All photos by Stacey Sprenz – staceysprenzphoto.com
FLIP NC’s 2020 launch party on Sunday – When We Knock, We Win – proved once again that there’s a growing coalition of North Carolinians who are ready to canvass door to door to break the GOP majority in the NC General Assembly, oust Sen. Thom Tillis, re-elect Gov. Cooper, and flip our state blue in the presidential election.
At the event, keynote speaker Shaniqua McClendon – political director for Crooked Media – recounted her experiences in the Obama White House and on Capitol Hill working for Sen. Kay Hagan and Rep. Alma Adams before discussing her company’s plans to convert more podcast listeners into activists during this pivotal election year. She also shared that Vote Save America, relaunching later this month, has selected North Carolina as one of the crucial battleground states it will focus on in 2020!
Our co-founders – Amy Cox and Briana Brough – laid out FLIP NC’s 2020 plans and strategy. An overview:
OUR GOALS: State legislative races will be far down the ballot, but they’re at the top of FLIP NC’s list of what we want to accomplish. If Democrats win, they’ve pledged to pass independent redistricting legislation that would ensure that voters get to pick their representatives instead of politicians picking their voters. We must flip six seats in the NC House or five seats in the NC Senate AND protect the seats we won in 2018. Turnout for down-ballot races can help drive up-ballot voting, but it doesn’t always work the other way (especially since Republicans eliminated straight-party voting), so we must work hard to inform voters about their representatives in Raleigh. In 2016, the first presidential election since the elimination of straight-party voting, a significant number of voters skipped down-ballot races. Across the 60 NC House races that were contested that year, an average of nearly 2,000 voters in each district cast a ballot without voting in the NC House race. To put that into context, in 2018, 18 NC House races were decided by less than 2,000 votes. Name recognition seems to be a significant factor, so it’s critical that we talk to voters about these candidates early and often.
BETTER MAPS: We have new maps for both chambers of the General Assembly, and while they’re not fair, they’re a clear improvement over the maps that have been in place for most of the decade. We also have a new congressional map, giving us a couple of easy pick-ups for Democrats and making a couple of Republican-leaning districts more competitive. There are competitive districts in every region of the state that need our support!
OUTSTANDING CANDIDATES: An incredible slate of Democratic candidates is running for both chambers of the NCGA, including Ricky Hurtado (NC-H63), Aimy Steele (NC-H82), Gail Young (NC-H83), Nicole Quick (NC-H59), Terri LeGrand (NC-S31), and Tess Judge (NC-S1) – to name just a few running in competitive districts!
THE ELECTORATE: The pool of registered voters in North Carolina, as a whole, has become increasingly left-leaning with each election cycle. The pool of registered voters who didn’t vote had a partisan lean of D+19 in 2016 and D+16 in 2018. Our analysis also shows that the 2018 blue wave in North Carolina was due almost entirely to an increase in turnout among left-leaning voters in key districts. Keep in mind: 2008 was the only year Democratic turnout matched Republican turnout in North Carolina and the only year North Carolina went blue in the presidential. Driving up left-leaning turnout is critical for 2020. Many voters don’t know who represents them or that they live in a competitive district – and they also don’t realize what a big impact the General Assembly has on their day-to-day lives.
A huge thank you to The Pig, Ninth Street Bakery, and Neal’s Deli for providing food for our launch party!
VOTER OUTREACH: There are many forms of voter outreach, but canvassing is the most effective thing we, as volunteers, can do to help get our fellow voters to the polls. In 2018, thanks to canvassing, we saw a 20% increase in voting among lower-propensity voters over and above the blue wave. And those low-propensity voters are the ones we need to turn out to win in 2020 – higher propensity voters will already be voting. We hardly saw any effect on turnout among moderate voters – who are far less reliable Democratic voters when they do get to the polls – so these stronger left-leaners are our focus for 2020. Even if no one answers the door, just leaving materials behind helps get sporadic voters to the polls. We ran a letter-writing campaign in 2018, sending handwritten letters to 7,000 left-leaning voters in flippable districts and, unfortunately, it basically had no measurable effect, so we will suspend those efforts this year. And analysis of our 2018 text-banking campaign found that it was similarly effective to leaving behind materials when it comes to turning out left-leaning voters, but we don’t need a lot more volunteers to scale up our texting efforts (although we do need additional funding!).
VOLUNTEER: FLIP NC’s canvasses are designed with the volunteer experience in mind. We launch all of our canvasses from bars and meet back up after canvassing to debrief and socialize. We canvass in pairs, and you can even sign up to be a “silent canvasser” – an idea hatched by our friends at Neighbors on Call – which means you can join an experienced canvasser to hold materials, record data, and just observe the conversations. Sign up to be a silent canvasser as many times as you want. When you’re ready to talk, you can jump right in, but you won’t get any pressure from us to do so. We’re currently running canvasses every month in Wake and Alamance counties, supporting other grassroots groups’ canvasses in other parts of the state, and running canvasses in other areas as we have the volunteer time and funding to cover them.
DONATE: Can’t canvass with us? Your donations go a long way, and every dollar helps. Become a monthly sustainer if you can! In 2018, we knocked 20,000 doors and sent 250,000 text messages with a total budget of less than $40,000. Our cost-effectiveness is unmatched. As an all-volunteer organization, our overhead is very low, but the cost of printed leave-behind materials and other supplies as well as text banking costs will be significant if we’re going to scale up as much as necessary to win in 2020.
We challenged everyone at the launch party to commit to canvassing with us in January, February, or March. Thank you to all who attended the launch party, donated, or signed up to canvass. Sunday’s event put us in a prime position to reach our 2020 goals, and we appreciate everything that FLIPsters will do in the next 10 months to ensure that we bring a massive blue wave to North Carolina.