When Steve Kagan stays up late, he sometimes gets up early in the morning and starts writing a letter. With blue ink, separate each letter into small capital letters so that the message is read well. It is almost the same as the other 7,600 that he has written for these elections and very similar to the more than 20,000 of the last six years.
“Dear Lydia, you will soon have the opportunity to vote in an important election, on November 5, 2024. Are you ready to vote? I vote because I want my daughter to live in a country with clean air and the freedom to make her own decisions about her health. These elections are very close. Our votes count,” the letter reads. The election date, printed, is underlined in yellow, and the letter also includes QR codes with more information about registering to vote, where the polling stations are and the candidates running, in this case in Nevada. There is no reference to Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, but Kagan is writing to likely Democratic voters. Support for the Democratic candidate can be inferred due to her reasons for voting, but she does not expressly say so. The personal message is almost the same, with small variations, for example, depending on gender: if you identify that you are writing to a woman, you usually make a reference to reproductive rights and, if you are a man, you mention the need for companies and The richest pay more taxes.
By hand, Kagan signs, carefully writes the address and puts a stamp on it. The sender is “Steven K.”, but his address is not Chicago, but rather Vote Forward, the organization that since 2018 has been coordinating volunteers to write handwritten letters that encourage participation.
Thousands of letters
Every election fall in Kagan’s office at her home in Hyde Park, also the Obamas’ neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, there are mountains of envelopes carefully arranged for mailing that take up much of the room. His daughter, Caroline, proudly shows off the display.
Kagan, a 70-year-old photographer born in New York and raised in Michigan, has lived in Chicago for decades, that is, in an overwhelmingly Democratic state that, according to the electoral system in the United States, has little influence on the final result of the elections. presidential because it is already sung for the Democrats. When Trump won the 2016 election, Kagan felt he “couldn’t” sit “back” and began volunteering in legislative campaigns in states where the results were closer, such as Georgia and Wisconsin. In 2018, Vote Forward discovered something that fit him better than making calls or traveling door-to-door. In the COVID pandemic, writing letters became a refuge.
“Sometimes I get up at three in the morning and start writing letters. It’s something I can do and feel productive, and it just fits me well. It’s quiet, I can do it while I have my early morning coffee,” Kagan tells me when I ask what she likes about the process. “There is also something special about its routine nature. I write practically the same letter over and over again. When I watch cable news and worry about how stupid some people are I can write the letters. “It’s kind of reassuring.”
The first day we speak, he is traveling to visit his daughter, but he has already written 15 or 20 letters for voters in Nevada, the state to which he has sent the most letters in these elections in addition to Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Arizona. Sometimes you have to take breaks and rest your hand from writing so much.
He also enjoys leading groups in Chicago to teach other volunteers how to write letters and get involved in civic campaigns. With a democratic group called Indivisible, he organizes writing sit-ins attended mainly by older people, but also by some twenty-somethings interested in discovering political activism. “Letters are an excellent entry into political activism. It is a starting point. There are people who feel more comfortable than calling on the phone or campaigning on the street. You have to be a little bolder to knock on a stranger’s door,” Kagan explains.
Sometimes it carries the texts with general information printed because few people have a printer anymore. He teaches how to find the tone of the messages and insists on details, such as being careful with the address, the importance of writing each letter correctly, where to place the stamp and the return address (few people are now used to writing or receiving letters handwritten). It is as important to check the address as well as the text of the letter: “Write a personal, non-partisan message” is one of the instructions on the paper that you share with your groups and that includes a sketch of where to put everything.
He also goes with his writing sessions to a nursing home and meets with a dozen who are interested in helping with the elections, but more limited in what they can do. “They come down with their walkers and wheelchairs, but they are fighters. They want to write because they can’t go door to door,” he says.
Target 10 million
This election cycle Vote Forward’s goal is to send 10 million letters. A spokeswoman, Leslie Martinez, says that last week they had already exceeded nine million, including more than 3,000 sent by American voters residing in Spain. Many of the mailings are done in groups and there is no ranking of who has sent the most letters among the more than 74,000 volunteers in this election, but when I tell Martinez Steve Kagan’s number, he responds: “Seven thousand letters is a incredible effort! The people who participate at this level are a crucial part of our movement.”
The organization was founded by Scott Forman, a Democratic activist and developer in Alabama who wanted to imitate the electric companies that include a mention on the bill of how much energy a neighborhood home consumes as a formula to encourage energy savings. Only the mention that other neighbors consumed less energy encouraged savings.
Forman tried an experiment by sending a thousand letters to voters who were registered but did not always participate in a US Senate election in December 2017. Democrat Doug Jones He then won by about 21,000 votes.. Forman then compared the group of 1,000 voters who had received their letters encouraging participation and a similar group of 6,000 who had not received the letters. With publicly available information that allows you to know who has voted and who has not, he saw that participation among letter recipients was three points higher. He couldn’t know if those voters had supported the Democratic candidate, but from demographics and past records he deduced that most would have done so.
Sending letters with a personal and non-partisan tone is a campaign tool with at least a century of history that has been perfected. The first more organized experiment was in 1924 in Chicago, when researcher Harold Gosnell began sending postcards encouraging voters to register with versions in English, Czech, Polish and Italian, and comparing the group of reluctant voters to whom he sent these letters. with others to whom one. It also measured the effect of sending or not sending somewhat aggressive vignettes where abstainers were described as “lazy” or “honest, but apathetic who become friends of the corrupt.”
In 2005, a consultant in Michigan tried sending the voter’s participation history and that of his neighbors with the idea of shaming those who voted less, but the technique was so aggressive that few campaigns wanted to associate with it. In 2010, Democratic consultant Harold Malchow tried it in Colorado with more benevolent letters thanking people for voting in the past, and once again noticed the effect in a Senate race that his Democratic candidate unexpectedly won. .
When fundraising and activism on the Internet began to take off, Malchow discovered that email can be “the most personal” of the tools even if it is “less glamorous” and with his experiments he achieved “the two most radical innovations in political communication”: measure the level of cause-effect and refine personalized campaigns for individual voters, according to journalist Sasha Issenberg in his book The Victory Labwhich documented the campaign techniques of Barack Obama and others in 2012.
Mobilize yours
Vote Forward campaigns are aimed primarily at young people and people from minority groups, who vote less or who are not even registered to exercise their right. Part of their campaigns are more specific to mobilize Democratic voters or because of their past registration or the neighborhood where they live and they organize them with activist groups such as Swing Left and Indivisible. The texts do not explicitly support a candidate, but rather policies that can be easily identified with Democrats.
“In my opinion, it all comes down to participation. This idea that there are undecided voters is probably true, but I think it’s a very small percentage,” Kagan explains. “I think people have made a decision and it’s just a matter of getting them to actually go out and vote. And Democrats often need a little nudge to remind them that this is important.”
Kagan has been pushing for this Monday’s deadline, the deadline to send letters so that they arrive with margin before the elections. This Sunday he shows me in a cafe in his Chicago neighborhood his latest information updated and registered on the Vote Forward website with the letters he has written and sent: 7,653. When we say goodbye, he goes home. “I have to write some more letters,” he comments.
This Monday he travels to Las Vegas to work as a volunteer in the most traditional tasks such as going door to door or making phone calls. But the most important thing for him he has already done: he has written as many letters as he could.
And how do you see the elections? “I’m an optimist,” he says. “I think things are going to go well.”
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