CEO Update: This fall is our last chance to test ahead of 2024
It's time to talk about November 2023! Six states have competitive statewide elections this fall and the youth vote could be the deciding factor in each of them. Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi all have gubernatorial elections, Virginia and New Jersey have state legislative elections, and Ohio has an abortion ballot measure. Each of these elections will have lasting impacts on the state, but so far are getting very little attention from national groups. Which is great, because low-salience elections are a sweet spot of ours.
There are 1.9 million college students in these six states, all of whom are reachable via campus media. This is basically a multi-channel marketing campaign, only instead of marketing products, we're marketing voting in the fall. It takes 10 touches to convert a lead to a sale; in this case, students are our leads, and cast ballots are our sales.
I've been running this program since 2018, and it's one of our best programs: it's scalable, it's affordable, and it's basically transactional. We put money in, and votes come out the other side. When we ran this program in 2019, which was the analogous election, we saw a 8 percentage point increase in turnout on our target campuses. That is bananas.
There are many reasons to run campus programs in 2023, but one of the best reasons is that this is our last chance to test ahead of 2024. We'll get results from a 2023 program next summer, and we'll use those to inform our 2024 program.
I wrote up a proper memo, but most people just ask for costs. It will cost about $1 per student to run a 4-week, 6-channel program. We can and should scale this up in certain states. If we can turn students out in 2023, it will be even easier to turn them out in 2024. So this is kind of a two for one campaign: pay now, get votes again next year.
Click here to read the full proposal.
One last thought: we started running campus programs in 2018. If someone had spent $2M on our exact campus program in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, the winner of the popular vote would have also won the election. Seriously, $2 million dollars. That's a rounding error in a presidential election.
If I could build a time machine and send this email during March 2016. I'm confident that the people on this VIP list would have found a way to raise $2 million more C3 dollars. And then we wouldn't spend our time trying to figure out who exact "unindicted co-conspirator 6" is. (I want it to be Ginny Thomas, but it's probably not.)
Fortunately I'm sending this update well before the 2024 election. We already know which states will be competitive then, we already know that these states have a lot of college students, and the VoteAmerica team is already very good at increasing turnout among college students.
This proposal is not confidential, so feel free to forward it to folks who think that we should hold elections, count the votes, declare a winner based on votes, and not try to overthrow the Federal Government when our preferred candidate does not win.
Talk soon,
Debra
