Re: Voter turnout in New York

friend, last month I sent you the email below about our Get Out the Vote (GOTV) efforts in 2018 and how we need to prepare for 2020 now in order to win. [THIS month we are getting ready to sign contracts for the platforms we will use to sign up volunteers for 2020 and connect them to local campaigns. We are estimating the cost will be over $50,000. Can you give $5 to help our efforts to kick Trump out of office by turning out voters in record-breaking numbers?]( We need to do everything we can to turn out voters next year not just because Trump is a danger to the human species--which he is--but because Republicans are impeding voting rights every chance they get in as many states as possible: - This coming Tuesday, voters in North Carolina’s 9th congressional district will head back to the polls for a do-over election because Republicans committed election fraud in this district during the 2018 midterm election. But that's not all that these voters have faced: North Carolina has been plagued by gerrymandering on both the state and congressional level. And now, even after being impacted by Hurricane Dorain, local election officials are refusing to expand early voting. - In Georgia, Stacey Abrams was robbed of being Governor because at-the-time secretary of state and now-governor, Brain Kemp engaged in extreme voter suppression, intimidation and voter misinformation. Abrams lost the race by the narrowest margin in Georgia history. - Weeks before the 2018 midterm election, the Supreme Court delivered a major blow to Native American voters in North Dakota when they upheld the implementation of Republican-backed ID law that stated that your address on your ID had to match your physical address. Many Native Americans living on reservations used a P.O. Box since the postal service doesn't deliver to the reservation. The Daily Kos community took quick action to raise close to $550,000 to fund a rapid-response campaign to educate and issue new IDs on reservations, and also run a robust GOTV campaign. The result more than doubled voter turnout in some affected areas. We run robust campaigns to counter Republican voter suppression everywhere it happens, from signing up tens of thousands of volunteers to canvass, knock on doors and make phone calls, to sending over a million handwritten letters to irregular voters in swing districts, to delivering hundreds of thousands of dollars to help Native Americans and other targeted communities get IDs so they can vote. Pulling all this off costs real money: staff, platforms, advertising, tech, communications and more. We will fight Republican voter suppression everywhere we can, but since we are funded by small donations, we can only go as far as you will take us. [Kicking Trump out of office will be our largest GOTV effort ever, and we are starting to put the pieces in place now. Can you support our plan to defeat Trump with record breaking voter turnout by giving $5 now?]( Keep fighting, and thanks for all you do, Chris Bowers Executive Campaign Director, Daily Kos --------------------------------------------------------------- Hi, friend, my name is Chris Bowers. Every two years, I manage our Get Out the Vote (GOTV) program here at Daily Kos to try and maximize Democratic turnout in midterm and presidential elections. I’d like to share some numbers with you: - 37,583. That’s the number of people who Daily Kos signed up to volunteer for at least one Get Out the Vote activity in 2018. (There were 65,000 GOTV activity or event signups in total.) - 3.5. Based on our experience, that’s the average number of pledges to vote for Democrats that a single volunteer can achieve. - 79,646. In 2016, that’s the total number of votes that Hillary Clinton lost by in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. If she had won all three states, she would have won the Electoral College. By my math, that means that in 2018, at Daily Kos we actually signed up enough volunteers to get 131,541 people to vote for Democrats--more than enough to swing the 79,646 votes needed to win those three crucial swing states. That’s a good start, and a testament to just how active and effective the Daily Kos grassroots community is. However, keep in mind that was the number of volunteers we signed up nationwide, as we worked to turn out voters in every state and territory. In 2020, we have to both continue pushing our national turnout effort, while also turning out that same number of voters just in those crucial swing states that will determine the outcome of the 2020 election. [We have big plans for 2020, and that’s why we set big goals NOW in 2019. We are still $125,000 away from our August 2019 fundraising goal. Can you chip in $5 to help us get to where we need to be to kick Trump and GOP cronies out of office next year?]( Getting out the vote isn’t just a lot of work--it’s also expensive. Here are just some of the things we need money for in order to make our GOTV program work: - Platforms: Over the last two years, a couple of new GOTV platforms have emerged that make it easier for grassroots volunteers to help convince irregular voters to cast their ballots for Democrats: [Mobilize America]( and [Vote Forward](. These platforms are better than anything which came before them--they are a crucial reason why our 2018 GOTV efforts were our best ever--but they also are not free. We need to make sure that the people operating them continue to do so, and that means making sure that they are paid fairly for their time and efforts. - Communication: Every time an election is near, at Daily Kos our communication needs skyrocket. Traffic to our website surges, so we have to pay for more servers and tech support. Also, in order to sign up GOTV volunteers and raise money for progressive Demoratic candidates in crucial races, we send far more email and text alerts than normal, both of which cost us considerable amounts of money. - Advertising. If we are going to go big in turning out the Demoratic vote in 2020, then we have to run online ads to sign up as many GOTV volunteers as we can. The time to start saving up to run these ads is now--we are already running experiments so that the money we spend on these ads will be as effective as possible. - Opportunity Cost. During the final weeks of an election, we typically do not do much direct fundraising for ourselves. This is because we are throwing everything we have at turning out voters and raising money for Democratic candidates in crucial races. It’s the right thing to do--but it does cost us real money. During the height of election season, we do raise some money to partially offset these costs. However, we know from past experience that we never raise enough. That’s one of the reasons why we have to set big monthly goals before election season even begins, so that we know when the autumn of 2020 arrives we can run the most effective get out the vote program possible. [We need to meet our 2019 goals in order to achieve our 2020 goal of record-breaking voter turnout that kicks Trump to the curb. We are $125,000 away from our August goal. Can you chip in $5 to help us meet it?]( Keep fighting, and thanks for all you do, Chris Bowers Executive Campaign Director, Daily Kos If you wish to donate by mail instead, please send a check to Daily Kos, PO Box 70036, Oakland, CA, 94612. Contributions to Daily Kos are not tax deductible. Sent via [ActionNetwork.org](. To update your email address, change your name or address, or to stop receiving emails from Daily Kos, please [click here](.