On Tuesday we proudly finished first in an 18-candidate field by earning over 48 percent of the vote. I wanted to take a moment to thank all those who have built this historic movement. Our field-first strategy worked because the community organized so intensely and because our talented field staff worked effectively and relentlessly. I have never seen a district with so much community engagement and I have never worked with such a strong field team.
From day one, the strategy of this campaign has been to put field first. We believed that the way to earn a spot in the runoff and to position ourselves to win on June 20th was by investing in direct voter contact and community outreach. That’s why we invested more in our field program than any Congressional campaign to date, hiring over 100 field staff. It’s why we opened field offices in every part of the district. And it’s why Jon attended one-to-three house parties a day for over six weeks.
We also changed how we target voters, focusing our efforts on a much larger range of people than is typical in a competitive race. The conventional approach is to define the universe narrowly, often by excluding people who are less likely to vote. In contrast, our field, digital, and mail programs talked to a universe of voters three times the size of a typical target universe and included voters who are considered unlikely to vote. We talked to people who have never voted before, new registrants, and people who may have only voted a couple times in their lives. The result was a lot of people voting on Tuesday who no one could have expected to vote, which is one of the reasons our 48.2 percent performance is several points higher than the public polls predicted just days before the election.
Our commitment to field and community outreach worked because so many leaders in the community organized behind Jon and committed to our voter contact strategy. If you were able to drive through the 6th District on a recent Saturday, you would have seen street corners covered by activists holding Jon Ossoff signs and field offices overflowing with hundreds of volunteers making calls and going out to knock doors. This was, from the very beginning, a campaign led and driven by community leaders and organizers.
That grid of grassroots enthusiasm, the likes of which Georgia has never seen, sent shockwaves throughout the country Tuesday night as Team Ossoff captured nearly 50% of the vote in a crowded field of 18 candidates.
What we accomplished on Tuesday was not only impressive by any standard in modern politics – it was historic. Our community knocked over 250,000 doors for Jon Ossoff in just two months.
Over the course of these next two months, we’re going to expand our field operation to talk to even more people here in the 6th District about why it’s so important to elect Jon Ossoff to Congress. We believe that this type of community-driven, neighbor-to-neighbor contact can change the nature of our politics.
We are going to expand our precinct captain program so that we have a captain in each of the 209 precincts — a person who lives in that precinct, and who can talk to and mobilize their immediate friends and neighbors. We are going to continue to hold house parties that expand our contact universe to listen to voters — including Independents, and Republicans who are not happy with their party’s candidate. We are going to continue to talk to a large target universe that includes voters who have never been engaged in politics before.
We are going to keep this momentum going. Visit electjon.com/volunteer to see how you can join the movement.
To flipping the 6th on June 20th,
Keenan Pontoni
Campaign Manager
Jon Ossoff for Congress