New Mexico Special Congressional Election 2021
Intriguing results from our first ever messaging test
The Takeaways
Letters with “personal story” messages, written by trained volunteers, may be especially motivating for voters
The Backstory
It might be the number one question Vote Forward receives from volunteers: “What should I write in my letters?”. Volunteers tell us they feel excited to write the most motivating message they possibly can. But so far, we have only been able to offer light guidance. Answering this question would require an experiment to test different message approaches head-to-head, something we had never tried - until this year. New Mexico’s June 1 special election to replace Rep. Deb Haaland (now Secretary of the Interior) offered a great opportunity.
To accomplish this, we had to find a way to ensure that volunteers wrote a specific type of message on their letters. We decided to require a training exercise to coach volunteers on how to construct their message (more on that below). Since it was our first time ever creating this kind of training, we limited participation to a few groups of volunteers, while others could participate in a standard letter writing campaign for New Mexico. As usual, volunteers in the standard campaign could write any message they wanted.
There are so many different kinds of messages that could resonate with voters - what to test? We decided to try out “personal story” messages: stories that are rooted in the substance of someone’s unique life experience, with concrete details and emotional descriptions. Others have shown that these kinds of stories can be part of a powerful conversation. By showing how voting affects us and the people we care about, we can make something as abstract as “democracy” or “elections” feel real and important. Here's one example written by a real volunteer:
I vote because I was diagnosed with cancer in 2017. It was very scary, but I felt lucky that, because of federal healthcare reform, I had health insurance that paid for my treatment. Now that I'm in remission, if I'm ever between jobs, I'll be able to get insurance only because the law protects people like me with pre-existing conditions. When I vote, I make sure to support candidates who support these policies that have been important to me and so many of my friends and loved ones.
The Numbers
After the election, our analysis compared turnout among 18,000 voters who received these Personal Story or "Narrative" letters from trained volunteers versus 25,000 voters who received “Standard” letters, as well as over 100,000 voters who did not receive a letter ("Controls"). When combined, both kinds of letters raised voter turnout in New Mexico by an estimated +0.6 percentage points compared to the control group. But when we split those letters out, data suggested that the Personal Story letters were driving that positive effect, showing a +0.8 point effect on turnout compared to +0.4 points for standard letters.
Does this mean that everyone should immediately switch to writing “personal stories” in all their letters? Certainly not. These are just the results of one experiment, and if you’ve already got a message you love writing, that’s great - stick with it! If you are looking to experiment with your letters, though, you can try the personal story exercise for yourself, which includes guidance, FAQs, and story examples. And on our end, given the promising results we saw here in New Mexico, we're excited to build on this work to develop even better message guidance for future campaigns.
