Political campaigns are fought on two fronts:

• "Air war" - consisting of speaking tours and advertising. The air war is to persuade voters.

• “The ground game” - boots on the ground consisting of door-knocking and canvassing. The ground game is to identify voters. This is where elections are won or lost.

Combined, these two components are known as Get Out The Vote (GOTV). The GOTV strategy is designed to get campaign supporters into the voting booth.

Today’s political ground game is heavily supported by micro-targeting and extensive voter data collection and analysis. Software and social media/digital ads help to support the tools below. Campaigns use various software programs to capture and analyze the data, while social media/digital ads are used to gain insight into the voters’ position on certain issues, solicit donations, and build key lists.

The primary tools used in the ground game are:

• Direct mail 

• Phone + text message banks 

• Door-to-door contact 

Designing a good ground game calls for politicians and their campaign teams to step out of their offices and go into communities; knocking on doors to meet with constituents, staging rallies, addressing various interest groups, calling homes, establishing field offices and other similar activities. The underlying aim of this tactic is to identify and document supporters.

The benefits of an effective ground game strategy are:

• Puts you in close, personal proximity to the people you need to convert and is often the most effective form of persuasion.

• Platforms such as field offices provide an opportunity for voters to ask questions, speak about the issues that directly affect them and provide honest feedback - it helps you to understand your audience.

• On election night, your campaign team may just know more than half of the voters personally - what time they plan on voting, and most importantly, who they plan on voting for.

The pitfalls of an ineffective ground game strategy are:

• You run the risk of lacking a deep understanding of voter issues and concerns. This may mean that the issues you are strongly advocating for may not be the ones the voters are most passionate about.

• You miss opportunities to convince non-supporters to support your cause - and in turn vote for you as face to face discussions allow for constructive criticism where persons can delve deeper into conversations.

• The missed opportunity to cultivate fruitful and long-lasting relationships with voters.

An increasingly large body of political science research shows that the gold standard for moving a voter to the polls is a personal conversation between a volunteer and a voter. These conversations are the most powerful when they are in person, but they are also effective when a volunteer and a voter engage via the telephone. Peer-to-peer texting is another vehicle (though virtually untested for turn out effect) for personal back and forth conversations.

One of the highest impact and lowest cost strategies for building power in our communities and taking back our democracy is to radically increase the number of conversations between volunteers and voters. We have used these conversations at the door to engage people who usually sit out elections, to recruit the people who were already with us to volunteer, and even to persuade people who voted against us before, but have a shared interest in our agenda of racial and economic justice.

/ˈmantrə/'s philosophy of deep canvassing draws from Los Angeles LGBT Center's Leadership LAB’s Deep Canvassing Primer. This approach was first featured in the New York Times Magazine, and the data and methodology behind it fir sppeared in the peer-reviewed journal, Science.

One of the challenges is to take a traditional organizing practice that assumes volunteers can be extensively trained and managed by staff and translate it into a distributed organizing model. In a distributed organizing model, a sprawling crew of part time, sometimes, and one-time volunteers work across space and time and use consumer software platforms like Google apps, Zoom, Slack and WhatsApp to manage everything from canvassing logistics to training to research to tech development. It’s also volunteers who schedule, recruit for and manage in-person canvasses.

Without in-person, full-time, paid organizers running all aspects of the operation, what is required is a canvass model that is lightweight, easier to learn via online training, and depends on peer-to-peer coaching, encouragement and knowledge sharing among volunteer hosts, canvassers and support team members. Iterating this model every day means hiring a handful of full-time paid organizers working as peers with hundreds of volunteers to figure out what’s working, what’s not, and what needs to be added, subtracted or changed from the processes put in place at the start of the campaign.