2024 elections: What we know, and how we'll learn more
At Vote Forward, we’ve heard from many letter writers after 2024’s The Big Send asking about the impact of our collective work. It is understandable that many of us are, in this moment, searching to understand what happened in the 2024 election cycle. Letter writers put in so much time, money and effort, and we’re so grateful for the real investment in our work. It’s worth stepping back and remembering that it is still very early. We will always be transparent with you, and want to outline our process for rigorously evaluating the impact of our letters.
To truly evaluate our impact, we need to compare turnout among voters we targeted to turnout among similar voters who we didn’t target. This is exactly what we do when we set up an experiment, or RCT (randomized controlled trial), and all of our 2024 campaigns were structured as RCTs. That means that when the turnout data comes back, we will be able to analyze it and rigorously answer questions about Vote Forward’s impact, just as we did in 2020 and in many other experiments over the past six years.
So what do we know now? There are many commentators already sharing opinions (some informed by data, and some not) about what drove voters’ behavior in 2024. There are also some aggregate charts and statistics available about voter turnout and vote choice, based on either exit polling or official state reporting.
To date, total 2024 turnout sits at 155.8 million ballots cast — roughly 4 million fewer than the 159.7 million ballots cast in 2020. That overall drop masks important differences by state; in several states targeted by Vote Forward and other voter mobilization groups, turnout actually surpassed 2020 levels.
However, the aggregate information we have now cannot tell us whether our efforts at Vote Forward, or the efforts of any other organization, were successful.
It’s possible that our work did mobilize voters, even if overall turnout ends up being lower than in 2020. For example, it’s possible that we successfully boosted turnout in the states and districts that we targeted, while turnout dropped off in places we didn’t focus.
Aggregate information also cannot tell us anything about our impact among specific voter groups. For example, youth voter turnout in 2024 appeared to be lower overall than in 2020, on average, but that does not imply that Vote Forward’s efforts to raise turnout among younger voters were ineffective.
In general, aggregate data can’t speak to the impact of our strategy: the places and types of voters we targeted, our approach to messaging, our mail window timing, or anything else. Nor can it speak to the question of how our efforts impacted electoral outcomes. But we are set up well to answer specific questions about the impact of our work through our evaluation process.
Over the next few months, our team will:
Obtain individual-level turnout data, which originates with Secretaries of State
Clean and process the data
Statistically analyze the turnout data
All of this takes time. We expect that the first sets of data will be available as early as December of this year, but the last sets won’t arrive until March. This puts us on track to learn and share our work’s impact in late spring to early summer of 2025.
We continue to test, evaluate and iterate our campaigns to incorporate our learnings. The 2024 Big Send Campaigns were designed and targeted based on our previous record of experimentation, and we’ll base future letter campaigns on the results of this year. The work we accomplished in 2024 was incredible!
All in all, this community adopted more than 9.75 million voters this year! With additional letters to Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin in 2023, that means Vote Forward letter writers adopted 11 million voters during the 2024 election cycle.
A few highlights from this year’s campaigns include:
4.55 million letters to female voters
4.14 million letters to young voters 25 and under
3.82 million letters to Democratic-leaning voters through our Political campaigns, including 1.01 million to voters in highly competitive U.S. House districts
92,000 letters to U.S. voters living abroad
418,000 letters encouraging voter registration
Since all these 2024 campaigns were set up as RCTs, we can report on our community’s specific impact, and importantly - learn from what we find.
Until then, don’t forget to rest and celebrate the work we all did in 2024. It can be uncomfortable for any of us to accept that we don’t know something (yet!), but what we do already know is that this community of letter writers worked together to send a remarkable number of letters in 2024. We think this is worth recognizing and celebrating. We’re so grateful to you for making this possible.