This memo examines technologies available to help campaigns achieve scale in their relational organizing programs in the 2018 election cycle. The details provided represent our best, most recent knowledge of the top tools and are informed by surveys completed by the companies or organizations managing them. This memo is not meant to be comprehensive in documenting every tool available.

Author: 2020 Vision Ventures by Analyst Institute, May 2018

Campaigns, parties, interest groups, pollsters and political scientists increasingly rely on voter registration lists and consumer files to identify targets for registration, persuasion and mobilization, and as sampling frames for surveys. However, a sizable proportion of the U.S. citizen population does not appear on these lists, making them invisible to list-based campaigns and research.

What political consequences follow from a list-based view of the polity?

Author: Simon Jackman and Bradley Spahn, August 2015

Several tests, conducted across a variety of modes, have indicated that friend-to-friend “relational” communication can have a powerful impact on whether a person turns out to vote.

Based on the promising results of several tests conducted in recent years, Analyst Institute views relational voter turnout (RVT) as one of the most promising tactics for progressive campaigns to incorporate into GOTV plans.

Author: Analyst Institute July 2018

Overall the small universe size makes it difficult to draw firm conclusions about the effect of relational persuasion. The results suggest that being targeted by relational contact did not appear to increase support for the ballot measure. There may be some evidence that both the relational and non-relational contact might have increased turnout, but there is a lot of noise in this estimation.

Author: Analyst Institute, October 2019

The objective of the first experiment was to test the effectiveness of two different canvassing messages and the objective of the second was to determine whether personal outreach was especially effective. The results from the first experiment suggest that mobilization is difficult in the context of a high-profile presidential election. The results of the second experiment, however, run contrary to this claim. Personal outreach by a friend or family member can apparently influence some people to vote when they would not have otherwise.

Author: David W. Nickerson, August 2009

Although prior turnout effects from relational programs are encouraging, we still have much to learn about how to optimize and effectively scale relational programs. This memo briefly outlines important areas for future research on relational voter contact programs.

Author: Analyst Institute, May 2018

During the 2018 general election cycle, The New Data Project (NDP) partnered with Analyst Institute to determine the effect of its relational voter turnout app, VoteWithMe, on voter turnout nationwide.

This test contributes to our knowledge regarding the effectiveness and scalability of relational voter turnout programs as well as the utility of the VoteWithMe app in particular in increasing voter turnout during a midterm election cycle.

Author: Analyst Institute, December 2019

Currently 73% of online adults use Facebook, and 66% of users report having already taken at least one civic or political action on the platform.

If Facebook can be strategically utilized to increase political participation, then the platform—and potentially digital technology as a whole—may offer the potential to reinvigorate voter participation.

Author: Journal of Communication

Our relational organizing tool, Empower, was proud to participate in 8 Analyst Institute studies in 2018. The Key Questions and Challenges we answered:

● How can relational voter contact programs be brought to scale while maintaining effect potency?

● What methods increase participation in relational programs?

● How can relational voter contact be used by or within historically underrepresented communities? What are the best strategies for doing so?

Author: Analyst Institute, 2019

In 2018, For Our Future partnered with Analyst Institute to test the impact of relational voter engagement on turnout as a part of the Directed Research Fund.

For Our Future’s relational voter contact program had a large, statistically significant effect on turnout. This confirms that relational voter contact can be an effective way to mobilize voters.

Author: Analyst Institute, August 2019

Voces de la Frontera Action is a membership-based community organization and worker center led by Latinx and immigrant workers. They seek to increase the Latinx vote to impact electoral outcomes in Wisconsin. In 2018, Voces de la Frontera Action partnered with Analyst Institute to test the impact of relational voter engagement on turnout as a part of the Analyst Institute’s Directed Research Fund. Using Empower (formerly MyRVP), Voceros mapped their social networks.

Voces de la Frontera Action’s relational voter contact program appears to have increased overall turnout, with the effect being concentrated among those who did not match to the voter file when initially entered into Empower.

Author: Analyst Institute, August 2019

ROC Action is a national organization of more than 100,000 workers, employers, and consumers organizing for better wages and working conditions in the restaurant industry. Through their coworker-to-coworker model they seek to mobilize restaurant workers, millions of whom are women, youth, and people of color, to build long-term, collective power to create change.

In 2018, ROC Action partnered with Analyst Institute to test the effectiveness of their relational voter turnout program as a part of the Directed Research Fund. To build their program, ROC Action used their One Fair Wage campaign to recruit Champions in Michigan. Using Empower (formerly MyRVP), Champions mapped their networks, each listing an average of 5 contacts to build an experimental universe of targets. Notably, ROC Action’s relational voter turnout program reached a significantly larger scale than any relational voter turnout program studied with a randomized controlled trial prior to the 2018 cycle.

Author: Analyst Institute, August 2019

Turnout increased dramatically compared to past midterms, and the composition of the 2018 electorate resembled recent Presidential electorates much more than recent midterms. Young voters and voters of color, particularly Latinx voters, were a substantially larger share of the electorate than in past midterms. White non-college voters and people we’ve historically modeled as Republican supporters were a smaller share. The 2018 electorate was similar to 2016, with the exception of age: midterm electorates are older than Presidential electorates generally speaking, and 2018 ended up somewhere between 2016 and 2014 in this regard.

Author: Yair Ghitza, May 2019

Personally contacting volunteers more than doubled RSVP and attendance rates over sending just emails. Personally contacting volunteers increased RSVP rates by 168% and attendance rates by 177% over just sending emails asking people to come. Our findings indicate that giving volunteers a call and leaving a voicemail, giving them a call plus sending them a text, and just sending them a text are all superior means of communication over just sending an email if you want people to RSVP and then show up to your team activity!

Authors: Gaby Goldstein & Mallory Roman, May 2019

Academic studies find numerous factors influence voting behaviors. In this report we (i) synthesize the most highly-cited, publicly-available academic studies on social influence and voter turnout and (ii) include an appendix of the most-cited studies on voting. To make this report digestible for political campaign professionals, we label each study by its outreach method, psychological mechanism, and outcome affected.

Authors: Lea Lassoued & Robert Reynolds, May 2019

The results of the 2018 election are well known, highlighted by the Democrats’ “blue wave” takeover of the House of Representatives and other state offices across the country. However, recently released data from the Census Bureau sheds new light on how this was done—with extraordinarily high levels of voter turnout among voting blocs that lean Democratic. These data, from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS) voting supplement, provide information not available earlier—estimates of voter turnout for key demographic groups—both nationally and for states. They tell us which groups exceeded turnout expectations in 2018 and suggest that good things may be in store for Democrats in the 2020 presidential contest.

Even before all the votes were counted last November, reports indicated that turnout had surged. Now, the Census Bureau’s estimates show that the 2018 turnout—at 53.4 percent—was the highest in midterm elections since it started collecting voter turnout numbers (voters per 100 citizens) in 1978; and for the first time since 1982, it rose above 50 percent. Interestingly, this surge follows the lowest midterm turnout rate in the Census Bureau’s time series—41.9 percent in 2014.

Author: William H. Frey, May 2019

More than half of U.S. eligible voters cast a ballot in 2018, the highest turnout rate for a midterm election in recent history, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of newly released data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The increased turnout was particularly pronounced among Hispanics and Asians, making last year’s midterm voters the most racially and ethnically diverse ever.

With enthusiasm at a record high, more than 122 million people voted in the 2018 elections, the highest in a midterm election year since 1978. Last year also marked the first time since 1982 that the voter turnout rate in midterm elections surpassed 50%. This was a stark reversal from the previous midterm year, when turnout had decreased – from 45.5% in 2010 to 41.9% in 2014. (The voter turnout rate is the share who cast a ballot among eligible voters, defined as U.S. citizens ages 18 and older. Historical data in this analysis starts in 1978, the first year the Census Bureau gathered citizenship data for its survey of voters.)

Jens Manuel Krogstad, Luis Noe-Bustante & Antonio Flores, May 2019

Today’s Democratic Party is increasingly perceived as dominated by its “woke” left wing. But the views of Democrats on social media often bear little resemblance to those of the wider Democratic electorate.

The outspoken group of Democratic-leaning voters on social media is outnumbered, roughly 2 to 1, by the more moderate, more diverse and less educated group of Democrats who typically don’t post political content online, according to data from the Hidden Tribes Project.

Democrats who do not post political content to social media sites are more likely to identify themselves as moderates or conservatives, say they don’t follow the news much, and are African-American.

Authors: Nate Cohn and Kevin Quealy, April 2019

Most candidates agree that “grass-roots engagement” and a good ground campaign matter, but too often candidates misunderstand what actually makes them work.

People power is not a spigot that can be turned on and off with fancy technology. Instead, it depends on interwoven human networks through which people learn to work together on things they care about, even when the electoral spotlight is not on. Campaigns, and political parties, can help build these networks — or make them wither away. In 2009, national Democrats opted to let them wither. They’re back at that crossroads today.

Authors: Hahrie Han & Lara Putnam, April 2019

To encourage Montanans to get their friends to vote, the nonpartisan organization Forward Montana piloted a pledge program before a Pearl Jam concert in Missoula last August. With three local nonprofit groups, volunteers canvassed a pre-concert block party outside Washington-Grizzly Stadium and asked people, “Will you pledge to get three friends to vote?”

In two hours, the volunteers got 3,252 of the 10,000 attendees to complete the pledge, which involved sharing their cellphone number and the first names of three friends they would encourage.

Author: Robert Reynolds, March 2019