Every election cycle there's one of these explainers about how having a 20 minute conversation on your porch with a condescending stranger is so much different from just telling them to go away. The one thing deep canvassing really *is* good for is as a fundraising fairy tale. 
The impression left is that ordinary, unenlightened canvassers tear themselves away from these potentially transformative, deeply empathetic conversations on the porches of real America so they can meet their arbitrary canvassing quota. The truth is we all hate door knockers.
But expect to hear all about this secret progressive weapon to bridge the political divide just around the time when campaigns badly need your donation to meet their filing deadline.
The one study on this that everyone quotes sent out a survey to 218,000 registered voters, and then treated the 3.6% who responded as representative of all voters. Even in that universe of happy survey takers, the effect of "deep canvassing" was miniscule. cambridge.org/core/journals/…
What this particular paper showed is that the kind of people willing to spend 11 minutes talking to a young Latino person on their doorstop who said they were with a church group were very slightly more likely to provide the answers they were coached to give in follow-up surveys.
Here's essentially the same New York Times article, writing about the same study, back in 2016. And I look forward to reading about the magic of deep canvassing in the NYT again in 2024. nytimes.com/2016/04/10/mag…
My favorite thing about these supposedly open-ended, meaningful conversations with empathetic canvassers is that they were entirely scripted. There was literally nothing a voter could say to affect the canned reply they'd get. I encourage anyone interested to read the full paper.
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