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 capitals so that the message is clearly read. That’s almost the same as the other 7,600 he wrote for this election and very similar to the more than 20,000 over the past 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’m voting because I want my daughter to live in a country where the air is clean and she is free to make her own decisions about her health. These elections are very close. Our votes count,” the letter reads. The date of the election, printed, is highlighted in yellow, and the letter also includes QR codes with more information on registering to vote, where the polling stations are located 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 from the reasons she voted, but she does not expressly say so. The personal message is almost the same, with small variations, for example by gender: if you identify that you are writing to a woman, you are usually referring to reproductive rights and, if you are a man, you mention the need for businesses 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 coordinated volunteers to write handwritten letters encouraging participation.
Thousands of letters
With every election that falls, in Kagan’s office at her home in Hyde Park, also the Obamas’ south Chicago neighborhood, mountains of envelopes carefully arranged for mailing 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 to say in a majority Democratic state which, according to the American electoral system, has little influence on the ballot. final result of the presidential elections because it is already sung for the Democrats. When Trump won the 2016 election, Kagan felt he “couldn’t” stand idly by 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 suited it better than making calls or going door to door. During the COVID pandemic, writing letters has become 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 works well for me. It’s quiet, I can do it while I have my early morning coffee,” Kagan tells me when I ask her 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 letters. “It’s quite reassuring.”
The first day we speak, he’s traveling to visit his daughter, but he’s already written 15 or 20 letters to voters in Nevada, the state he sent the most letters to in this election, in plus Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Arizona. Sometimes you need to take breaks and rest your hand after writing too 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 around 20 young people interested in learning about political activism. “Letters are a great entry into political activism. It’s a starting point. There are people who feel more comfortable than calling on the phone or campaigning in the streets. You have to be a little bolder to knock on a stranger’s door,” says Kagan.
Sometimes it prints texts containing general information because few people still have a printer. It teaches how to find the tone of messages and emphasizes details, such as care in addressing, the importance of writing each letter correctly, where to place the postmark and the return address (few people have this anymore). habit of writing or receiving handwritten letters). It is equally 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 which includes a sketch of where to put All.
He also goes with his writing sessions to a retirement home and meets with a dozen people interested in contributing to the elections, but more limited in what they can do. “They come down with their walkers and their wheelchairs, but they are fighters. They want to write because they can’t go door to door,” he says.
Target 10 million
Vote Forward’s goal this election cycle is to send 10 million letters. A spokesperson, Leslie Martinez, says that last week they had already exceeded nine million, including more than 3,000 sent by American voters living in Spain. Many mailings are done in groups and there is no ranking of those who sent the most letters among the more than 74,000 volunteers during this election, but when I give Martinez Steve Kagan’s number, he responds : “Seven thousand letters is an 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 emulate electric companies that list the amount of energy a neighborhood home uses on the bill as a formula for encouraging energy conservation. . Only the mention that the other neighbors consumed less energy encouraged savings.
Forman tried an experiment by sending a thousand letters to registered voters who had not always participated in the US Senate elections in December 2017. Democrat Doug Jones He then won by around 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 those letters. With publicly available information that tracks who voted and who didn’t, he found that turnout among letter recipients was three points higher. He couldn’t know whether those voters had supported the Democratic candidate, but based on demographics and track records, he inferred that most would have.
Sending letters with a personal, nonpartisan tone is a campaign tool with at least a century of history that has been perfected. The first more organized experiment took place 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 and others had sent these letters. who one. She also measured the effect of sending somewhat aggressive vignettes in which abstainers were described as “lazy” or “honest, but apathetic and becoming friends with the corrupt.”
In 2005, a Michigan consultant tried to send out the voter’s turnout history and that of their neighbors in an attempt to shame 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 kind letters thanking people for voting in the past, and once again noticed the effect in a Senate race than his Democratic candidate unexpectedly won.
When Internet fundraising and activism began to take off, Malchow discovered that email can be “the most personal” of tools even though it is “less glamorous” and with his experiments he realized “the two of the most radical innovations in political communication.” : measuring the level of cause and effect and refining personalized campaigns for individual voters, according to journalist Sasha Issenberg in his book The victory laboratorywhich documented the campaign techniques of Barack Obama and others in 2012.
Mobilize yours
Vote Forward campaigns are mainly aimed at young people and people from minority groups, who vote less or who are not even registered to exercise their right. Some of their campaigns are more specific to mobilize Democratic voters or because of their prior 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 are easily identifiable 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 says. “I think people have made a decision and it’s just a matter of getting them to vote. And Democrats often need a little nudge to remind them that it’s important.”
Kagan insisted on Monday as the deadline to send the letters so they arrive with margin before the election. This Sunday, he shows me in a cafe in his neighborhood in Chicago his latest information updated and recorded on the Vote Forward site with the letters he wrote and sent: 7,653. When we say goodbye, he goes home at his home. “I have to write a few more letters,” he comments.
This Monday, he goes to Las Vegas to work as a volunteer in the most traditional tasks like going door to door or making phone calls. But most importantly for him, he has already done it: he has written as many letters as he could.
And how do you see the elections? “I’m optimistic,” he says. “I think things will go well.”
