Clutching a fistful of Harris campaign pamphlets, George Pumphrey Jr. hunched in front of a doorbell camera in a neighborhood in North Milwaukee and began yelling into the little digital peephole.
“I’m a volunteer!” he called out, asking to talk to the human being inside the home, who was visible from the window but was busy watching television. A woman’s tinny voice came through the peephole, asking Mr. Pumphrey to leave a few pamphlets at the door.
All in a day’s unpaid work for Mr. Pumphrey, 75, who knocked on doors until his knuckles bled when Barack Obama was running for president in 2008. But now, he said, a combination of exhaustion, misinformation and wariness about strangers has made it harder to reach people in Sherman Park, the predominantly Black neighborhood where he spent some of his childhood.
“The only way to do this is to meet them face to face,” he said as he walked down the street to the next house on his list. “But with all the craziness that’s going on, people don’t want to do that.”
Mr. Pumphrey’s experience does not signal the death of the door knock, exactly, but the reinvention of it, especially in places where would-be voters can be hard to reach. In Milwaukee County, which is home to two-thirds of the Black residents in battleground Wisconsin, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign is dispatching fleets of volunteers and relying on data-capturing apps to supplement the traditional work of door-to-door canvassing.
Technology might be making it easier to avoid a door knocker, but the Harris campaign is betting it can also help prompt voters to the polls on Election Day.
