Why Late Starts Can Kill Campaigns

Most campaigns wait too long to start knocking on doors. They wait until they’re fully staffed and fully funded, until there’s a yard sign design, and they have walk cards in-hand. By the time they finally launch their field program, they’re way behind.

I interviewed Elijah Day and Madisyn Pettit from Patriot Grassroots for my podcast , and they said something that stuck with me: “Start early, not big.” This approach is what they call long-form canvassing, and it rewrites the timeline most campaigns still follow. 

Late Starts Kill Campaigns 
Field programs are expensive. They’ve big, chunky, and take dozens of paid staffers to manage. That’s why the traditional campaign builds a field program in the final three-to-five months. It might be the norm, but it’s not the only way to do it, and it certainly doesn’t make it the best way. This is a model built for volume, not building relationships in the long-term. But if you think about why you’re doing it in the first place, you’ll realize that voter outreach shouldn’t be about blitzing neighborhoods in the last 90 days. If you want to earn people’s votes, they need to recognize your name, agree with your message, and believe in your ability to do the work. That takes time that the traditional timeline doesn’t give you.

The UK’s “Shadow Government” Model 
In the UK, opposition parties appoint a “shadow government” to mirror the actual one. There’s a shadow Minister of Education, a shadow Secretary of Health, and so on. These aren’t just titles, each of these people is a candidate, running to show that even though they’re not elected, they can create policies that work. 

They hold press conferences and advocate for constituents just like their official counterparts, without the official title. This gives voters a preview of how they’d lead, and it builds credibility well before Election Day. We don’t have that setup in the United States, but we can borrow the principle. Start your campaign by acting like you already have the job. Knock on doors, ask people what they need, and then go do something about it. Solve a small problem. Follow up. Build a reputation for showing up. 

That’s exactly what Day and Pettit were advocating for. Long-form canvassing means starting early with a small team, focused on listening, relationship-building, and delivering value to the community before Election Day. This gives your campaign time to build name recognition that actually sticks, develop a reputation for solving problems, and show voters you’re someone who follows through. All of that adds up to something most campaigns don’t have: trust.

What Happened When I Accidentally Did It Right
In my first campaign, when I was still a paid door-knocker and volunteer coordinator, I accidentally did long-form canvassing without knowing what it was. I was too new to know any better, and in my excitement, I started walking my neighborhoods months early. By the time GOTV came around, I’d knocked on those same doors two or three times. People knew me by name.
 
One guy literally asked if I was running (haha, no thank you!). I didn’t realize it at the time, but what I’d done was build a field operation based on trust, not the same boilerplate scripts we see every year. On the other side of that coin, I’ve definitely followed the “traditional” campaign timeline of going out 4 to 5 months before the election. It’s almost always because the candidate came on late, hired staff late, recruited volunteers late, or something else too late. In these situations, we always do our best and hit the doors hard. We follow the plan, but it always feels like people barely remember our candidate’s name, let alone what he was running for. We don’t lose these races because of the mail plan, or because our targeting was off. We lost because we showed up too late to make an impact on the voters.

Why Campaigns Fall Behind 
Here’s what I see holding campaigns back from starting early:

• No Staff: You don’t need a full team to get started, in fact it might be better if you don’t. Start with a small team and scale up slowly and organically as you identify supporters and volunteers at the door.
• No Volunteers: You’ll recruit them by being visible. Go knock on doors, show up to events, ask for help and you’ll be surprised who shows up for you. 
  
• No Money: You don’t need full-color literature or glossy walk cards to start. Go to Vistaprint and order 5,000 basic postcards with a simple design. Early field is all about building a presence in the district with your target voters. 

How to Start Field Right Now 
If you want to build a campaign that voters trust, start before they expect you to. Pick your neighborhood and start walking it early. You’re not just IDing voters, like you’d be doing if you started six months out, you’re listening to voters and getting to understand their issues. Track what you hear in a spreadsheet, or in a voter contact app so you can start recording what people care about. 

Then, most importantly you must act on that feedback. If someone mentions a broken streetlight, call it in. Then go back and tell them it was fixed. Bonus points if you ask them to walk with you next time you come back to the neighborhood (this is how you build a real neighborhood team). The best campaigns don’t wait until they have a logo and a team of 12. They start now, with what they have. Start early and stay consistent, then by the time Election Day arrives, voters will know your name, and they’ll trust you enough to vote for it.

Caitlin Huxley bridges data and strategy to help moderates win close races, leveraging 15 years of experience. She’s the author of Ancient Wisdom for Modern Campaigns: Lessons from Sun Tzu’s Art of War.