Turn Out for What
Mobilizing Voters in Pennsylvania and the Seven Battleground States
George Caleb Bingham, The County Election, 1852. Image.
Greetings, traveler!
Welcome to Quests, where we turn ideas into action.
This week, we’re heading back to the Town Square. Election Day is almost here, and your mission to boost voter turnout is about to begin.
As we stroll into the crowded village green, do your best to ignore the loudest voices.
The drunk conspiracists ranting about weather modification and half-eaten dogs. The faux-intellectuals chanting half-baked slogans.
We’re concerned with the silent majority: the 90%+ of people who will cast their votes without broadcasting their intentions, the voters who will truly swing the 2024 presidential election.
First, we’ll explore what research actually says about voter turnout, touching on the work of Alan Gerber, Donald Green, and Etian Hirsh.
Why don’t more people vote? How do we mobilize them to vote?
The answers might prove uncomfortable. Negative emotions—cynicism, anger, shame, apathy—influence voters and non-voters much more than the cheerful messaging of “Do Your Part!” voter outreach typically suggests. Many forms of voter mobilization—including e-mails, mailers, and robocalls— are largely ineffective. “Social-pressure strategies,” i.e., someone threatening to check public records and tell your neighbors you didn’t vote, perform wonderfully, treacherously well.
Then we’ll zero in on Pennsylvania, where nine million voters might just decide the election. Where Elon Musk has effectively relocated and is, in essence, paying people to register to vote. Where the 2024 candidates have spent more than a billion dollars, and where the Republicans, in particular, have deployed unusual tactics, going after “low propensity voters” and tapping into what John Della Volpe, writing in the New York Times, dubbed Trump’s “bro whispering” ability.
No state is more important than Pennsylvania. Tinker with any Election Map to see why: without it, the path to 270 electoral votes becomes a maze of improbable outcomes and narrow margins.
It’s the linchpin of the seven battleground states.
So what can YOU, dear adventurer and likely non-Pennsylvanian, do about it? More than you might think. Take on the Quest below, and fulfill your civic destiny.
It’s time to rally the townspeople—let’s get into it.
Who Doesn’t Vote and Why
Generally speaking, younger, poorer, less educated Americans vote at far lower rates than older, wealthier, college educated voters.
In the 2020 U.S. election, approximately 51.4% of voters aged 18-29 participated, compared to 76% of those aged 65 and older.
For those with an income of $30,000-$39,999, the turnout was 63.6%. For those with an income of $100,000-$149,999, the turnout was 81.0%
Voters with less than a bachelor's degree had a turnout rate of 60%. Voters with a bachelor's degree or higher had a turnout rate of 80%.
Access is a significant barrier. Voter suppression is a real, historical problem. Voter fraud? Not so much. And, of course, election day should be a national holiday: Americans overwhelmingly support this proposal.
But statistics and surveys don’t tell the whole story. Respondents regularly lie about having voted, whom they voted for, even why they voted.
To understand voter turnout, we need to remember that voting is fundamentally a social act. Our increasingly siloed social groups—blue collar workers in Michigan, college students in Ohio, retirees in Florida, and so on—simply place different levels of social importance on voting.
The so-called “low information voters” —has there ever been a more obvious euphemism for stupid people?— are decried as mis/under/ill informed, politically disengaged, and susceptible to conspiracy theories. An alternative reading is that they’re alienated, stuck working bullshit jobs, and struggling to find meaning in a post-religious society in which they’re bowling alone and amusing themselves to death. Democrats, in particular, ignore these voters—the infamous “basket of deplorables”— at their peril.
People at the margins, no matter their race, education level, or political cast, should be engaged (no, bearhugged) and made included—not patronized or dismissed as fools, but treated like adults with lived-problems who might address them, in part, at their local polling center.
Then, if they still won’t vote, some good old-fashioned peer-pressuring might do the trick.
Alan Gerber and Donald Green, authors of Get Out the Vote, found in a series of studies that social pressure is one of the most effective tools for mobilizing voters. Voters who were told their voting record would be shared with their neighbors were significantly more likely to vote than those who received standard “get out the vote” messages. Put simply, people vote when those around them signal that it matters—when friends, family, and community members reinforce that their participation is meaningful.
Staying home on Election Day isn’t a big deal if your friends don’t scold you for it. The inverse is also true: voting is contagious within peer groups.
“The strongest effects observed to date come when authentic personal appeals to vote are conveyed by someone the voter knows—a friend, family member, co-worker, neighbor. Door-to-door canvassing by enthusiastic volunteers is another effective mobilization tactic; chatty, unhurried phone calls seem to work well, too. Automatically dialed, prerecorded GOTV phone calls, by contrast, are utterly impersonal and rarely get people to vote. Here is the trade-off confronting those who manage campaigns: the more personal the interaction, the harder it is to reproduce on a large scale.”
—from Get Out The Vote, p. 6
In Politics is for Power, Eitan Hirsh describes the rise of “political hobbyism,” in which people engage with politics in a passive, performative fashion. In the '80s, '90s, and 2000s, cable news fueled this trend, turning politics into a spectacle. Then, in the 2010s and 2020s, social media balkanized us into our individualized, ad-supported slices of reality.
Hirsh draws a contrast between Obama’s 2008 campaign and Clinton’s 2016 run:
“Why did so many students volunteer for the Obama campaign but not the Clinton campaign? With Obama, the students had a candidate who was exciting, young, dynamic, especially compared to his competitor Mitt Romney. With Clinton, Democrats believed they had a candidate who stood between Donald Trump and the White House, but not someone as fun to support as Obama. And so they didn’t. If voting is about supporting someone you think is fun, then 2016 just wasn’t fun for Democrats. It was only fun for Republicans.”
—from Politics is for Power, p. 48
The lesson here is clear: campaigns must generate excitement. They must convince people that voting matters and that their peers think it matters.
To sum up, our reasons for voting are tied more closely to our sense of social standing— our desire to be a part of the cool kids’ group, and to signal so to others—than we like to admit. Chalk it up to human nature.
It’s like the Nathan for You skit where Nathan hires a Santa Claus to tell kids they need to buy a particular toy, or else all their friends will call them babies.
You don’t want to be a baby, do you?
I didn’t think so—go vote.
Why You Should Obsess Over Pennsylvania and the Battleground States
Unfortunately, because of the cruel construction that is the Electoral College, there’s a good chance that your vote doesn’t matt—.
Okay, let’s not say it doesn’t matter. But it certainly matters much less than the votes of Georgians, North Carolinians, Nevadans, Arizonans, Michiganders (?), Wisconsinites (??), and Pennsylvanians.
If you live in one of the forty-three non-battleground states, you’re drowning in election noise. And yet, your vote, at least in the presidential race, means little to the eventual outcome. You have no mouth, and you must scream.
So ditch the yard sign—(beyond the local level, they don’t do much)—and let’s think critically about Pennsylvania as a case study for the seven battleground states, and how non-swing-state voters might intervene.
What are the campaigns doing?
Well, all the usual stuff: TV ads, robocalls, high-profile rallies. They’re saturating the airwaves and firing up the base. But increasingly, campaigns are getting creative. They’re investing heavily in targeted digital ads that zero in on specific voters’ concerns—like fracking for the suburbs outside Pittsburgh or gun rights in the Poconos. They’re also leaning on aggressive, data-driven canvassing, trying to track every possible vote down to the last apartment complex.
A week ago, The New York Times published a fantastic interactive piece reflecting this fact: “Forget Swing States. It’s These 21 Microcommunities That Could Decide the Election.” The campaigns are zeroing in on towns and neighborhoods where just a few thousand votes could flip the whole state. Considering the result of the election will impact Americans in all fifty states, we should follow the campaigns’ lead and direct our mental energy to the places that will decide it.
In its door-knocking session, South Philly Voter Project targeted Democratic, unaffiliated, and third-party voters, who data showed did not consistently cast ballots. The idea, according to coordinator Tamesh Kemraj, is to bolster support as much as popular in dense areas like South Philly using deep canvassing — time-intensive conversations aimed at convincing people to vote.
“We do effective voter outreach by having our neighbors knocking on their neighbors’ doors,” said Kemraj, who is also a city committee person and works on Fiedler’s campaigns. “It’s not someone they haven’t seen before, but someone next door who’s saying, ‘Hey, I’m a neighbor knocking on your door, letting you know why this is important to us.’”
—from Votebeat Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania is especially interesting because of its large population, its proximity to other states—New York, New Jersey, Ohio, West Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware—and its concentration of universities. If you took a random sample of Americans, there’s a better chance they know someone in Pennsylvania than in Nevada, Georgia, or Arizona.
Pennsylvania, the Keystone State. Image
I’d argue it’s a more fluid state than the other battlegrounds, more open to interstate cross-pollination. And thanks to the way the electoral map has shaped up, a disproportionate amount of electoral importance has been distilled there. Hence, the recent antics of Elon Musk.
No doubt, Pennsylvanians are extremely tired of the attention—of people trying to sway, suppress, or buy their vote. But that’s the absurdity of the system. This is the Electoral College game.
If you want to affect the presidential election, don’t waste energy in your own backyard. Focus on the battlegrounds where it truly matters.
So, now that we’ve gathered in one (strangely important) corner of the village green, let’s talk to as many townsfolk as possible.
Here’s Quest 3:
Mobilize Pennsylvania voters.
(Note: we’ll give *Quest Completed* credit for outreach in any of the seven battleground states, but in the spirit of communal focus, let’s zero in on Pennsylvania.)
Key Details
Talk to Pennsylvanians (or other battleground voters)
Sympathize with the absurdity of their predicament.
Ask if they’re voting, but don’t necessarily tell them whom to vote for. Conversations are better than lectures.
If they say they aren’t voting, give them a friendly-but-firm nudge. Social pressure is surprisingly effective. Just remind them their vote matters more than yours.
Option 1: Relational Organizing / Social Media
This is the low-hanging fruit. Text your friend from college, DM your cousin who moved to Philly, make a social post and tag your favorite Pennsylvanian.
Yes, this might feel annoying (let’s be honest, it is annoying), but you wanted to do something, right?
Most of us don’t love talking politics with friends and family. I get it; I feel the same way.
There’s certainly a nuance to it. Tap your networks in a way that feels honest and not contrived.
If you absolutely can’t stand talking politics with someone you know, proceed to Option 2.
Option 2: Text Banking / Phone Banking
Ah, the veil of anonymity. These methods are less effective than personal outreach, more time-consuming, but they do work. The campaigns have become incredibly skilled at targeting potential voters, drilling down into data to reach specific demographics. It’s a numbers game: contact a hundred people, and maybe you engage with three. I promise you it’s more impactful than debating your neighbor in Texas or California.
Links to volunteer opportunities:
Kamala Harris Supporters
Mobilize PA voters (Oct 24 - Nov 2)
Election Day efforts (Nov 2 - Election Day)
General PA voter outreachDonald Trump Supporters
Volunteer with Trump campaign
Volunteer with the Pennsylvania GOP
Option 3: Outside-the-Box, Off-Platform Messaging
The typical platforms are flooded with election content, so this is where you get creative. Reach voters in unusual places. Good-humored guilt-tripping can go a long way.
Look to unconventional spaces like:
Discord servers (there has to be an efficient way to tap gamers in the battlegrounds; this is my personal quest-line…I’ll post progress over at the Quests community)
Subreddits (r/eagles, you need to flyyy to the polls…Vote Birds!...okay, I’ll see myself out)
Comment threads on Spotify, YouTube, podcasts, or forums
These spaces are less saturated with typical campaign ads, and you might just catch someone who’s tuning out the usual channels but still needs a nudge to vote.
Please comment here on Substack with thoughts, counterthoughts, suggestions, and disagreements.
To tumble further down the rabbit hole, head over to the Quests Community.
Upon completion:
It’s dangerous to go alone—find a quest partner, and party up.
Recommended Reading:
Get Out the Vote by Alan Garber and Donald Green
Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein
NEXT ON QUESTS
We’re talking walking. 🚶
The history, benefits, and lost art of that thing you probably don’t do enough of on a daily basis.
It’ll be a nice reprieve, just one week out from the election, and a reminder to embrace the simplest of challenges in our busy daily lives.
In the meantime, quest on.