Thank you First U Letter writers for the 13,000+ letters you wrote! We put our UU values into practice, urging voters to exercise their right to vote and many of you wrote specifically to urge people to vote for abortion rights. While the Right to Abortion Proposition in Arizona did pass handily (yay!) we still don’t know what impact our letter-writing had on getting out the vote in Arizona and in Georgia. To address that question, we share an update from Vote Forward, the organization with which UU the Vote and First Unitarian partnered to write our non-partisan Get Out the Vote letters. They write:  

“We’ve heard from many letter writers after 2024’s The Big Send asking about the impact of our collective work. It is understandable that many of us are–in this moment–searching to understand what happened in the 2024 election cycle. Letter writers put in so much time, money and effort, and we’re so grateful for the real investment in our work….

To truly evaluate Vote Forward’s impact, we need to compare turnout among voters  targeted to turnout among similar voters who we didn’t target. This is exactly what we do when we set up an experiment, or RCT (randomized controlled trial), and all of our 2024 campaigns were structured as RCTs. That means that when the turnout data comes back, we will be able to analyze it and rigorously answer questions about Vote Forward’s impact, just as we did in 2020 and in many other experiments over the past six years.

So what do we know now? 

• To date, total 2024 turnout sits at 155.8 million ballots cast — roughly 4 million fewer than the 159.7 million ballots cast in 2020. That overall drop masks important differences by state; in several states targeted by Vote Forward and other voter mobilization groups, turnout actually surpassed 2020 levels.
• However, the aggregate information we have now cannot tell us whether our efforts at Vote Forward, or the efforts of any other organization, were successful.
• It’s possible that our work did mobilize voters, even if overall turnout ends up being lower than in 2020. For example, it’s possible that we successfully boosted turnout in the states and districts that we targeted, while turnout dropped off in places we didn’t focus.
• Aggregate information also cannot tell us anything about our impact among specific voter groups. For example, youth voter turnout in 2024 appeared to be lower overall than in 2020, on average, but that does not imply that Vote Forward’s efforts to raise turnout among younger voters were ineffective.

Over the next few months, our team will:

1. Obtain individual-level turnout data, which originates with Secretaries of State
2. Clean and process the data
3. Statistically analyze the turnout data

All of this takes time. We expect that the first sets of data will be available as early as December of this year, but the last sets won’t arrive until March. This puts us on track to learn and share our work’s impact in late spring to early summer of 2025.

Since all these 2024 campaigns were set up as RCTs, we can report on our community’s specific impact, and importantly – learn from what we find.

Until then, don’t forget to rest and celebrate the work we all did in 2024.We think this is worth recognizing and celebrating. STAY TUNED FOR UPDATES!