Our Impact
Beyond Field
Our field programs have increased voter turnout by up to 10.4%.
We’re also committed to updating the Democratic playbook and testing new ways to reach more voters that traditional canvassing can’t reach. That includes recruiting and training new organizers, funding grassroots voter contact groups, and empowering volunteers to write millions of postcards to swing state voters.
Field Programs
- Distributed Organizing
- Relational Organizing
Other Programs
- Campaign Fellows
- Postcards & Turnout Mail
Our Impact in 2022
Our work in 2022 contributed to expanding the Democratic Senate majority and historic victories in state legislatures. We brought on on thousands of team members engaged in direct voter contact with these expanded programs:
- Distributed Organizing
We recruited 981 paid Field Representatives to have one-on-one conversations with inconsistent Democratic voters in their own rural and exurban communities, providing these organizers with resources in canvassing best practices and the tools they need to rally voters. We sent Field Representatives turfs, or lists of households in their area with infrequent Democratic voters, as they needed them, and provided support for any issues they encountered as they canvassed.
In total, our Field Representatives knocked 176,000 doors in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
How and why we compete everywhere
- Community Mobilizers
Relational organizing relies on voters called Community Mobilizers to act as trusted get-out-the-vote messengers in their own networks — because while you might not answer a stranger’s knock on your door or pick up a call from an unknown number, a message from a friend can cut through that noise.
Modeled on a first-of-its-kind program by the 2020 Ossoff for Senate campaign, and building on our own 2021 pilot in Virginia, we recruited 2,832 Community Mobilizers who had 210,687 conversations with infrequent voters in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
- Campaign Fellows
Adding just one staff member can make all the difference in a campaign’s capacity for direct voter contact. In the 2021-22 election cycle, we funded 1,040 Campaign Fellows Campaign Fellows who worked directly on federal campaigns across the country and state legislative campaigns in Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia.
- Postcards to Swing States
In 2021-22, our volunteers — in all 50 states, D.C. and Puerto Rico — sent 20.7 million handwritten postcards to voters in seven key Senate states and 41 frontline House districts. They also delivered more than 135,000 Neighborhood Letters.
- Turnout Grants
We invested $602,690 in incredible organizations focused on engaging young, rural and BIPOC voters in local communities through our first Turnout Grants program. These nine grassroots organizations worked in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
Proven programs
Our mission is to rally Democrats to vote — but that’s about more than just winning each election.
All our work at Progressive Turnout Project is to build power for the long term. We’re here to share resources, implement strategy and offer our expertise for the advancement of Democrats (and democracy itself), cycle after cycle.
We focus on:
- Talent: Hiring, training, and fairly paying organizers who can run voter contact programs and help voters fight against suppression.
- Data: Giving Democrats an edge in field with data, rigorously collected in the field and interpreted by experts.
- Training: Not letting that knowledge evaporate after Election Day, sharing best practices with campaigns, and make the case for direct voter contact.
- Innovation: Trying new tactics and messages to keep us on the frontier of field organizing, measuring what works, and making our programs as effective as possible per grassroots dollar.
