RICHARDSON, Texas — It’s dinnertime on a Tuesday when Jules Mandel knocks on the front door: Does the homeowner have time to talk about abortion?
She does.
For the next 40 minutes, Mandel listens to the woman, standing barefoot on the front stoop, explain how being adopted and a teenage mother helped shape her views.
The conversation was closer to a therapy session than a political sales spiel. But that’s the point.
The approach is known as “deep canvassing,” an attempt to shift opinions about hot-button issues by connecting through conversation about feelings and experiences.
For six months, Mandel and several others working for the abortion rights advocacy group Avow Texas have been going door-to-door trying to move the needle ahead of the midterm election in Rep. Angie Chen Button’s district. The group is targeting the Garland Republican, who voted last year in favor of abortion restrictions, including a near-total ban triggered by the U.S. Supreme Court’s June reversal of Roe v. Wade.
While deep canvassing has been tried in other states to change minds on immigration, abortion and transgender rights, it’s a novel political approach in Texas, Avow political director Caroline Duble said.
The conversations aren’t just five minutes; they can last a full hour. Instead of hammering a set of talking points, the canvassers share personal experiences and ask questions, letting voters do most of the talking: Do you know anyone who’s had an abortion? How did that feel for you?
In a polarized political climate, the tactic can seem radical. Whether it can translate into votes remains to be seen.
Duble said the goal is not only to win elections, but also to remove the stigma associated with abortion.
“When you talk to people about the actual experience of abortion and what they want for the people around them,” she said, “they are way more supportive than if you ask are you pro-choice or pro-life, and are you a Democrat or a Republican.”
Mandel stops in front of a row of modest ranch homes on flat lots, where some patches of yellow grass give evidence of drought, and squints at an app on a cellphone that identifies which one to approach. “How old is Georgia?” Mandel asks.
“50-something, I think,” a co-canvasser responds.
The operation uses data to target specific voters: those who probably don’t support abortion, but think the government should stay out of it, said Mandel, who directs the field operation.
Out of 150 state House seats, Avow chose Button’s carefully.
What had been a suburban district trending purple was redrawn in the last legislative session to shore up Republican support. District 112 now wraps from Richardson through Sachse down into Sunnyvale. It was crafted to include several thousand voters — the most of any swing district, Duble said — who split their ticket in the last election by choosing a Republican in the U.S. Senate race and a Democrat in the presidential contest.
“We knew that there was a window to talk to rational-thinking, moderate voters,” Duble said.
Only 13% of Texas voters believe abortion should be illegal in all cases, while 22% say it should be completely unrestricted, according to a recent Dallas Morning News/UT-Tyler survey. The rest are somewhere in between, and a strong majority support allowing the procedure in cases of rape, fetal anomalies or if the pregnant person’s life is in danger.
A 14-year veteran of the Legislature, Button is campaigning as a business-minded Republican and says the issues she hears about most from voters are inflation, high gas prices and rising property taxes. Although she voted for the law banning abortion except in life-threatening cases, she now says she wants to expand the exemptions to include rape and incest. Debate on that is expected to occur in the 2023 legislative session.
In the Nov. 8 election, Button faces Democrat Elva Curl, a former Dallas City Council candidate who has gone after Button’s voting record. Curl has said she wants to overturn restrictive abortion laws, including Senate Bill 8, which empowers people to sue doctors and anyone else who helps a woman end a pregnancy once fetal cardiac activity can be detected.
Ahead of the election, Democrats are leaning into abortion rights as a way to motivate voters. Gubernatorial hopeful Beto O’Rourke and attorney general candidate Rochelle Garza are running ads attacking their GOP opponents over their support for banning the procedure.
For Republicans, restricting abortion has been a reliable rallying cry for their voters in Texas for years. But they’re still sorting out how to respond to a changed political environment after decades of campaigning for the fall of Roe. On the trail, few are playing up new abortion restrictions, instead focusing on immigration issues that are top of mind for their base.
Most voters have already made up their minds about abortion, said Rice University political scientist Mark Jones, so the issue might not persuade Republicans to flip their vote.
“Where the issue is probably going to have an impact, if any, is mobilizing a set of pro-choice voters who wouldn’t have typically voted,” Jones said. “When the group turns out, they tend to be younger, more female and more Democrat.”
Duble says the group will be closely watching the margins on election night.
“No matter what happens in this election,” Duble said, “we’re learning about how to talk to people about abortion.”
The conversations always begin with the same question. Voters are asked to place themselves on a scale of 0, meaning abortion should be banned entirely, to 10, meaning it should be legal with no restrictions.
The woman standing barefoot before Mandel, who declined to be identified, rated herself a 5.
She said she knows there are heart-wrenching situations and thinks families should be able to make the best choices for themselves. But she said she’s bothered by “late-term abortions,” a point she repeated a few times before Mandel chimed in.
“I think late-term abortion is a bit of a red herring,” Mandel said, adding that doctors don’t use the term, a “political talking point” the far right created in an effort to block abortion access. Abortions in the third trimester are almost always a medical decision, Mandel said as the woman nodded.
“You’re right,” she conceded, “the whole late-term thing is not a medical term.”
The deep canvassing initiative draws from a similar effort in Maine, where Planned Parenthood of Northern New England has been block-walking in the state for five years. Since April, Duble said, Avow canvassers have knocked on more than 2,600 doors, spurring about 200 conversations.
The canvassers judge whether they’ve gained ground by ending the conversation where it began, with the scale ranking. At the end of this one, the woman still considered herself a 5. Mandel saw it as a success.
“Even just having a conversation with someone where they are hearing abortion talked about in a non-stigamtized way for the first time, that’s new,” Mandel said. “I’m sure she’s absolutely going to talk to other people about that, and that’s a ripple effect.”
