Last week, buried in a New York Times report on Joe Biden’s front-running yet listless campaign, was a brief account of nervous Democrats in Erie County, Pennsylvania. Biden’s limited presence had so unnerved Democratic leaders there that they had taken it upon themselves to go door-to-door distributing campaign signs, dropping off literature, and interacting with voters. “If you complain as much as I do and you beat on the doors of the national campaign, they’re eventually going to respond to you,” Ryan Bizzarro, a state representative from the county, told the Times.

Across America, in the pivotal swing states that will determine the outcome of the 2020 election, the story is the same: Biden’s campaign has abdicated the ground game to Donald Trump, largely forgoing door-knocking and in-person campaign events for a barrage of phone-banking and text-banking, as well as digital and TV ads. The approach, coming in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, is, at first blush, understandable. Two hundred thousand Americans have died from the coronavirus, and infections and death continue. In the context of this hellish year, door-knocking almost feels frivolous.

That was the argument Amanda Litman, the founder of Run for Something, made on Twitter last week, calling door-knocking during a pandemic “dangerous and unethical.”