Clipboards, Palm Cards, and 73 Votes — Why I Built CanvassLocal

At the local level, knocking doors is the single biggest determining factor for winning. The big campaigns have hundreds of volunteers and tools to manage ad buys, sign locations, digital targeting, outbound calls, and more. But if you're running for a local seat — Town Council, School Committee, maybe Budget Committee — there is no replacement for human interaction. A conversation on someone's porch moves votes in a way that no mailer or Facebook ad ever will.

I've spent most of my adult life learning that lesson, losing by inches before I figured out how to win, and eventually getting frustrated enough with the tools available to local candidates that I decided to build my own.

73 Votes

My first engagement with a political campaign came my senior year of high school. My father had decided to run for a State Rep seat in our town. Since he was running, that meant his children were also running — and we spent many evenings and weekends canvassing the district door-to-door. The strategy was simple: print the streets we pulled from the clerk's voter list, stick them on a clipboard, and go ask people to support my dad.

He didn't win the primary. He lost by 73 votes. His opponent went on to get blown out in the general election, so we didn't feel so bad — but 73 votes is a number that stays with you. Back then, if we'd had just a little bit of data and a clear path to the number of votes we needed, maybe that changes. Maybe 73 becomes zero.

Three Weeks and a Wake-Up Call

Years later, I threw my hat in the ring for a city council seat in Newport, Rhode Island's 3rd Ward. It was haphazard. I remember my father pushing me to go knock doors, and it wasn't until I was introduced to two consultants working on another campaign that things clicked. The election was about three weeks away, and I set to work — printed lists and palm cards in hand — hitting the doors of every likely voter on the list.

The morning of the election, I ran into one of those consultants doing some last-minute lit drops. He looked at me and said, "When I met you three weeks ago, you didn't stand a chance. Today, you might have this."

Turns out, I didn't. But the lesson was burned in. Had I started earlier with their strategy of knocking doors directly — and that very clear talk track when I spoke to someone — I could have pulled it off.

The Spreadsheet Campaign

I took that lesson with me when I moved back to my hometown, and in 2016 I decided to run for Town Council. This time, I had a plan. I took the spreadsheet of voters from the clerk, reformatted it into an Excel table, built helper columns for tracking data, and put together a rudimentary dashboard for keeping track of how I was doing. Then I pulled up street lists, grabbed my clipboard and my palm cards, and started knocking on doors. At the end of each door knocking session, I'd take my lists and manually input data into my spreadsheet. Over the course of the campaign across 4,000+ doors I probably spent another 6-12 hours just manually transcribing data into my tracking sheet.

Two days before the election, my dad called me. "How many votes do you have?" was his only question. I knew that in a crowded field — 18 candidates for Town Council, only 7 seats — I needed around 3,000 votes to be guaranteed a win. I told him a number, somewhere around 2,600.

Two days later, on election day, I finished 2nd overall.

The spreadsheet worked. The clipboard worked. The palm cards worked. Showing up at people's doors and having something good to say — that worked. But every step of the process was held together with duct tape and stubbornness. I was reformatting clerk data by hand. I was planning walk routes by eyeballing a map. I was tracking voter conversations in columns that weren't designed for it. And I kept thinking: there has to be a better way to do this.

Why Local Campaign Tools Don't Exist for Independents

Here's what I found when I went looking: the professional canvassing tools — VAN, PDI, L2 — are powerful, mature, and completely tied to party infrastructure. They assume you have a party login, a regional field director, a coordinated operation behind you. If you're running as an independent candidate, or you're nonpartisan, or you simply filed because the seat was empty and nobody else stepped up? You're on your own.

The few door-to-door canvassing apps that do work for independents are priced for state legislative races with five-figure budgets and paid staff. They were never built for a Town Council candidate whose entire war chest came from a folding table at the farmer's market. When campaign software costs more than your yard signs, you can't afford it. So you go back to the clipboard.

So I Built a Canvassing App for Local Campaigns

CanvassLocal started from a simple takeaway that's been reinforced at every stage of my political life: running for local office is about being organized, having something good to say when you talk to people, then talking to everyone you can and keeping track of what they tell you. Pen, paper, and a clipboard can get you there. But it isn't great, and it isn't efficient, and it leaves votes on the table.

I built CanvassLocal to replace that method. It's a mobile-first canvassing app designed to fit in the palm of your hand on your phone. It gives you efficient walking routes, easy tracking of not just voter intent but the hot-button issues people care about, and a clear picture of where you stand so that come election day, you know your number.

I didn't build this because I'm a tech founder who stumbled into politics. I built it because I'm a candidate who got tired of the tools not existing. There's a difference, and I think you'll feel it in the product.

Whether you're a seasoned candidate or someone brand new, whether you're running in a crowded field or a two-person race, this tool is built to help you get the best effort out of your campaign. Running for local office takes a lot of time. If you want to win, it takes just a little bit of money — and a lot of doors.