What we can do to help get out the vote and defeat Trump

I received this in the mail. I plan to take part in this campaign to get out the vote and defeat Trump and invite you to do likewise. If you need some motivation, check out this documentary. It shows how Kemp stole the election from Stacy Abrams with voter suppression, and how this has become the Republican strategy for winning despite being a minority party. 

https://www.bravenewfilms.org/suppressed

 Hi.  Here’s a question to consider:

      Do you ever feel frustrated that Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell keep doing harmful things and you feel unable to stop them and their enablers?

      Well, there’s some potentially good news!   There’s a guy named Scott Forman, a Democrat who went to Harvard and then he worked for a software company, where he learned how to measure the impact of hand-written personalized letters in hand-written personalized envelopes to motivate difficult-to-motivate people on important issues.   He first utilized this letter-writing method with a power company energy-saving campaign that used personalized letters to help consumers be motivated not to waste power.    They found the personalized letters to individual customers caused far more behavior change than other methods.   

     Then Forman tried out the personalized letter method in the Alabama Senate race of 2017 where he scientifically measured and discovered that an additional 3.9% of the “Registered Democrats Who Rarely Vote” did in fact vote in 2017 because they received a personal letter reminding them to vote.

     Then Forman tested out the personal letter method again in swing districts in the 2018 Congressional elections and found it once again significantly boosted the actual number of “Registered Democrats Who Sometimes Don’t Vote” who in fact did remember to vote in 2018 in those House districts, many of which flipped from red to blue as a result of that mid-term election of 2018.  

    Forman reasoned that most voters today hate unsolicited phone calls and they don’t want some stranger coming to the door (especially during the Covid-19 this year).   Yes, people are on their phones and Facebook a lot where they get bombarded by election year calls that they tend to ignore, but when a personalized sensible letter with a hand-written envelope arrives in the US mail, it more likely gets opened, it gets read thoroughly, and it leads to the person being more likely to vote.   (See the article in The Atlantic, “A Throwback Way to Win a Pandemic Election” from April 30, 2020 for a description of the letter-writing method and its effectiveness).    

     Now here’s the potential good news:   Scott Forman has put together a non-profit called Vote Forward or VoteFwd.org where they are ready to have us volunteers write personalized letters to “Registered Democrats Who Rarely Vote” or “Registered Democrats Who Sometimes Vote” in numerous battleground states, including Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Texas, and others.   

     Just getting an extra 2% or 4% of these voters in battleground states to vote for a Democrat for President and Senate would restore sanity and decency to our nation.   

     VoteFwd.org is ready with a pile of targeted mailing addresses for 10,000 or 100,000 volunteers to write 50 or 500 letters each that will reach 10 million or more Democratic voters in crucial swing states for November 2020.  They’re calling it “The Big Send” and they’ve partnered with Swing Left, Indivisible, Daily Kos, the Women’s March, and the League of Conservation Voters to urge volunteers to do this old-school, newly-relevant way of Getting Out the Vote.    

      All you need to do to be part of making a huge difference in 2020 is to sign up at VoteFwd.org with your email and create a password.  They will ask you a couple of security questions to make sure you aren’t a robot or a Putin.   Then they let you download the half-typed, half-handwritten letter and the voter mailing addresses that you personally send (with Vote Forward’s p.o. box as the return address from that particular state on the envelope) along with your hand-written envelopes and stamp.  I recommend using colorful paper, a colorful envelope,  or a fun color of ink on the envelope,  along with a stamp that is engaging (Mr. Rogers, Marvin Gaye, “Honoring First Responders,” Gwen Ifill of PBS, Cesar Chavez, National Parks, or gorgeous rivers that are endangered by the current administration).   

       You can start today and save your stamped, addressed envelopes in a box in your home until you mail them during the final week of October to the “Democrats Who Sometimes Don’t Vote” in these key battleground states.   VoteFwd.org has already gotten 1.25 million of these letters written and saved up (“stockpiled like face masks”) by volunteers like you and me.   That means they are already 1/8 the way toward their initial goal of reaching 10 million swing voters during October.