2022 research results
A quick overview of experimental findings from our extensive research agenda - with a sneak peek at 2023
Vote Forward was born as an experiment; testing and learning truly is part of our organizational DNA. As we’ve grown and matured over the past six years, our research program has developed, too.In the 2022 midterms, we conducted our most innovative and extensive set of experiments in any single year to date.
We shared these findings recently on our most recent data results release call in November 2022, and soon, you’ll be able to find more detailed information on each one here at votefwd.org/labs. Below, you’ll find our quick rundown of our 2022 experiments, plus a sneak preview of 2023 results (with more to come soon!).
In Nevada, we teamed up with Stand Up America to test letters in the secretary of state election, which pitted the Democratic candidate against an election denier. This Political campaign was a first for us in all sorts of ways: our first precinct-randomized study, our first campaign focused on a downballot race, and the first one designed to influence electoral outcomes. Not only did our letters boost turnout, but they also appeared to help Democratic candidates – in the secretary of state race, and in the much closer U.S. Senate election as well.
In Arizona, we partnered with the DNC on a Political campaign focused on voter registration, and found that our letters improved registration rates over and above several waves of direct mail. Voter registration has been a tough nut for us to crack up until now, but through this partnership, we were able to leverage better data on unregistered potential voters to inform our analysis.
In Pennsylvania, we found that letters with enclosed items – a handwritten sticky note or voting-themed magnet – appeared to boost turnout significantly compared to letters without items. Though this experiment was small, we’re excited to look for ways to scale it up in the future.
Also in Pennsylvania, we experimented with issue-focused messaging, where we matched issue-focused turnout letters, with messaging focused on either abortion or climate, to voters modeled as likely to care about that specific issue. The results here weren’t very strong, but seemed to suggest that the climate issue letters, and not the abortion letters, were more effective at boosting turnout, compared to standard Vote Forward letters. Since this finding wasn’t conclusive, we’re hoping to learn more from the issue-focused letters we tested in Virginia’s 2023 elections.
In Wisconsin’s 2023 supreme court election, we ran letter campaigns to inform voters about the candidates on their ballot, including now-Justice Janet Protasiewicz, as well as encourage turnout. In the Social campaign, focused on voters of color, our letters showed a clear positive impact on voter turnout. The Political campaigns, in contrast, did not show evidence of impact, likely because turnout in that group was already sky-high at almost 70%.
Besides these special experimental campaigns, we designed our midterm-focused get-out-the-vote letter program, The Big Send, as an experiment with a small control group. To our surprise, we were not able to detect clear evidence of impact in that experiment. This result was an unexpected outcome for us, since when we’ve tested Vote Forward letters in multiple studies over the past six years, we consistently find evidence of impact on turnout. Our biggest takeaway: as election messaging becomes noisier and voters learn to tune out, it’s more important than ever to invest in strategic, thoughtfully crafted campaign designs – and that’s what we’re doing now in 2024.
Stay tuned for more results to come from our 2023 experimental campaigns in Ohio and Virginia, both of which are in the works now. And in the meantime, check out our active campaigns to write letters now for this year’s critical elections! You can choose from a wide array of letter campaigns across many critically important states and districts, including innovative research campaigns geared for extra impact – and all of them are only possible through the efforts of letter writers like you.
