important,” she said. “You need to make sure that the public is educated, that the members know what’s going on. Sometimes just reading it or hearing it on the news doesn’t work. But meeting with someone person-to-person, that works.”
Brown picks up Marzette’s newspaper and hands it to her. As he walks out of her driveway, he inputs some things in his app about the visit, including that she supports Brown and Issue 1.
There was nowhere in the app to record her support for Harris-Walz.
Note: This story has been updated to include the union households the AFL-CIO currently is focusing on in its door-knocking campaign and those households volunteers will focus on in October.