2024 General Election
Our impact in 2024, and what comes next for Vote Forward’s campaigns
The takeaways:
Vote Forward’s 2024 letters had a measurable impact on turnout for low-propensity and overseas voters
Letter writing is still an effective way to drive voter turnout, but we need to be increasingly strategic and innovative in how and when we use it
We also need to keep innovating on new tactics beyond letter writing to reach voters
The backstory:
ICYMI: The Atlantic covered Vote Forward’s 2024 program in a June 2025 article about experiments in politics and the future of voter turnout campaigns. Read more here.
Though 2024 was only Vote Forward’s second presidential cycle, we entered the year with big ambitions. Vote Forward’s 2020 letter-writing campaigns were among the most effective programs ever measured in any presidential cycle, and other experiments continued to demonstrate strong results from letter writing across dozens of elections since then, from 2021 through 2023. All of this meant we were enthusiastic to launch another huge effort in 2024, and volunteers showed us they were up to the challenge.
As in 2020, we executed another large-scale, volunteer-driven letter program aimed at boosting turnout in the November 2024 general election, called “The Big Send.” In parallel with that effort, we co-designed two layered experimental campaigns to reach hundreds of thousands of additional targets beyond our core get out the vote (GOTV) universe and test the impact of new tactics and audiences. Vote Forward volunteers ultimately wrote 9.75 million letters to voters across 28 states (including all presidential battlegrounds) in 53 unique letter campaigns—as well as more than 600,000 letters in our special research campaigns.
We knew that it's always been hard to generate or measure impact in presidential election years–and it’s getting harder over time. Elections are getting noisier, and voters are overwhelmed with contact from many different organizations, so that it’s more difficult for any one message to break through. That’s why we tested our impact in 2024, as we do in nearly every letter writing campaign. Every one of those 53 “get out the vote” letter campaigns was structured as a randomized experiment—an RCT—so that we could measure our impact on voter turnout after the 2024 election.
Our strategy for The Big Send in 2024 centered first on “surge” voters: those who had not cast a ballot in 2016, but who had voted in at least one major subsequent election in 2018, 2020, or 2022. These voters had powered the record-high turnout levels measured in those elections, and they clearly had some motivation to turn out in big election years, but they were still at risk of not showing up in 2024. Our 2024 letter campaigns ultimately reached 5.2 million of these voters. Strong volunteer enthusiasm for letter writing meant that we were then able to add even more voters to our letter campaigns. Volunteers wrote nearly 4 million letters to this new group of low-propensity voters, including both infrequent voters and those who had newly registered to vote.
When we analyzed our data, the differences between these two groups of voters turned out to be critical. Among “surge” voters, our estimated impact was negligible. We believe this result is likely because these voters showed extremely high baseline turnout in 2024, at almost 76%. (We observed a similar finding in Wisconsin in 2023.) However, letters did measurably boost turnout among low-propensity voters by +0.16 percentage points: a statistically significant result. In the context of a presidential cycle, this result is not just statistically measurable, it’s also meaningful. To the best of our knowledge, this effect size is actually close to the average for all previously measured presidential year turnout programs. Our 2024 campaigns showed once again that even a single handwritten letter can nudge some voters to turn out, even in an incredibly noisy election context.
Beyond these findings from The Big Send, we also saw exciting results from our special research campaign to reach U.S. voters living overseas. Among these voters, Vote Forward’s handwritten letters boosted turnout by +0.4 points over and above 2-3 waves of printed mail. This is a very strong result for a presidential year on its own, and it’s even stronger when we consider that that effect was happening on top of the effects from other pieces of mail (like our layered VR letters in 2022).
At Vote Forward, we run experiments not just to find out what happened in the past, but to inform our approach to the future. Here’s what we think these results tell us:
Handwritten letters still work. In 2024, they once again showed measurable impact with low-propensity and overseas voters. With this finding, we now have 8 years of rigorous evidence proving that handwritten letters can work to increase turnout in elections large and small. Moving forward, we’ll be focusing our letter campaigns where they’re most effective: in low-turnout, low-information elections, and among low-propensity voters.
We need to keep evolving. While our letters did have impact in 2024, we didn’t see the same large effect that we did in 2020. Over the next few years, we’ll experiment to find new, creative ways to generate impact through letters, such as our new “reciprocal contact” campaigns to Pennsylvania votersin 2025. You can learn more about those campaigns and sign up here.
There’s potential beyond letters. At Vote Forward, we’ve shown that we can support thousands of volunteers to write millions of letters - over 40 million to date - that have made a real difference on voter turnout. Now we think we can take that same volunteer-centered, tech-enabled, and evidence-driven approach to reach voters in new ways. To discover those new ways of making an impact, we’ll be running lots of innovative experiments over the next few years leading up to 2028. If you’re not already signed up for emails, register at votefwd.org to stay tuned for what comes next.
Not only do we believe it’s important to keep testing and learning—we also think it’s essential to keep sharing what we learn transparently, through posts like this and other outlets. It’s all too common to see organizations share only partial results, misleading statistics, or nothing at all. With these latest findings, Vote Forward is proud to continue our tradition of openly sharing everything we find, no matter what.
If you’d like to support this work, please sign up to become a volunteer at votefwd.org, or donate to support our small team’s efforts.