Based on a casual study of my social media feed, I can tell that many folks in my social circles experience some kind of anxiety and apprehension over US elections. This is understandable! We live in the most powerful country in the world where elections are held every 2 years that can substantially shift the balance of power in government. If you’re an adult today, you’ve probably experienced at least one federal election where the result was shocking and surprising and maybe meant more danger and risk for you and your loved ones.

When faced with the fear of the unknown, it’s natural to seek more information, try and shine a light in the shadows. In the right time and place, this can be a helpful impulse. I’m sure there are nervous flyers who might be comforted by learning about the extremely low rates of incidents on commercial flights, for instance. Unfortunately, despite all the polling and modeling and analyzing out there, there’s a hard limit to anyone’s ability to predict the individual decisions of over 100 million people. There’s a part of your brain that craves one more poll, one more tweet, one more blog post, one more hot take, one more pixel of knowledge, but eventually this kind of information intake is roughly as nourishing as drinking seawater.

If this sounds like you, then the best advice I can offer is to try to be a participant rather than an observer. Find a concrete use of your time that connects you with your community and makes a tangible improvement in the future of that community. There are many ways of getting involved, but I’m here to talk about one in particular: volunteer political canvassing, or in other words, Go knock on some doors

I first tried canvassing in 2017, and if memory serves I’ve done at least one shift door knocking or phone banking in every election since then. There’s a lot I can say about the ups and downs and lessons learned from those experiences, but today I’m gonna try and keep it quick. If you’ve never done it, I’ll give you two reasons to try canvassing: It makes a difference and You’ll feel better.

It Makes a Difference

This is a well-studied and repeatable result of political science: face-to-face contact with prospective voters is effective at increasing turnout. On the margin, get-out-the-vote operations win elections.

Alan Gerber and Donald Green have been systematically studying this question since 1998 with randomized experiments. Their work culminated in the book Get Out The Vote, first published in 2004 and updated with new research at least 3 times since then. It’s written for a mass audience, but it’s my understanding that this book is commonly assigned in college political science courses. Their results have been replicated by David Nickerson, by Bedolla and Michelson, and by many others in different places and over many years. People have many reasons for being inconsistent about voting, but for whatever reason, hearing from a real person who took the trouble to walk up to their home seems to nudge people to mail in a ballot or mark their calendars for election day.

The effect size found in these studies is often relatively small, but in a country highly polarized around 2 major parties, a few percentage points can make a huge difference in terms of outcomes. Every US election will have examples of races won by a few hundred votes or less. My favorite example: in 2022, Judy Seeberger won a state senate seat over Tom Dippel in Minnesota’s 41st district by about 300 votes. In doing so, she gave her party a one-vote majority in the chamber, allowing for a historic legislative session in Minnesota . Not every race will be so close and so consequential. In fact, very few will! But the whole point is that you don’t know ahead of time what the close races will be, and so every action that locks in a few more votes makes a small but meaningful change in the chances of victory for the candidates and causes you care about.

You’ll Feel Better

Stress and anxiety take many forms in life and people are complicated. Experts in human psychology will be the first to tell you that many important findings in the field are nuanced and full of caveats. But it’s my understanding that perceived control is pretty fundamental to the nature of stress and anxiety. Taking some sort of concrete action, however small, towards alleviating a stressful situation can have an outsized impact on our emotional well-being. Conversely, our stressors amplify to the extent they make us feel powerless to change our situation. Physical activity and social support are two additional factors that help to alleviate the impact of stress.

Take that into consideration when I tell you what it’s like to do a shift door knocking. You’ll assemble in a small or large group for a brief training. You’ll be among like-minded people who are probably going through some of the same anxieties and decided that day to spend some time trying to help a cause they care about. You’ll get designated a little corner of a neighborhood and spend a few hours walking around outside. You’ll ask people questions and record their answers. You’ll share info with your neighbors about how and when they can exercise their right to vote. Some conversations will be awkward, but in my experience it’s very rare for someone to be outright rude. Much more often, people will thank you for taking the time to do something they see as valuable and important. Quite a lot of the time, you’ll knock on a door and nobody will be home so you’ll move on to the next one. Maybe the weather will be pleasant, and maybe you’ll get a chance to visit a part of town you’ve never been to before.

At the end of the day, you’ll likely have reached at least one person who wasn’t sure how to vote or who to vote for, and who sincerely appreciated a thoughtful person coming to the door ready to listen and connect them to help and information. True, you’ll never really know whether that person made it to the polls or voted for your preferred candidate, but you’ll know that you tried, and perhaps you both will reflect on the beautiful and fragile notion that civilization is something that you and your neighbors build together.

How to get started

In Minnesota, the DFL is coordinating a widespread Get Out The Vote campaign until the election with events every day all across the state. The place to start is dfl.org/gotv.

You may know someone who has done this kind of canvassing before, and that person would probably love to hear from you, help you learn more, and maybe even go with you for your first shift. If we’ve ever spoken for 2 minutes in real life, then Hi! I’m happy to be your personal volunteering concierge.

You can also look up who represents you and who is on the ballot this year. The website of every candidate worth your time will have a big prominent button saying something like “Volunteer” that will lead to a form or an email address, usually connected to someone excited to reply with places and times you can help out.

So here we come to the last sentence where I try to be inspirational and everything I type feels impossibly corny. If you’re reading this today, you have 10 weeknights and 4 weekend days before election day - pick one, then get off the bench and take a shot. Take your inspiration about the importance of small efforts to a common cause from whatever ancient tradition you choose, and I’ll meet you out there.