It’s Big Send day! I live in Washington, a state in which my vote is basically performative as far as the White House goes, so I was pretty desperate for something else to do to help, and I’m a grad student in the middle of a pandemic, so I don’t exactly have a ton of extra cash laying around. I phone banked for Obama, and also for Martha Coakley during the run up to the Affordable Care act, and I will do that in the coming days. But I wanted to see what the research said about what is the single best get-out-the-vote tactic available to volunteers. That’s how I and many others discovered VoteForward, a project of hand-writing letters to a specific set of people--swing state voters who are both likely Democrats and infrequent voters.
I joined a letter writing group and learned the process, then started a few letter writing groups of my own, sitting masked and six feet apart at tables in my house, writing letters, or gathering over Zoom. VoteForward’s initial goal was 10 million letters, and there have been about 10 million diaries about it, so you likely know that the target was hit easily in the first week of October. I wasn’t sure what to do, because I still had more letter writing groups planned with people who were hoping to get involved, but VoteForward ambitiously increased the target to 15 million, AND moved the target mailing date back 10 days to accommodate the vagaries of DeJoy’s sabotaged Post Office. Five million extra letters in just two weeks, given that it had taken all summer to get to 10 million, seemed like such a stretch goal I figured it didn’t matter if we didn’t hit it, because we’d already done so well.
Today is the day they all go in the mail, all 16.14 million of them. More than 16 million hand-written letters, asking our friends in personal and amiable terms to please get out and vote.
Even if slightly less than 2 percent more people vote than otherwise would have (studies show turn out increases of up to 3.4%, but turnout is already high this year), that’s 300,000 votes in swing states and potentially flippable states. I feel really good about what we’ve done. It means that there’s still a boost of energy possibly waiting to happen here in the final days, after the first flush of early voting. It also means we are pumped as hell on team blue.
Now to figure out a texting project!