2020 General Election
In a crucial election, Vote Forward’s biggest-ever campaigns moved tens of thousands of voters
The takeaway
Handwritten letters proved to be one of the most effective turnout interventions ever measured in a presidential election year
The backstory
At the beginning of 2020, the year was already shaping up to be one of the most consequential presidential election years in our lifetimes. And just a few weeks later, when the COVID-19 pandemic reached the United States, 2020 also became one of the most unusual election years in recent memory. The virus wrought drastic changes in Americans’ day-to-day lives, reshaped the political landscape, and forced major changes in campaigning and elections. Ultimately, despite pandemic-related challenges to voting, turnout in the 2020 election surged to its highest level in a century.
It was also a significant year for Vote Forward: our first time writing letters in a presidential election. Since we knew we needed to go big, we called our effort “The Big Send,” and set a goal of sending 10 million handwritten letters to voters ahead of the November 3rd general election. In the end, it seemed we underestimated the level of enthusiasm for letter writing, as more than 200,000 volunteers wrote nearly 18 million “get out the vote” letters to voters across 18 different states. These included all of the battleground states including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia that ultimately determined the winner of the presidential contest, as well as other states whose elections had outsized influence on national results.
Of course, scale means nothing unless it also generates big impact—and our 2020 program delivered even more than we had expected. We designed our letter campaigns as randomized trials with a very small control group of voters who did not receive any letters (5%). This experimental design allowed us to directly measure the letters’ effect on voter turnout while still reaching as many voters as possible. Our post-election analysis of these campaigns yielded a big result: an estimated 0.5-0.8 percentage point impact on overall voter turnout, which would translate into a gain of 80,000-126,000 net votes. (To put this in context: That’s almost half of the combined margin by which Joe Biden won six key battleground states in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Source: AP.)
This placed Vote Forward’s letter program among the most effective GOTV programs ever measured in presidential elections, with impact comparable to that of previously studied gold-standard get-out-the-vote (GOTV) programs. It was especially meaningful to see this result in 2020, the highest-turnout presidential election yet in our lifetimes, since effects are typcially smaller in big, noisy election years. Achieving an impact of less than a percentage point on turnout may seem small, but in a big presidential election year like 2020, it’s huge.
To give credit where it’s due, this result was only possible through the effort of hundreds of thousands of volunteers who contributed their own time, money, and passion: buying stamps and writing supplies, printing letter templates, and hand-writing their own unique personal messages about the importance of voting. In a post-election survey, about a third of these volunteers told us that letter writing in 2020 was their first-ever act of political or civic volunteering. Though we can’t measure Vote Forward’s impact on volunteers as easily as we can measure voter turnout, connecting with thousands of new volunteers and enabling them to make a difference in elections with effective tools is a significant achievement in itself.
For more information on Vote Forward’s 2020 program, continue reading for the full text of our 2020 Impact Report:
2020 Impact Report
2020 was an incredibly challenging year. One of the bright lights in the gloom was the incredible efforts of a huge number of Vote Forward volunteers from all over the country.
More than 200,000 of you sat down and wrote more than 17.6 million letters to voters in key states across the country. For some of you, this was only the latest in a lifetime of activism. For many others, it was your first time volunteering in an election. Your efforts left us profoundly hopeful for the future and excited to see what we can accomplish together in the years ahead.
The Big Send’s Big Impact
For The Big Send in 2020, Vote Forward randomly held out some voters from our campaigns so we could assess how much our letters affected voter turnout. Now, we’ve crunched the numbers, and it turns out that the program had a big impact. Our best estimate of the impact of the program is as follows:
Turnout: 0.8 percentage points
Votes: 126,000 net votes
Averaging across campaigns, we estimate that voters assigned to receive a letter voted at a rate that was 0.8 percentage points higher overall, compared to voters in the control group. To be more precise, we think the impact is most likely between 0.6 and 1.1, but 0.8 points is our best estimate.
Extrapolating this estimated impact to the entire 2020 Big Send campaign—over 14 million unique voters—translates into a gain of 126,000 votes. When we all work together, small effects turn into big results, just like the act of voting itself.
And we know: it was work. Tens of millions of letters is a whole lot of stamps, printer cartridges, and cramped writing hands. Counting all the minutes volunteers spent writing letters, we estimate that it would add up to over a century. If you were one of those volunteers—whether you contributed your days, hours, or just a few minutes—this impact belongs to you. We hope you’re proud (we certainly are!).
This estimate is based on the cleanest subset of our voter data. We also validated this finding with a smaller, even more rigorous embedded RCT analysis, which showed a slightly reduced but comparable impact estimate of 0.5 percentage points.
Many thanks to our partners at the Analyst Institute for their in-depth collaboration and review of our work. Statement from them: “Vote Forward partnered with the Analyst Institute to validate its analysis of program impact. Vote Forward allowed Analyst Institute access to voter file and anonymized program data, as well as coding scripts and output from each major stage of its GOTV program and experimentation workflow. Analyst Institute has reviewed Vote Forward’s analysis as well as independently verified its impact estimates and supports Vote Forward’s conclusions on program impact.”
Questions about this analysis? Please review the FAQs below.
State spotlights
Together we wrote letters to voters in 21 states in 2020, including states that hosted some of the tightest races in the country, where the electoral outcome was decided by the smallest of margins.
Arizona:
879,994 Letters written
10,457 Vote margin
Georgia:
1,550,406 Letters written
12,670 Vote margin
Wisconsin:
291,074 Letters written
20,682 Vote margin
Georgia Senate Runoff Elections
Vote Forward volunteers wrote an additional 2.6 million letters to voters in Georgia in advance of the critically important runoff elections for two US Senate seats on January 5, 2021.
Labs experimental results
Vote Forward is always running experiments to discover new tactics and to refine and improve our existing programs. We conduct these experiments under the banner of our “Labs” program.
This year we learned that sending letters earlier can be just as effective (Florida CD-15, Aug. 2020), that Vote Forward letters can motivate voters to vote by mail (Maine Senate primary, July 2020), and that two letters aren’t necessarily better than one (Virginia general, 2019).
You can dig into the details by checking out these reports:
Florida CD-15 (August 2020)
Maine Senate Primary (July 2020)
Virginia (November 2019)
Coalitions & partnerships
Our work in 2020 would not have been possible without all of our amazing partners. Of the 17.6 million letters written for the 2020 General Election, over 10 million were written by volunteers recruited by one of our 54 partner organizations.
In addition to our partner organizations, we were thrilled to work with amazing supporters like Hillary Clinton, Mandy Patinkin, Lin-Manuel Miranda and the cast of Hamilton, and so many more.
The Big Send
Many of you first heard about us through The Big Send — a coalition of 20 partisan and nonpartisan organizations. This group included larger national organizations like Indivisible and Daily Kos, along with regional organizations like Women for American Values & Ethics (WAVE) in Southern California and the Oregon Big Send.
The Big Send at Work
The Big Send at Work was a first-of-its-kind coalition of businesses who partnered with Vote Forward to help encourage all Americans — including their employees, customers, and broader communities — to vote in the 2020 elections. Nearly 40 companies participated, including Patagonia, PayPal, Change.org, Fenwick, and Rachel Comey.
Thank you to our volunteers
None of this would have been possible without our amazing volunteers. We are honored that you chose to join the Vote Forward community this year!
“My son was an election worker in a north Austin precinct. A young man, on entering the polling place, announced that he was voting because someone sent him a handwritten letter encouraging him to cast his ballot. He said he was so impressed by the letter he convinced a friend to come along with him to vote too.”
“I received one of your Vote Forward letters from Maria E in Indiana, Pa and I must say this was a pleasant surprise. It was such an unbiased and positive reminder. I’ve voted once before, I didn’t vote the last election and felt absolutely horrible. This year I am registered to vote but haven’t sent my ballot in. This letter was the motivation I needed to do so.”
