Sanders Iowa Campaign Tells Volunteers to Back off Phone Calls

In the week leading to Iowa's caucuses February 3, Democrats there are bombarded with phone calls from pollsters, campaigns, and outside advocacy groups. That, in addition to baseline spam, creates a cacophony that is hard for campaigns to break through. It is more effective, campaign leaders have argued, to have friends and relatives urge those close to them to come out to caucus than to carpet bomb phone lines. The campaign’s phone call goal before Iowa was 5 million, but volunteers have already surpassed 7 million. 

Moving away from the dialer breaks with the practice that has become synonymous with volunteering and is ubiquitous on other campaigns. So much so that on the same day Sandberg sent the new directive, Sanders’s twitter feed urged its followers: 

We’ve got a long way to go. It’s going to be a tough fight and we can't take anything for granted. Knock on doors.