What began as a bold experiment proved that a decentralized national campaign model based on shared expertise and seed funding with local groups can help successfully pass ballot initiatives in a wide range of states.
The Fairness Project, which launched just over a year ago with initial backing from labor, was founded on the belief that voters would embrace ballot initiatives as a way to fix our broken economy and bypass ineffective lawmakers.
But instead of running a top-down national organization, our role was to fund and support local coalitions to run successful initiative campaigns on their own. To achieve this, we developed a strategy to provide early financial support to local groups and offer access to the cutting-edge tools used by top-of-the-ballot campaigns. Our model paid off.
Now, timing was an asset. Enthusiasm this cycle helped propel minimum wage ballot initiatives to pass with a larger margin and more votes in favor than the winning presidential candidate in all four states we worked in.
In Arizona, the measure passed with an impressive 58 percent. President-elect Donald Trump won the state with just 49 percent. Not even Sen. John McCain received that much support in 2008 – the year he won the state with just under 54 percent. This year, he received less support than the ballot measure as well. In nearby Colorado, Hillary Clinton won 48 percent of the vote, but 55 percent of voters approved a hike in the minimum wage.
How was it possible to have such decisive wins in such a divisive cycle? While vote counts and our own post-election polling demonstrated that economic inequality was clearly a top priority across ideology and party, what made the difference was the disciplined state campaigns run by local teams who knocked on over 1.1 million doors and built best-in-class earned and paid media operations.
With some donors now questioning their investment in candidate campaigns, ballot initiatives proved to be some of the best investments in politics. These races provided incredible returns on the money we spent, as measured in the almost immediate, direct impact on the lives of millions of working people. Few candidate campaigns can make that claim. On average, each campaign spent $3.6 million and impacted 544,000 workers per state.
Moreover, a little seed funding went a long way. By investing early, we attracted other funders, kept costs low and ensured success across the board. On average, The Fairness Project contributed about 14 percent of each campaign’s budget. This relatively small contribution had a big impact, like in Arizona where about $581,900 – or 13 percent of the campaign’s budget – wound up materially improving the lives of 779,000 workers.
Early investment in a campaign to build a long runway has been a guiding principle for The Fairness Project from the start. We hit the ground running in places like Maine nearly 18 months before Election Day, a strategy that enabled campaigns to attract additional investment, hire top campaign talent, and maintain a two-way conversation with voters over the course of a year-long campaign. Building a strong presence early forced the opposition to concede in Maine and didn’t present much of an obstacle in others.
This initial influx of cash cannot be underestimated. In California and Washington, D.C., this early organizing around the ballot initiative created the political motivation for the legislatures to act and raise the wage themselves.
But it wasn’t just money that mattered – the campaigns relied on well-tested and some newer campaign techniques. Many of these have come under fire in the 2016 post-mortem – like polling and data analytics – but every campaign with which we partnered found these tools valuable to inform their winning strategy.
Close partnerships and collaboration between campaigns was critical. Take Colorado, one of our closest races. Despite our campaign leading the polls, we started seeing the opposition strengthen dramatically after Labor Day, buying more television ads and moving up in the polls. They even rolled out an opposition ad with John Elway, Coloradans’ demigod.
While they were confident that support would hold, the campaign quickly recognized the need to ramp up paid media activity in the state to combat misinformation and we worked closely with the campaign to bring in extra money to cover the airwaves with their message. The other side wasn’t able to match the campaign’s efforts and the ballot measure ultimately prevailed.
These partnerships extended not just in moments of crisis, but throughout the election cycle. Because each state was developing its own campaign, specific to their population, they naturally had their own methods of engaging voters. We provided the states with the connections to share best practices such as effective messaging and field strategy.
Thanks to our coordination, Colorado gave Arizona a game plan for how to run town hall events and ensure messaging was consistent among different speakers. Maine shared their successful business outreach plan with Colorado and all the states collaborated on their experiences with editorial board meetings so no state would be surprised by questions that arose.
An important lesson that we learned as states got up and running was the ability to scale tools and techniques. For instance, we created a customizable website designed around common needs, but tailored each site to the specific requirements of the state campaigns.
Arizona launched later than many others, in the summer before the election. But with The Fairness Project’s help, the campaign was able to get its website up quickly, working to immediately collect information on potential supporters in sync with the launch of the campaign.
When it comes to specific tools, we democratized data and analytics by bringing powerful modeling and targeting tools to grassroots ballot initiatives that might not otherwise have access to these resources due to their cost and complexity. National and statewide electoral campaigns routinely rely on statistical modeling to drive resource allocation. We provided similar models to Arizona, Washington, and Colorado, allowing them to reach their most likely voters and preserve this information cycle to cycle.
The “secret sauce” of our data program was the ballot drop-off model. Normally, ballot campaigns anticipate around 5 percent fewer votes than Senate or presidential candidates. To combat this, we developed a ballot completion model that identified the voters who might have needed additional contact to ensure that they voted on all the questions on the ballot.
The results are clear – the drop-off on the minimum wage ballots this year was around 1.4 percent in Colorado and Arizona. In Maine and Washington, more people voted on the ballot initiative than in the presidential race. Four years ago, no ballot measure in these states, regardless of the issue, received more votes than the top of the ticket. Looking forward, we aim to improve upon this year’s success in 2017, 2018 and beyond.
Jonathan Schleifer is executive director of The Fairness Project, a national organization working to address economic fairness through ballot initiatives.