Reading your first How Are We Doing? summary

The first time a candidate opens a sentiment summary after a few weekends of canvassing, the reaction is almost always the same: a quiet panic at the size of the unknown slice. Eighty percent unknown looks like eighty percent of the district has not made up its mind about you, or worse, has and is not saying.

It means neither. It means you have not knocked on their door yet. Here is how to read the four buckets, and which numbers in them are worth reacting to.

What the four categories actually mean

• Favorable — you or a volunteer spoke to this voter and they indicated support. This is a real signal from a real conversation.
• Against — same conversation, opposite answer. Valuable, and not a failure.
• Undecided — you reached them and they genuinely have not decided. The rarest and most actionable category.
• Unknown — no contact yet. This is a measure of your coverage, not of your standing.

That last distinction is the whole article. Unknown is an operational metric. The other three are political ones. Reading them on the same chart makes it easy to confuse a canvassing gap for a persuasion problem, and they call for completely different responses.

Why 80% unknown is normal in August

Run the arithmetic. A district of 12,000 registered voters is maybe 6,500 households. Six volunteers walking two three-hour shifts a weekend at 50 doors each covers 600 doors a weekend, and roughly a third produce a conversation.

After four weekends, that is about 800 conversations against 12,000 voters. You would expect to be somewhere north of 90 percent unknown. Eighty percent, four weeks in, means you are ahead of pace.

The number that matters: the favorable-to-against ratio

Ignore unknown entirely for a moment and look only at voters you have reached. Of those, what share are favorable and what share are against?

That ratio is your best early read on the race — with one large caveat below. A 3-to-1 favorable ratio among contacted voters is a strong position. Roughly 1-to-1 is a genuine fight. Anything under that, and you have a message problem that more doors will not solve.

The caveat: early canvassing is rarely random. If you started in your own neighborhood and the precincts where you already know people, your early ratio is flattering and you should discount it. The ratio becomes trustworthy once you have walked precincts where nobody knows you. Until then, watch it — do not celebrate it.

Undecided is the most valuable slice

A large undecided share is frequently misread as bad news. It is the opposite. Undecided voters have met your campaign, engaged with the question, and remained persuadable. They are the cheapest votes available to you, because contact has already been made and the hard part — getting them to think about the race at all — is done.

Undecideds should get a second contact. Not the same door knock again: something that follows up on whatever they were uncertain about. If your notes say a voter wanted to know your position on the bond referendum, the follow-up is about the bond referendum. Generic re-contact converts far worse than specific re-contact, which is why the notes field matters as much as the sentiment button.

What to do with each bucket

1. Favorable: stop persuading and start mobilizing. Ask for a yard sign, a volunteer shift, a donation, a list of neighbors. Then make sure they vote — a favorable voter who stays home is worth exactly zero.
2. Undecided: one targeted follow-up addressing their specific question, roughly two to three weeks out.
3. Against: mark it, be gracious, and never go back. Re-contacting opponents wastes your scarcest resource and occasionally reminds them to vote.
4. Unknown: this is just your remaining walking list. Sort by precinct value and keep going.

Watching it move over time

One snapshot tells you very little. The trend tells you almost everything. Check three things weekly:

• Is unknown falling at a rate that reaches your coverage goal before the last two weeks? If not, either add volunteers or shrink the target universe. Shrinking is usually the right call and is almost always made too late.
• Is the favorable-to-against ratio stable as you move into unfamiliar precincts? A ratio that collapses when you leave your own neighborhood is important information, delivered early enough to act on.
• Is undecided growing as a share of contacts? That often means your message is landing as inoffensive rather than persuasive.

Two ways to fool yourself

The first is treating unlogged doors as unknown when they were actually conversations. If a volunteer talks to fifteen people and logs four, your data says you have a coverage problem when you have a data-entry problem. Log at the door, not from memory in the car.

The second is optimistic coding. Volunteers who want to please the candidate mark polite as favorable. Someone who took a flyer and smiled is not favorable — they are unknown, or at best undecided. Tell your volunteers explicitly that "they were nice to me" is not a sentiment, and that an honest against is more useful to you than a generous favorable. The whole system is only worth as much as the accuracy of the button people press at the door.

Get that right and the summary stops being a source of anxiety. It becomes the thing that tells you which Saturday to spend where — which is the only decision a local campaign really makes, over and over, until election day.