How was that victory possible? A historically high voter turnout for an off-year election.
More than 1.7 million people cast ballots in the race, besting the 1.6 million that cast ballots in the 2020 Supreme Court race, when there was also a presidential primary to drive turnout. Progressives saw what happened in prior off-year elections, and mobilized their base to win this election.
Daily Kos understood why the stakes were so high and mobilized our readers to get involved. We recruited over 2,240 volunteers across the country who did the following activities:
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1,450 of you wrote personalized “please-vote” letters with Vote Forward—adopting more than 84,000 Wisconsin voters who were likely to vote for Judge Protasiewicz, but did not have the best track record of turning out in every election;
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593 of you ordered and wrote over 60,000 get-out-the-vote postcards with Blue Wave Postcards;Â the whole program sent over 300,000 postcards to Wisconsin voters;
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263 of you did the necessary hard work of phone banking with Wisconsin Democrats through our Mobilize platform, talking directly to voters, and making sure they have voting plans. The feedback that we got from our volunteers was very positive!
Progressive groups came out of the woodwork to make this victory possible, and several tried some innovative tactics. NextGen America, which mobilizes young voters, even used dating apps to talk to young single Wisconsin voters to make sure that they had a plan to vote.
But we are not out of the woods. Wisconsin Republicans narrowly won a special election in a gerrymandered district, which gives them a two-thirds majority in the state senate. As long as the legislative lines continue to favor the GOP, expect more shenanigans in the coming years.
