A month ago, right as Daily Kos started to ramp up get-out-the-vote volunteer recruitment through Mobilize America, I volunteered at a local event in my neighborhood to see what kind of activities we were directing folks to do.
It was supposed to be a postcard-writing party, but when I got to the restaurant, people were writing handwritten letters to targeted voters urging them to go vote. The program was Vote Forward, where people write to unlikely voters who are very likely to vote Democratic—if they show up. And we would tell them why we had pledged to vote in every election, offering them a slight personal nudge.
Voters were picked depending upon whether they lived in a state or district likely to determine the outcome of the midterm election. So I stuck around for about an hour, and wrote letters.
The Washington, DC, letter-writing party had over 31 people show up, despite the bookstore saying it could only handle 15 volunteers.
The very next day at work, my boss, Chris Bowers, set up a conference call with Scott Forman, founder and executive director of Vote Forward, who wanted help from Daily Kos to promote this program. I told him I had inadvertently volunteered just the night before.
Scott didn’t know how many of these letter-writing parties were already happening. The program had already gone viral, and people were self-organizing. We started recruiting more sign-ups, and my colleague Kate Daligga assisted Vote Forward in fielding questions with their Help Desk.
Vote Forward got 24,861 people to write letters, and Daily Kos was responsible for approximately half of those volunteers. Judging by community blog posts, it definitely piqued people's interest. People would sign up and agree to "adopt" anywhere from five to 100 voters. Volunteers were assigned the "swing district" nearest them. If they wanted to influence a different race (or if their district ran out of names), they could pick another one.
Starting from Swing Left’s list of 78 target districts, Vote Forward selected districts that the FiveThirtyEight congressional model projected in mid-August 2018 would be closest. They also prioritized districts in states with important Senate and gubernatorial races. But as the program got more and more popular, we kept running out of names, and Vote Forward had to buy more.
The Minneapolis Vote Forward party wrote over 800 letters.
Once a volunteer hit 100 letters, they would have to request to be rated a "super-volunteer" to lift the cap. We would normally ask for some proof that they had already written letters, so they would send us photos of their completed letters.
People were encouraged to host letter-writing parties at home, and Vote Forward set up a helpful party kit for people to self-organize. There were likely hundreds—if not thousands—of these parties at personal homes.
I felt we needed some letter-writing parties organized by Vote Forward at public places, so I took the lead on organizing them with volunteers who were willing to find us a venue. We hosted Vote Forward parties at a restaurant in Atlanta; a restaurant in Houston; a community center in Minneapolis; a bookstore in Washington, D.C.; a bar in Nevada City, California; a deli in Corvallis Oregon; a coffeehouse in Los Angeles; a restaurant in Dallas; a pub in Lakewood, Ohio (just outside Cleveland); and a condo complex in San Francisco. Each of these parties was well-attended (some beyond capacity), and each produced hundreds of letters. The San Francisco party printed 1,300 letters and then had to run to the print shop for another 1,000 to keep up with demand.
A very young Vote Forward volunteer drops letters in the mailbox on Tuesday, October 30th. Over one million letters were sent.
On Tuesday, October 30, volunteers were instructed to drop all of their letters in the mail. A lot of people asked us if they could send them earlier, due to early voting happening in many states. But there's convincing evidence that the effects of this kind of message fade very fast. While many other campaigns are pushing early voting to bank in Democratic votes, the purpose of this program was to reach Democratic voters who might not have the most consistent voting track record. Any benefits of getting a few people to vote early would be outweighed by the downside of voters receiving these letters earlier—and forgetting about them on Election Day.
The last few days before October 30 were intense for all of us running Vote Forward. New volunteers were coming out of the woodwork to adopt new voters, and the system kept running dangerously low on names. We spent a lot of time contacting volunteers who had already adopted voters but had not reported that they had written their letters. We would urge them to finish their letters, or to tell us if they didn't have time so we could re-assign them to other volunteers who could.
I went to bed late Monday night. By Tuesday morning, our database had shown that over one million letters had been prepped (i.e., written and made ready to go). That was 20 times what Vote Forward had initially set out to do. Our challenge was to now urge people to drop their letters in the mail. People mailed their letters, but neglected to log back into their account and mark their letters as "sent." Or they tried, but had trouble logging in and needed our help. So we spent much of Tuesday and Wednesday handling the flow to determine an accurate count.
Late last night, a volunteer in Texas marked the one millionth Vote Forward letter sent. Our database now shows that 1,009,383 letters have been marked as sent. In other words, we did it!
Will this be effective? When Scott started Vote Forward as a pilot program in 2017 for the Alabama Senate race, the Analyst Institute did a study after the election. Turnout was more than 3 percentage points higher among folks who received letters vs. those who did not. The effect will very likely be smaller in a midterm election than a special, but at that level of impact, this could boost Democratic turnout by up to 30,000 votes. As we all know, Donald Trump became President because of 77,000 votes in three states.
That means letter-writing is not enough, but can help amplify and improve our numbers, and tip some decisive House and Senate races in our favor. The one million letters were sent to 56 swing districts, some of which also have competitive statewide races.
I told Scott when Daily Kos got involved in this program that I did not want people to use this as an excuse to not phone-bank, walk precincts, or do other get-out-the-vote work. But it's a great supplement to what people can do, and an alternative if people cannot do other stuff. Anecdotally, I can tell you we had a LOT of volunteers say that they were physically unable to go canvassing and were looking for an easy way to help contribute to boosting Democratic turnout. We gave them that opportunity to get involved.
But the election is on Tuesday—a mere five days from now.
If you can volunteer in any other way, during these crucial final hours, please sign up for a volunteer shift here. There are literally thousands of campaigns with get-out-the-vote activities who need your help now.
