Russell Berman in The Atlantic:
They called it the “Big Send.” Democrats gathered in living rooms, libraries, and coffee shops across the country to write letters to millions of potential voters in swing states and competitive congressional districts, urging them to vote in November. During the 2020 pandemic election, the novel but decidedly 20th-century tactic had cut through the glut of digital messages that inundated Americans’ cellphones and inboxes, and organizers hoped it would similarly boost turnout for Democrats in 2024.
It did not.
In a study set to be released later today, the group behind the letter-writing effort, the nonpartisan Vote Forward, found that personal messages sent to more than 5 million occasional voters deemed at risk of staying home last fall had no effect on turnout. (The group’s campaign produced a modest increase in turnout among a second, slightly smaller set of low-propensity voters, but it still fell short of previous Vote Forward programs.) What’s unusual is not Vote Forward’s lackluster findings, but that the group is ready to tell the world about them. Every election, a constellation of progressive organizations sells donors and volunteers on the promise that their data-driven turnout programs will deliver victory at the polls. These mobilization efforts have taken on ever-greater importance in an era of tight elections, where the presidency and majorities in Congress can hinge on just a few thousand votes.
Progressive groups are only too happy to brag about their wins; they’re much less likely to divulge details about their campaigns that flopped. Driving this reticence is a fear that donations will dry up—or go to other organizations in a highly competitive campaign industry—if funders find out their money made little difference on the ground. In several instances, researchers told me, Democratic firms have either pushed them to suppress the results of studies that didn’t produce desired findings or cherry-picked data to make the numbers look better. “We have a people-pleasing problem in our party,” Max Wood, a progressive data scientist, told me.
Yasmin Radjy, the executive director of Vote Forward and its progressive campaign arm, Swing Left, is trying to change that culture. Just as Democrats are now debating, sometimes fiercely, why their party’s message failed last year, Radjy believes that to emerge from “the political wilderness,” they need to have candid conversations about their organizing and turnout efforts. Radjy has been frustrated by what she describes as Democrats’ lack of introspection and transparency. For months, she’s been asking party organizers and consultants what they learned in 2024, and what they’re going to do differently going forward. “We’ve got to actually be honest about both what works and what doesn’t work,” she told me. In the next election, “if we are serving volunteers, donors, and voters reheated leftovers from 2024, we are doing it wrong.”…