As COVID-19 continues to upend in-person voting and traditional GOTV programs, progressive advocacy group Stand Up America is announcing a $1.5 million electoral campaign to encourage millions of Americans to register to vote, vote by mail, and vote early in nine key presidential and Senate battleground states.
While one of the most consequential elections in American history unfolds amid a worsening pandemic, cash-strapped states are struggling to implement reforms to make in-person voting safe and accessible. That's why Stand Up America's electoral program will invest significant resources into helping millions of Americans register to vote from their homes, request and fill out their absentee ballots, and vote early in person.
Through a cutting-edge digital program, the group will use a combination of texting, phone banking, digital ads, and relational organizing tools to reach over 20 million Americans. With in-person organizing and GOTV derailed, Stand Up America's program will engage Black, Latinx, and younger Americans in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin entirely through digital organizing.
As a digital-first organization, Stand Up America has spent three years using innovative tactics to help its community of over two million progressives take action to resist Trump's corrupt agenda and protect our democracy, driving more than 1.3 million constituent calls and mobilizing tens of thousands of protestors. For the next three months, the multi-state program will use similar digital organizing tactics to remove Trump from the White House, flip the Senate, and lay the groundwork to pass bold democracy reforms in 2021.
Specifically, Stand Up America will:
- Launch a massive peer-to-peer SMS texting campaign that will contact at least 16 million people, a texting program powered by a team of over 4,000 remote volunteers. Organized through a unique Slack community, these remote volunteers will use new voter file modeling that increases the efficiency of texting outreach to voters on their cell phones while also contacting unregistered voters often left out of the political process.
- Launch a six-figure ad campaign expected to reach over eight million people on Facebook and Google search ads to help drive potential voters in target states to register to vote and request absentee ballots (examples below).
- Invest in relational organizing tools like OutVote to help Stand Up America's two million community members contact people in their networks to encourage them to register to vote.
- Help thousands of community members write over a hundred thousand letters to unlikely voters encouraging them to vote, in partnership with VoteForward.
- Host dozens of remote phone banks with activists across the country using ThruTalk to encourage people to vote.
- Recruit volunteers for progressive candidates and campaigns through Mobilize America.
"The American people cannot accept four more years of Trump's failed leadership, corruption, and attacks on the rule of law. Nothing less than our democracy is at stake this November, and that's why we must vote Donald Trump and his enablers out of office," said Sean Eldridge, Stand Up America Founder and President. "While Trump tries to undermine the election and suppress the vote in the middle of a pandemic, we'll refute his baseless lies about voter fraud and mobilize Americans to vote early, either in person or by mail. By reaching millions of voters in battleground states like Arizona, Florida, and Wisconsin, the Stand Up America community will help ensure that Trump is a one-term president."
The 2020 program will reach 25 times as many voters as Stand Up America's program did during the 2018 midterm elections, when the group texted 607,502 Americans to help get out the vote across the country and in key congressional districts. In 2018, Stand Up America also recruited 13,012 volunteers to help progressive candidates like Representatives Sean Casten (D-IL), Katie Hill (D-CA), Andy Kim (D-NJ), Harley Rouda (D-NJ), Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ), Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), and Jennifer Wexton (D-VA) get elected to Congress.