Field notes
A ground game is a math problem you solve in February.
Every October, somebody calls asking for 200 volunteers by Saturday. Here's the arithmetic that call always loses to — doors, hours, and the calendar.
LOUISVILLE — Every cycle, some campaign calls in October asking whether I can get them two hundred volunteers by Saturday. The answer is always the same: I can get you twenty, and in February I could have gotten you two hundred. The difference isn't enthusiasm. It's arithmetic, and the arithmetic doesn't negotiate.
A ground game isn't bought in October. It's built in February — October is just when everyone finds out whether you built it.
Start with the only three numbers that matter: doors, hours, and weeks. Say you're running in a legislative-sized district and you've done the targeting right — cut the full voter file down to a lean walk universe of about 6,000 doors. (If you haven't cut it, stop reading and go cut it. Walking the whole file is how campaigns feel busy while losing.)
A canvasser in a dense urban neighborhood — front doors on the sidewalk, shotgun lots — moves at 20 to 25 doors an hour. Put that same canvasser on a large-lot suburban street and it drops to 10 or 12, because the math of a ground game is partly the math of driveways. Blend it and call it 18. Six thousand doors at 18 an hour is about 330 volunteer-hours for one full pass. You want at least two passes plus a GOTV sweep, so the honest budget is 900 to 1,000 hours before anybody's counting the knocks that hit nobody home.
6,000 · ~330 · 900+
Doors in a lean walk universe · volunteer-hours per full pass at a blended 18 doors/hour · hours for two passes plus GOTV
Illustrative arithmetic with the assumptions stated — swap in your own universe and turf speeds. The point survives any reasonable numbers you use.
Now the calendar. A steady crew of a dozen people doing one three-hour shift a week gives you 36 hours weekly. At that pace, 1,000 hours takes about 28 weeks. Count back 28 weeks from the first Tuesday in November and you land in April. Add the weeks it takes to recruit and train that crew in the first place, and you're in February. That's the whole secret. There isn't one.
And if you're reading that in August with a general election staring at you — maybe you spent the spring winning a primary, which is a fine way to spend a spring — the arithmetic doesn't tell you to quit. It tells you to re-cut. Twelve weeks at that same 36 hours a week is about 430 volunteer-hours: enough to run the full two-pass program on a tighter 2,500-door universe, or one clean pass plus the GOTV sweep across the whole 6,000. Rank the file, take the doors the margin actually needs, and start this week. A smaller program executed beats a bigger one mourned — the only ground game that's truly too late is the one that stays a plan.
Two more pieces separate a ground game from a group of people holding clipboards.
The campaign drives the bus. Who gets targeted, what gets said, and where the data lives stay with the campaign — always. Delegate the warm human work: the host who opens her living room, the volunteer who knows every porch on his street. Never delegate the strategy to them. Most field programs that collapse didn't run out of volunteers; they handed the wheel to whoever showed up the most.
The data comes home every night. Every knock produces an answer — supporter, opponent, undecided, moved, vacant — and that answer goes into the file the same evening. A walk that doesn't feed the file was theater. It felt like fieldwork, it photographed like fieldwork, and it taught the campaign nothing it can use in the last two weeks, which is the only time knowing who your supporters are pays off.
The honest read cuts both ways, as usual. Doors do not fix a 30-point district — nothing fixes a 30-point district in one cycle, and a field plan sold as a miracle is a fundraising pitch, not a plan. Field's edge lives inside the margin of a close race: the two, three, four points that show up because you found your voters and physically got them to vote. In a state where a couple of legislative seats regularly land inside a few hundred votes, that edge is the difference between a caucus that grows and one that doesn't.
There's a layer beyond all this — a relational program I run in close races that turns one living room into a few hundred sequenced voter touches. That one I only say halfway out loud on the internet. If you've been one of my clients, you already have it. If you'd like to be, you know where to find me.
What I'm watching this month: which 2026 campaigns are cutting turf in August, and which ones are drafting the October phone call. I can usually tell you the November story from that alone — every county, read straight.