Strategy Memo: Let America Vote’s months-long commitment to field is paying off

To: Interested Parties
From: Brendan Summers, national campaigns director, Let America Vote
Date: October 30, 2018

RE: Let America Vote’s pre-election strategy

NATIONAL BACKGROUND

Since launching in 2017, Let America Vote has sought to create political consequences for politicians who suppress eligible Americans’ right to vote. That means identifying pro-democracy candidates and pouring grassroots resources into helping them win elections. After seeing great success in Virginia in 2017, LAV took a huge step forward this past spring, opening field offices in Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire and Tennessee to support candidates up and down the ballot.

Over the last five months, we’ve expanded our organizational reach in these states, recruiting and deploying hundreds of volunteers, leveraging a novel distributed organizing program to involve activists in other states, partnering with local parties and progressive organizations, and growing our footprint with satellite offices.

Across our five states, we’re redefining what’s possible with a volunteer-based field operation, and re-imagining how a national organization can add value to local races.

Let America Vote’s early investment into structural assets such as a small full-time staff, field offices and supplies has created a unique opportunity to serve as a bridge between organizations with resources and volunteer talent on one side and key, competitive races on the other.

Outside of our core field offices in each state, we’ve been able to leverage our infrastructure to help in other areas. For example, LAV offices in Georgia serve as an organizing hub for progressive groups launching canvasses across the Atlanta metro area. Our team in Iowa has folks working directly with large local parties in places like Cedar Rapids, where we’re able to help organize and turn out the vote for local races as well as the top of the ticket. And in Tennessee we’ve been able to integrate with the party structure when it comes to state House and Senate races to provide door-knocking capacity many campaigns simply wouldn’t be able to muster on their own.

From day one, we structured this organization to add value in every district and state we knock. Our goal is to be a value-added force recognize and plugging into good work already happening on the ground. This model has been extremely successful, not just for our own organizational goals, but also to providing structure and assistance when local races and parties may be stretched thin.

With a week to go until Election Day (and voting underway across the country) we continue to add value in all our target states. We remain focused on making the biggest difference we can for voting-rights champions.

Here’s what that looks like state-by-state:

GEORGIA

Electoral Breakdown: Despite radical Republican gerrymandering in districts across the state over the past decade, we see real opportunities to make up ground in the Georgia legislature. We’re focusing on about a dozen state House and Senate districts across northern Atlanta and surrounding counties. Additionally, we’re working with progressive allies in the state to identify high-value turnout areas to ensure we’re closing the gap in base turnout and aiding the top of the ticket. We also have a satellite office working on races in Athens.

Competitive Races: In Georgia we’ve supported Stacey Abrams for Governor since day one. She is a transformational leader who will make a fantastic governor. Our office in Sandy Springs is a hub for progressive groups engaged on the Independent Expenditure side, allowing cooperation in tracking packets, ensuring efficiency and avoiding duplication. The Sandy Springs location offers access to some of the more competitive legislative districts, amplifying our investments in the most important races.

Metrics: We’ve knocked more than 49,000 doors in Georgia and made over 37,000 phone attempts.

IOWA

Electoral Breakdown: Iowa is home to 31 “pivot” counties – counties that voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, but flipped to Donald Trump in 2016 – which is significantly more than any other state in the country. As such, a number of the LAV-targeted districts follow this same pattern in 2018.

Competitive Races: We’re assisting in a number Iowa races, with Let America Vote volunteers walking packets in at least 10 — ranging from state House to Senate to statewide. We’ve run particularly aggressive door-knocking campaigns in House District 42 and House District 43, two suburban-Des Moines districts with fantastic candidates in Kristin Sunde and Jennifer Konfrst.

Let America Vote’s early infrastructure investment has also provided some of the most basic, tangible support you can give a candidate: office space. We’ve provided space in our Des Moines headquarters to three statewide campaigns since the general election campaign began back in June, not only putting a roof over their heads but also allowing us to seamlessly integrate our shared operations and become a defacto coordinated office for down-ballot campaigns.

Metrics: Our Iowa numbers speak for themselves in terms of our commitment to one-on-one, volunteer-led grassroots organizing. Through October 28, we’ve knocked on 83,768 doors, and made 33,088 calls.  

NEVADA

Electoral Breakdown: While Democrats hold solid margins in both chambers of the state legislature, Nevada remains a swing state subject to extreme year-to-year electoral changes. Democrats held similar majorities prior to the 2014 elections, only be wiped out and relegated to minority status due to a dip in voter engagement and historically low turnout. LAV is investing heavily to defend high-priority districts.

Competitive Races: Let America Vote’s field operation is primarily centered in the western and southwestern valley of Clark County, with a heavy emphasis on battleground Assembly and Senate districts to ensure Democrats hold and expand present majorities. Let America Vote is leading efforts to pick up Assembly Districts 2 and 22, while protecting the most vulnerable southern Nevada incumbent in AD 29. We’re also organizing aggressively in Senate Districts 8, 9 and 20.

In addition to local races where LAV can have an outsized impact, we’ve knocked doors for statewide candidates, including secretary of state candidate Nelson Araujo.

Metrics: With a heavy emphasis on local legislative races, Let America Vote’s field team has been able to make multiple field passes across southern Nevada. All told, the team has knocked on more than 33,256 doors and made over 7,922 phone calls. LAV-Nevada has also been a major testing ground for our distributive organizing text message program, discussed in detail below.

NEW HAMPSHIRE

Strategic Summary: Republicans have a trifecta in New Hampshire, controlling the governor’s office and both houses of the legislature. Let America Vote’s program in the state is focused on breaking that state-government stranglehold by making gains in the House and Senate and holding Gov. Sununu accountable during his re-election campaign. In New Hampshire, LAV’s field team operates as an independent expenditure program with a heavy emphasis on door knocking and coordination with other progressive groups.

Electoral Breakdown: New Hampshire’s House is one of the largest English-speaking deliberative bodies in the world. That huge number of seats plays to LAV’s strengths, affording us an opportunity to have outsize impact on a large number of the races. Our method of knocking on doors to have conversations with neighbors is proven to get results in such localized elections, where seats are usually decided by a couple hundred votes. We’re running an aggressive program targeting House districts all across the state.

Metrics: Through October 21st, we’ve knocked on over 71,000 doors and made over 45,000 calls in support of our program.

TENNESSEE

Electoral Breakdown: Because many Tennessee state legislative races have rarely been seriously contested over the past decade, traditional measures of electoral competitiveness are murky. LAV is working with partners on the ground to overcome these constraints and engage in races from Memphis to Nashville to Knoxville.

Competitive Races: Let America Vote has been able to work extremely closely with many state representative candidates in the Volunteer State. Our team has knocked on doors for Bob Freeman in Nashville and Gloria Johnson in Knoxville. These races likely will be two of the closest contested this year, and we’re proud to have contributed to both of these great candidates.

Metrics: Our team in Tennessee has knocked on 32,046 doors and made 57,120 phone calls for state House candidates, making multiple passes in field universes for the best pick-up targets.

DISTRIBUTED ORGANIZING

Strategic Summary: In addition to LAV’s five in-state field operations, we’re running a robust Distributed Organizing Program in 2018 as well. The pro-democracy mission championed by Jason Kander and executed by Let America Vote draws a broad base of grassroots and volunteer support, much of it organized online and decentralized from any particular field office.

This gets at a perennial challenge for Democrats and progressives: our most ardent activists and supporters are often concentrated in areas far away from competitive and highly targeted races. LAV knows it must engage these supporters in novel and innovative ways if it hopes to capture to its maximum grassroots capacity.

Distributed organizing allows us to do exactly that. Our program allows us to create and manage a funnel of activity for these volunteers, leveraging their dedication and enthusiasm to raise the issue of voting rights everywhere and bring critical capacity to our targeted races.

Field Value-Add & Goals: The ultimate goal of the Distributed Organizing Program is to add voter-contact capacity to targeted races in targeted states. We’ve done that across our five states by mobilizing a pool of activists that existing local groups simply couldn’t access on their own. These activists assist states with text banks, phone banks and canvasses into key states. Of the three, we’ve found text-banking to be the most effective use of resources and also the most popular with volunteers. Since this summer, Let America Vote has sent over 200,000 text messages and had tens of thousands of one-on-one conversations.

We’ve also succeeded in familiarizing the larger Democratic infrastructure with new technology and organizing techniques, allowing activists to bring new tactics to local-level campaigns. This year, Let America has trained more than 200 people on peer-to-peer texting technology, many of whom had never texted for a campaign before.

We’ve participated with Hustle on data projects, testing how script length and time-of-day affect engagement and discovering, for example, that texts under 160 characters get twice the response rate as texts over 320 characters, while time-of-day differences are inconclusive. We’ve created basic metrics — such as the drop-off rates when switching methods of communication and differences in action rate based recruitment methods — that will be helpful when planning distributed programs in the future.

Lastly, we’ve created volunteer engagement activities to recreate the camaraderie of a field office, inviting volunteers to host house parties and recruit friends, holding social media training and even tapping new technology such as Remesh to survey volunteers on the issues important to them. This has done wonders for our volunteer retention.

Our program, in short, has not only produced meaningful results for our candidates this cycle, but also allowed us to develop new distributed-organizing best practices to aid campaigns across the country in cycles to come.

CONCLUSION

After flipping seven legislative seats and helping keep the governor’s mansion in Virginia in 2017, Let America Vote knows that its 2018 success will be judged on the races won and lost on Election Day. We’re happy to be judged on that metric, and confident that our 700,000-plus direct voter contact attempts and conversations since June will show up on the positive side of the ledger after all the ballots are cast.

But even a week out from Election Day, we know we’ve already “won” in a lot of ways. We got engaged early and persevered on numerous races where, frankly, no other outside groups were willing to go. Our team has trained and mentored 172 interns across the country, built relationships with 720 volunteers and engaged remotely with 200 texters — all of whom are primed to continue helping Let America Vote expand after this election. And if they didn’t before, Republican politicians know now that there will be political consequences for enacting draconian voter ID bills, purging eligible voters or closing polls early.

We wouldn’t have been able to do that without our grassroots donors, the leadership of our president, Jason Kander, and the dedicated staff at Let America Vote who have worked endless hours this cycle and overcome every challenge thrown at them.

We’re not taking any victory laps yet, or anything for granted. We still have seven critical days to go. But we’re confident in our organization and program and welcome the results that’ll roll in a week from tonight.