Our 2024 campaign goals were (1) to turn out left-leaning voters, (2) to reduce ballot dropoff in state court races, and (3) to spread the word about the importance of our state courts.

Major Takeaways

Increased Turnout

FLIP NC’s turnout-focused text-banking program reached more than 1 million voters and added ~5k net votes for Democrats statewide. This was our primary driver of increased turnout.
Our canvassing and lit drop campaigns also contributed modestly to turnout, though these were within the margin of error. However, boosting turnout was not the primary objective of these programs this cycle.
In a presidential election year, opportunities to increase turnout through voter outreach in down-ballot races are more limited. We anticipate a stronger turnout impact from canvassing and lit drop in the 2026 midterms – similar to 2018 – and look forward to testing its impact again.

Reduced Ballot Dropoff

Our state court-focused canvassing and lit drop campaigns significantly reduced ballot dropoff, which had a clear positive impact on Justice Riggs’ vote margin.
In the precincts we fully saturated, we cut ballot dropoff in half relative to comparable precincts we did not reach. We estimate that reduced ballot dropoff among our target voters added ~690 net votes for Justice Riggs statewide from ~51k voters contacted.

Broader Attention on the Courts

Through social media campaigns and direct voter engagement, we work to highlight the importance of state court races.
While we observe broad reach and engagement with our messaging, we cannot explicitly measure its impact.

Background: FLIP NC’s 2024 Voter Outreach

Note: FLIP NC’s voter outreach activities focused on left-leaning voters with a partisan-lean score of at least 70, meaning if they vote, they have at least a 70% chance of voting for Democrats. Most voters on our lists had higher partisan-lean scores.

Our goals for 2024 were to (1) turn out left-leaning voters, (2) help ensure that they vote for Democrats downballot, and (3) spread the word about the importance of our state court races.

Canvassing. FLIP NC hosted monthly canvasses in Durham and pop-up canvasses in other parts of the state beginning in March 2024, running 12 canvasses in five counties from March to September 2024. 59% of the doors we reached were in Durham County. FLIP NC volunteers knocked more than 11k doors and had conversations with more than 2k voters. We also provided all back-end support and materials for partner groups’ on-going court-focused canvassing in other parts of the state as well as legislative canvassing that reached 4k additional doors and resulted in another 1k conversations with voters.

Lit Drop. Nearly 300 volunteers left informational literature about our state court races at more than 40k doors in 29 counties. Volunteers were able to join this program from anywhere in the state. FLIP NC also hosted 8 lit drop parties in 6 counties to expand our reach and volunteer network.

Lit drop volunteers were encouraged to speak with voters they encountered, but conversations were not explicitly captured in the data.

In addition to FLIP NC’s direct voter outreach and supported partner activities, additional partner organizations distributed another 5k FLIP NC-supplied court-focused lit sheets as part of their own canvassing programs. The impact of this distribution was not captured in our data.

In sum, FLIP NC reached voters at 56,000 doors as part of our state court-focused campaigns.

Text Banking. FLIP NC sent informational text messages to more than 1 million left-leaning voters statewide with a vote propensity score (likelihood of voting) below 95. Texts included specific local early voting site and time information, and voters were asked if they had questions about how or where to vote or about the new photo ID laws.

This campaign is unique in that we do not ask voters for anything – not to support specific candidates or even to vote. We simply provide information that will help voters vote more easily and offer further assistance with their voting questions. This campaign increased net votes for Democrats by targeting these messages to folks who are more likely to vote for Democrats and helping them vote.

Text bank volunteers received extensive training and support to answer voting questions and serve as “voting concierge” to provide requested information and answers to questions.

Text banking commenced in four rounds:

Round 1: At the start of North Carolina’s early voting period, we texted voters across the state (excluding Western NC for this round) with their county’s early voting dates and times, site locations for counties with only 1-2 locations, and a unique link for each county to full site and time information. (1.05m voters)
Round 2: We held a separate text bank, with Western NC partners, to send updated early voting information to the counties impacted by Hurricane Helene. (80k WNC voters)
Round 3: With one week of early voting remaining, we sent a follow-up text to those who had not yet voted and lived in counties with 4 or more early voting sites. The text contained their closest early voting site if they lived in a county with 4 or more early voting sites. (340k voters)
Round 4: Voters who did not vote during the early voting period received a text message the day before the election with their election day polling location and hours. (450k voters)

FLIP NC leaders and highly trained “super volunteers” continued to monitor text conversations until after the polls closed as we continued to receive questions from voters days or even weeks after they received our initial texts.

Social Media. We use social media – Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter (now replaced with BlueSky) to post infographics and video explainers about our state court races and the impact of ballot dropoff in North Carolina; many of these posts were shared widely.

FLIP NC’s 2024 Impact

Turnout. Our text-banking campaign had the greatest impact on turnout, focusing exclusively on increasing participation among left-leaning voters. As with all of our 2024 voter outreach, this campaign targeted voters with a partisan-lean score of at least 70, but most voters on our list were much higher; the average partisan-lean score of our target list was 92.

To measure the campaign’s effectiveness, we held back a random sample during early voting, allowing us to compare turnout between those we texted and the control group. We estimate that our text-banking campaign added ~5,000 net votes for Democrats statewide.

Given that 2024 was a presidential election year, we did not anticipate an impact on turnout from canvassing and lit drop as great as our past midterm efforts, but we also held back a random sample for these programs so that we could analyze our impact on turnout. While we see a modest increase in turnout relative to the control group, the effect is within the margin of error. This impact is significantly smaller than what we observed in 2018, a midterm year with greater room to increase turnout. We look forward to repeating this analysis in the 2026 midterm election, where we expect a larger effect.

Margin. While our canvassing and lit drop programs had a limited effect on turnout, they significantly improved vote margins for Democratic state court candidates in precincts that we heavily saturated.

We influence margins among voters who are already turning out in two key ways: vote switching and reduced ballot dropoff, both of which can only be measured at the precinct level.

Down-ballot voting. The primary goal of our court-focused canvassing and lit drop programs was to decrease ballot dropoff among left-leaning voters. Our analysis suggests that this is exactly how these programs had the greatest impact.

While we ran lit drop and canvassing in as many places as we could reach, it was heavily concentrated near the blue precincts where most of our volunteers live. Even in red counties, we primarily targeted walkable blue precincts, and 55% of the doors we reached were concentrated in blue Durham and Orange counties.

Our analysis focused on Durham and Orange counties, where we heavily saturated a significant portion of precincts. Across the state, ballot dropoff was generally lower in heavily Democratic precincts – about 1.4 points in very blue precincts compared with about 2.7 points in both purple and very red precincts. Even after controlling for the partisan lean of the precinct, we see about 50% less ballot dropoff in the precincts we fully saturated through canvassing and/or lit drop relative to comparable precincts in Durham and Orange counties where we had more limited or no presence. We also see a comparable increase in the vote margin for Justice Riggs, relative to the vote margin for Kamala Harris in the presidential election, in those same precincts. This suggests that our primary impact on the vote margin was through reducing downballot dropoff rather than vote switching.

Interestingly, we estimate a slightly larger impact of canvassing on the Democratic vote margin in the Court of Appeals races in Durham and Orange Counties, suggesting that canvassing especially helps raise awareness about the importance of these races.

Overall, we estimate that FLIP NC’s canvass and lit drop campaigns added ~390 net votes for Democrats in Durham and Orange counties (where more than half of our voter outreach was concentrated) due primarily to reduced ballot dropoff. Assuming a similar impact on the voters we reached in other counties, we estimated that these efforts added a total of ~690 net votes for Democrats statewide. This likely understates our impact; ballot dropoff was greater – with more room to improve – in most of the precincts we reached outside of Durham and Orange counties. However, voter outreach in other areas was more scattered, precluding similar statistical analysis in other counties.

Vote switching. As noted above, our impact on the margin is entirely explained by our impact on reduced ballot rolloff; it does not appear that we significantly impacted the margin through vote switching (which was not an explicit goal of our program). We do want to note that the places where we had the most saturation, allowing for analysis of our impact, were in very blue areas with little room for vote switching; ticket splitting is much lower in very blue precincts than in purple or red precincts. It’s possible that similar campaigns would have a greater effect on vote switching in less blue areas, but we did not saturate enough precincts on other areas to be able to test for such an effect.

Spreading the word. Our election analysis was necessarily limited to looking at results we can see clearly in election data. For example, we can compare turnout for individuals we reached relative to comparable voters who we did not reach. It is impossible to directly assess several ways that our efforts might have had an impact. This is especially true for efforts aimed at raising general awareness about the state court races through, for example, social media efforts or by asking regular, engaged voters to help spread the word about the critical nature of these down-ballot races.

Conclusion

In 2024, FLIP NC engaged in voter outreach programs with the aims of (i) increasing turnout statewide through an informational text banking program and (ii) decreasing down-ballot dropoff and increasing Democratic vote margins in State Court races through canvassing and lit drop programs. Our analysis of each program suggests that it significantly increased net votes for Democrats in a manner consistent with its impact. Overall, we estimate that FLIP NC’s 2024 programs increased net votes for Democrats in all races statewide by about 5k votes and for Democrats in State Court races, in particular, by a total of about 5.7k votes, inclusive of all of our direct voter outreach efforts.