Amid national outrage over racial inequality, the past several months have seen millions of protesters take to the streets and demand justice for Black individuals killed at the hands of law enforcement, including George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery. Polls estimate that the total number of protesters reached as high as 26 million people — “the largest kind of concurrent protests that we’ve ever seen in America history,” according to Bernard Fraga, an associate professor of political science at Emory University.
The protests have not stopped at demonstrations; participants have channeled their rage by signing petitions, donating, organizing, and posting on social media. But an important question remains: Will they vote come November?
Historically, turnout among voters of color and young voters — groups disproportionately represented among those currently protesting — has been depressed. According to data from the Pew Research Center, between the presidential elections of 2012 and 2016, the Black voter turnout rate fell from 66.6% to 59.6% — the first decline in Black turnout during a presidential election in the past 20 years. And in 2016, only 46.1% of those ages 18 to 29 voted — the lowest turnout rate by age group.
Registering and mobilizing people of color and young people to vote will especially be important this election cycle, where these groups will also make up a larger share of the electorate. This year, 1 in 10 eligible voters is part of Generation Z — those born after 1996 — and 33% of potential voters will be people of color, the largest share of non-White voters ever.
One way to improve voter turnout is to improve outreach, especially to individuals who have never voted before. Thus, a key insight into these groups’ future participation in the voting process is the efforts of grassroots organizations to connect with these communities in outrage and lead them on a path to voting. Indeed, many nonpartisan organizations have already ramped up their voter registration efforts for these low-propensity voters, acknowledging that their consolidated political power could impact the presidential race and shape down-ballot races across the country.
Capitalizing on Protest Energy: Surges in Voter Registration
The urgency of this moment is unique, given the broad base of support the Black Lives Matter movement has garnered from individuals of diverse political stripes. According to a Pew Research Center poll in June, 67% of Americans support the movement — a figure that could position issues of racial inequality and police brutality, once far more politically divisive topics, at the top of the political agenda in both this election cycle and beyond.
Several nonpartisan and progressive voter outreach organizations are honing in on the energy of this unprecedented movement by conducting initiatives to boost voter registration. These organizations are especially important in ensuring that people see voting as a crucial form of political participation — albeit not the only one — amid ongoing calls for police reform.
Following the killing of George Floyd, multiple organizations noted a massive jump in voter registration numbers. Voto Latino, an organization dedicated to increasing political participation amongst young Latinx voters, signed up only 2,294 people to vote between May 1-10, but registered over 63,000 new voters during the first 10 days in June. RockTheVote, a group building the political power of young people, registered 150,000 new voters the first two weeks of June — the largest number of registrations for any two-week period during the 2020 election cycle. And HeadCount, a nonpartisan organization using the power of music to register voters, registered about 3,000 people online in May and five times as many in June.
Some scholars like Fraga have demonstrated a clear link between protests and voter registration. “Protest activity can increase voter registration and voter turnout,” he told the HPR. Both are powerful forms of political participation and can feed on each other, he added, especially if an outside group helps draw the links between voting and protest.
“It’s not that someone shows up to a protest and decides to register to vote,” Fraga continued. “Someone has to make that connection and say, if you’re concerned about these issues like police violence and brutality committed against people, then here’s one path. Protest is one path. Voting is another path.”
Some groups even registered new voters directly at the protests. Andy Bernstein, HeadCount’s executive director, said that in the wake of the protests, the organization had “a ton of people coming to us saying, ‘Hey, I want to register voters at these events.’” HeadCount then created printable QR codes for people to put on protest signs such that when someone scans the code with their phone, they are taken to a page where they can register to vote.
Reaching Traditionally Ignored Voters
The reasons for historically lower voter turnout among people of color and young people are diverse, ranging from systemic voter suppression to a lack of concerted outreach by traditional political groups that typically focus on higher propensity voters. Organizations are thus working hard to combat suppression tactics and draw in new voters, especially Black, Brown, and young demographics.
The Collective, a progressive PAC with the goal of building Black political power, initiated an effort to gather protesters’ cell phone data and direct them to advertisements about registering to vote. This effort came as Michael Bloomberg gave the group $2 million to register 250,000 Black voters in key battleground states.
Some groups are also directing their energy to geographic locations frequently overlooked by traditional political campaigns. For example, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Vote Your Voice initiative is providing $30 million in funding to 12 nonpartisan, nonprofit organizations focused on voter registration and mobilization as well as endeavors to counter voter suppression in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi. These Southern states, with the exception of Florida, are not of critical focus for traditional political organizations as they are not battleground states that can decisively shape the election.
A state’s electoral competitiveness is often a key driver for a campaign’s grand strategy when it comes to allocating scarce resources. But since these nonpartisan organizations have no desired electoral outcome, they are able to direct more resources into reaching low-propensity voters who often need several touchpoints to engage. Fraga said that it is very important for organizations like the Biden Campaign to partner with voter outreach groups that have goals “beyond just 2020, beyond just winning elections and making sure those campaigns are on the ground, doing the work, whether or not it’s politically expedient.” Such efforts are valuable to strengthening trust and reciprocity between candidates and potential voters, inclining them to vote.
While registering new voters under the backdrop of COVID-19 is no easy task, these organizations have been successful due to their reliance on digital technologies and outreach methods. Organizations like Voto Latino have fully embraced online outreach. “We started as digital natives, and we are in the most intimate spaces that these young people are in,” the group’s CEO Maria Teresa Kuma told Fortune. “We’re on their phones through their Instagrams and social platforms. We’ve been experimenting on TikTok and Tinder and getting the word out, and they’re reciprocating by signing up.”
Countering Anti-Voting Sentiments
Of course, just reaching out to voters who have traditionally been overlooked does not equate to more ballots. One progressive view — elevated by recent calls for radical changes in policing — is that voting may not be a meaningful form of action in a system designed to keep some voices silent, or that focusing on specific causes is more important than voting. For those who subscribe to this perspective, protests can serve as an essential way to make their voices heard. “It’s hard for you to get to them in a conversation about ‘join us’ when they feel like the entire system has failed them,” said Jamaä Bickley-King, the director of Voter Engagement at The Collective.
These protesters tend to be disillusioned with establishment politics and cannot picture themselves casting a ballot for Joe Biden. Fraga said there is a “subset of the population, especially younger individuals, people of color, who are out in the streets, quite frankly, because they don’t believe that formal political participation — that is, voting and registering to vote — are an effective means of getting what they want.” And among those further left, there are many who believe Biden’s policies fall short of the truly transformational change they seek.
For these protesters who may not feel compelled to support a candidate at the top of the ticket, a focus on down-ballot races — especially local races that more directly shape the decisions made around policing — may be more of a selling point, according to Seth Levi, chief strategy officer for the Southern Poverty Law Center. “With these policing issues that are going on right now, ultimately a lot of that is driven by local elected officials,” he told the HPR. “It’s mayors who are hiring police chiefs. It’s prosecutors who are choosing not to prosecute police officers involved in violence and killings.”
Levi also said that the differences between Biden and Trump are so massive and could motivate participation among voters on the fence about either candidate. “Regardless of an individual’s political beliefs,” he explained, “the two candidates they’re picking from on either side of this close election have very different policies and viewpoints. And we think people are going to want to have a say in that.”
For people who do not believe in voting as an empowering method of change, Bickley-King said it is necessary to “meet them where they [are] at and have an authentic conversation with them,” adding that the conversation about empowerment is “a long-game conversation.” He said there’s no “magic message” to convince someone to register, but that the “saliency of the organization” and “a layer of peer-to-peer contact” can prove effective in building trust with potential voters.
In addition to offsetting anti-voting sentiments, advancing civic participation, particularly through voting, is important to shaping national decision-making and creating lasting change for issues of policing and racial injustice. While registering new voters is a crucial step, the real action occurs when these voters cast their ballots come Election Day. Organizations focused on voter registration have therefore also been conscious of ways to continuously keep newly registered voters active and engaged. This includes deploying resources — in terms of volunteers, number of interactions with a potential voter and an increased focus on mail-in and absentee voting, as the ongoing pandemic has fully altered the nature of elections.
And the responsibility to register and turnout voters does not just lie on organizations dedicated to the cause. It is incumbent on campaigns and candidates to earn their votes, and as Fraga noted, communicate “why it’s important for them to participate, not just on the streets, but also in their polling places or via the mail come Election Day.”
