Asking you how your day is going, jigging to music booming from cars, holding clipboards and pamphlets out to you—PSU students employed as canvassers over the summer will try many different ways to get your attention.
“I thought one guy was going to punch me because his baby was sleeping and I rang the doorbell,” ASPSU Chief of Staff Brandon Harris said. He canvassed for Oregon politician Chuck Riley last year.
“Sometimes you have people standing there with a big dog gnarling behind. Sometimes you have a good day where there are no rude people,” he said.
Harris said the majority of his fellow canvassers did it for the money, not because they cared about the campaign or the political process.
Canvassing jobs pay about $10 an hour on average. Harris found his job on Craigslist.
But Harris—a political science major—said he loved the time he spent going door to door and talking with people about the candidate he supported.
“I think people have the right to their privacy, but at the same time they need to participate in civic activities,” Harris said. “Most people don’t have faith in politics. Civic engagement in the U.S. has gone down. Most people send a check instead of getting involved.”
As a six-year-old boy, Brandon Harris wore a sandwich board and collected signatures from pedestrians in an effort to ban gillnet fishing, an easy and effective procedure that decimates the population of salmon and other native fish.
That was Harris’ earliest canvassing experience.
According to Harris, canvassing imparts great skills, mainly the ability to communicate with a variety of people and appeal to different interests.
“It’s hard work,” said Greg Flores, interim director of the PSU Career Center. “It’s attractive to some students, but it’s not for everybody.”
Some students aren’t happy with the number of canvassers around town and on campus.
“It’s frustrating when you’re trying to get to class and then you’re stopped by a canvasser asking for a donation,” said junior Katie Earlstrom. “I try hard to avoid them.”
Earlstrom said she dreaded walking from her classroom in Cramer Hall to Neuberger Hall because she would run into two canvassers soliciting donations.
She said it was the aggressive demeanor of the canvassers that upset her, not their underlying requests for support.
“I understand that they’re doing something good, but I think it’s rude to guilt-trip people several times a day into making donations,” Earlstrom said.
According to PSU policy, canvassers are allowed to recruit supporters on campus so long as the activity stays in public areas like the park blocks or the sidewalk.
Harris pays attention to most canvassers.
“I try to see where they’re from. If they got a clipboard—a fundraising clipboard—I try to avoid them,” he said. “But when they’re collecting signatures, I want to see what they’re supporting. It’s hard to say ‘no’ to someone. There may be something interesting there.”
Casey Dreher, a PSU campus organizer employed by the Oregon Student Association, believes that canvassing is an important part of the political process.
But the presence of too many canvassers working within a small area desensitizes students, he said.
Spreading out can be tough when most employers want clip-boarders to knock on approximately 600 doors a week and place 450 calls a day.
As part of his job, Dreher organized voter registration drives on campus during election season. Last year, 140 PSU volunteers registered 2,467 students within two weeks.
“You have to break down barriers in a short amount of time and explain that politics do matter,” he said. “The difficult part is letting them know that we’re not outsiders. We’re working for you.”
According to Dreher, communication style is key. Most canvassers aren’t trained in using a non-invasive manner when approaching pedestrians.
Ultimately, he said, due to the nature of the job, canvassers are bound to run into hostile people.
“The worst experience was when someone told me to go hang myself,” Dreher said.