Introduction
There’s a mythology baked into the New Democratic Party across Canada, that if we knock on enough doors, make enough phone calls, talk to enough people face-to-face, that maybe this time we will win. It is a story that was repeated on stage at the federal party’s 2026 Winnipeg Convention where nearly every speaker and leadership candidate pledged their allegiance to “showing up” and “knocking on more doors,” when posed with the question of how to rebuild the federal NDP. During the 2025 federal election, I campaigned as an NDP candidate for Saskatoon West, and longtime local organizers recounted stories of the “poll captain” model that assigned one volunteer to each poll, responsible for overseeing the contact of around one thousand voters. Expressing the core of this mythology, poll captains show up on doorsteps several times around and during the election period, developing one-on-one relationships with every voter so that they can tailor their get-out-the-vote (GOTV) activities on election day around who needs a ride, who voted early, and who will need a reminder (or two).
