A Simple Way to Mobilize Voters This Week
Relational organizing is easy, highly effective, and better for your mental health than doom-scrolling
By now you’ve probably heard: The 2024 election will be as close as it will be consequential. Whether you care about climate, freedom, democracy, you name it—the race for the White House, Congress, and many state legislatures will have huge influence in the years to come.
In today’s newsletter, I want to highlight one of the most effective and overlooked ways that any individual can mobilize voters and help elect politicians who share their values: relational organizing.
A more effective way to get out the vote
Most political action is frustratingly ineffective.
One traditional and popular political tactic looks something like this: An individual who cares deeply about an issue joins a campaign, gets a list of phone numbers, and then sends a lot of texts to strangers. Most of those texts end up in a spam folder.
Relational organizing is different. Rather than texting strangers, an individual—like you or me—texts, calls, or has a casual conversation with a friend or someone else in their network.
As an example, you could send a message to a former co-worker to remind them to vote. That’s what my wife did this weekend when she sent this message:
Hi Ed! It’s been a while - I hope you’re well! I saw on Instagram you have a baby, Congrats! I’ve been volunteering a lot this election and am trying to make sure all my friends in swing states have a solid voting plan. It looks like you live in Arizona these days. Do you have a voting plan yet? Here’s a link to the best resources I’ve found.
This high-trust, high-quality approach is effective. A 2020 study by Columbia University and Outvote compared relational organizing to traditional voter outreach. It found, “A text message from a friend increased likelihood to vote by 8.3 percentage points.” The traditional outreach, by comparison, only increased voting likelihood by 0.29%.
Relational organizing is also something that anyone can do without any coordination. Anyone can do it from their living room, in their pajamas, at any hour of the day over the next week.
Join me in doing some relational organizing
This weekend, I’ll be hosting an event with Rollie Williams, the comedian and creator of Climate Town, to do some relational organizing. We’ll run through how to find people in your network that live in swing states, what messages are most effective, and answer any questions that come up.
If you want to attend the event, you can sign up by clicking the button below:
If you can’t make it, I’d strongly encourage you to find some time over the next few days to send some messages to your friends. It can make a huge difference. Here is a playbook from Climate Changemakers on how to do it.
Let’s go elect some climate leaders.
