Post by Jennifer Tomkins
Climate change, gun laws, impeachment, reproductive rights, election reform, tax cuts—take your pick. More than ever before, the country is paying attention to politics and voters are motivated to show up to the polls. It’s anticipated that between 65% and 70% of eligible voters will actually cast votes in 2020. Not only would this be the largest percentage turnout in a century, this also means many people who are typically non-voters will turn out to vote next year. So now, the race is on to woo new voters.
On the red side, the Trump campaign is already in hot pursuit of new voters. They use rallies to harvest data to target both existing voters and register new ones, and they are even “making efforts to flip such blue states as Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Minnesota.”
On the blue side, we’ve been a bit slower getting off the starting line, but the research is there on how to engage “low propensity” voters—we just need to start using it across all campaigns and communities.
From A Grassroots Perspective
Working America is one grassroots organization gaining massively astute and helpful insights into these neglected voters. Polling a group of over 1,000 working class voters for the past four years, Working America assessed what they care about and what this means for 2020.
Their findings are significant: “almost one-third of these people are unsure about who they will vote for in 2020, including some voters who went for Donald Trump in 2016 but are now wavering.” What matters to swing and low propensity voters in Ohio, for instance, is “who has their backs as they struggle to cope with precarious lives.”
What swayed their voting choices was a focus on bread-and-butter issues, i.e. “jobs and the income gap, followed by health care and Social Security.” Not even low unemployment shakes their concerns about jobs. Both strong Democrats and strong Trump supporters ranked jobs and health care as top priorities (although Democrats cited climate change as their third most important issue while Trump supporters were concerned about immigration).
Other compelling poll results point to the fact that uncommitted voters are not very interested in candidates and they don’t follow politics. However, as the election approaches, they are likely to tune in to bold policies that mesh with their own personal priorities. In addition to the issues of jobs, the income gap and health care, a majority of these voters support a wealth tax and nearly half support a Green New Deal and Medicare for All.
Altogether, Working America had ~750,000 conversations in working-class neighborhoods across several swing midwestern states, all of which laddered up to the same core principle: “People don’t just want solutions for themselves. They want parity.”
From A Candidate’s Perspective
Turning to a candidate perspective, Dan McCready, who recently came within 2 points of victory in the deeply red 9th district of North Carolina, offered four take-aways from his own campaign he feels can be widely applied by other candidates.
Focus on values: “Democrats can sometimes get stuck in policy jargon and cede the language of values, where voters really make decisions, to Republicans. In our campaign, we flipped this around.”
Present real policy, not abstract DC jargon: “When it came to policy, I met voters where they were.” McCready spent a lot of time engaging with voters and listening to their day-to-day concerns, rather than trying to spin his policy beliefs according to his audience.
Build trust to earn loyalty: “We showed that running in a district like mine doesn’t mean a candidate has to sacrifice the Democratic base to win the middle. In fact, the trust we built early on, which we strengthened over countless coffee chats and town halls, set our base on fire. We didn’t always agree on policy specifics, but we trusted one another, and we became like family.”
Include everyone: “We didn’t give up on rural America, and Democrats elsewhere shouldn’t either. In the rural areas of our district, politicians had left everyone behind—white, African-American and Native American voters alike.”
While McCreedy couldn’t be called a progressive, his approach closely reflects that of the groups like Working America and those that Airlift funds in that he never wrote off low propensity voters, including in rural areas. He internalized and reflected back their concerns in his campaign language, explaining that “If Democrats lead with our values, meet voters where they are and show up everywhere, we can do amazing things.”
We agree. Airlift has always believed that turning out low-propensity voters is key to winning in 2020 and that the way to do it is by the kind of constant engagement that both McCreedy and Working America employed.