Flirt Canvassing

How one woman is educating men about Project 2025, one chat-up at a time

What happens when you combine Deep Canvassing and speed dating? Maybe you get a breakthrough in political communication.

Author, journalist, and podcast host Liz Plank has recently been testing a brand-new strategy for reaching the silent majority of men who have checked out of the national political conversation. Like the guys White Dudes for Harris are trying to organize, they don’t necessarily see a home in either party, and they feel their masculinity shut down, rather than recognized, in a changing world. Plank believes that these men are persuadable — and she’s acting on that theory.

Plank has been striking up conversations with men — not the hourlong interactions Deep Canvassers swear by, but getting to know guys in social settings in swing states — at bars, parties, tailgates — in a few minutes, bonding over common interests, maybe doing a little flirting, and turning the conversation to how gender inequality (and in particular the radical proposals of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025) hurts everyone — including men.

It’s an inspired bit of consciousness-raising. So we reached out to talk to Plank about it, and in a lengthy conversation with us she covered a lot of territory: the crisis facing American men, the cultural conveyor belt that carries them to the far right, how her approach can work to interrupt the process, and what she thinks the Kamala Harris campaign needs to say to reach the lost men in the middle of American politics.

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I am very interested in this political technology I've written about in the past called Deep Canvassing, which is sustained, hour-long organizing conversations. And I was taken aback lately to discover that you seem to be a pioneer of something new, I don't know if we're going to call it date canvassing or shallow canvassing or flirt canvassing. The Ink wanted to be the first outlet in the world to give people word of this new political technology. So please name it and then explain what it is.

Oh my God. Oh my God. I mean, this is so much pressure. I have not put enough time into the branding of it as much as the doing of it, but yeah, I like “flirt canvassing.” Maybe it's intimate canvassing, something with intimacy to your point, or I want a plus one. I am a big fan of deep canvassing. I'm a fan of persuasion. I've learned so much from you reading your books and reading your writing, that the way that we convince people and that we convert people is not by scolding them, it's not by shaming them. It's not by a mean tweet. It's actually through relationships and through connection. And I wrote a book about masculinity, so I have a history of talking to people who don't want to talk to me.

A lot of men don't want to talk about masculinity, don't want to talk about gender, don't want to talk about feminism. And so I think it's just a natural proclivity or maybe some sort of skill that I've built over time. And I've gone to Trump rallies when I was working for Vox. I've been in situations where I've talked to people who don't agree with me, and I've always found that, yeah, you want to connect first and then you want to get to the tougher topics, and you want to do it in sort of a gentle way.

But practically, for people who have not seen these videos, where you show yourself doing it, give people the breakdown of what you actually have been doing.

Well, I've just been talking to men and I've been going to particularly male-centric spaces or environments. I went to a tailgate at a Phillies game in Pennsylvania. I went to a day club in Arizona. I'm basically going to swing states, I'm going to male environments where men are there to just hang out and not talk about politics necessarily. And I start talking to them. Yeah, I do some light flirting. I'm not misleading them necessarily. I am single, but I'm definitely there to connect with 'em and talk with them. And then I end up talking to them about politics, talking to them about who they're voting for, what's important to them. At the Phillies game, my goal was to talk to them about Project 2025, because it's a 900-page document on purpose so that most of us don't end up having the time to read it.

So I went and I talked to men specifically about the ways that the anti-abortion agenda is really an anti-sex agenda. And obviously men are affected by the anti-abortion agenda. They're affected by these bans, but they are way more affected than they think they are.

And again, particularly in Project 2025, I mean, there's just an overreach on so many different issues and so many areas that touch men's lives. My latest project is to tell them that it plans to outlaw porn and jail people who make porn. Your favorite OnlyFans creator: they're going to jail, your favorite porn star. These are real tangible things that I think the media maybe isn't necessarily messaging or the media that is messaging isn't getting to these men because they're not reading Politico, but they'll talk to me if I'm at a Phillies game and I'm just a nice woman to talk to, and they listen. They were like, wait, what? And is that real? And then we get into a conversation about it, and all of them were pretty concerned. A lot of them told me they didn't watch porn, which fact check. I don't know. But —