I just finished a round of phone banking for Bernie, and the last call was somewhat surreal. The person on the other end said (and this is verbatim):

No, I'm for Hillary. Go Bernie!!

This reminded me of a TOP post I made earlier this morning on how often people switch. The important part was bit of data I extracted yesterday from the FEC contributions database regarding Bernie vs Hillary:

We aren’t convincing each other of anything.

As of February 29th, there are ~136,000 contributors to Sanders and ~109,000 contributors to Clinton (This does not include contributions too small to report, so don't get excited.) The number of contributors who switched from Clinton to Sanders is about 460 and the number who went the other way is about 350.

This is not signal — it is noise. There are a number of interesting people in this data set (one Democratic contributor started with Clinton and wound up with Sanders after a journey through Webb and Lessig) so trying to infer anything from less than 0.5% of this data is a fool’s errand. The size itself is the inference.

Caveats:

• This is only as of February 29th. I will update my analysis when the March data comes out on April 20th, but I don’t expect to see any big surprises. But you never know (that’s what makes life interesting.)
• As I mentioned, this data set does not include really small donations. It may be that there is more switching among smaller contributors because there is less money/pride on the line, but it would have to be a yuge difference to affect anything. Like two orders of magnitude.

Why is this? I would hazard a guess that people mostly choose political representatives based on shared values. “Logic” and “reason” cannot address differing values — they are merely tools that can be used to discover the implications of your values. So arguing about them is likely to be unproductive.

Our task, then, is to find the undecideds and appeal to their values. There were one or two people like this in my call session, so in addition to the script's suggestion that they visit the web site, I encouraged them to consider their values. I think this is a winning strategy for Bernie because most Hillary supporters I run into are very pragmatic, but most of the undecideds I see these days are split between pragmatism (worried about the GOP winning) and idealism (changing the world).

So let's encourage them to vote their values. Sooth their practical fears and give them courage. That is how we will win.