Did veterans help Biden win Georgia? How one group mobilized them to vote
After creating a new voter file to target on-the-fence military veterans, officials with a progressive veterans group say they managed to mobilize tens of thousands of them to vote for Joe Biden in critical swing states, including Georgia, where the final margin was razor-thin.
VoteVets said they identified more than 12,000 veteran voters who would support Biden over President Donald Trump heading into the 2020 election in Georgia, where the Democratic nominee won by just north of 12,000 votes.
Following their success, VoteVets plans to expand their outreach ahead of the pair of Georgia runoff elections in January that will determine which party controls the U.S. Senate.
“We view veterans as a place to chip away, and elections are won and lost on margins,” VoteVets co-founder Jon Soltz, who deployed twice to Iraq, said in an interview.
VoteVets, which was founded during the Iraq War in 2006, has typically focused on supporting Democratic veteran candidates and issues through fundraising. Sotz said the group spent more than $40 million in the 2020 election cycle, including more than $1.2 million on behalf of Sen.-elect Mark Kelly in Arizona.
But Soltz said he wanted to broaden those efforts in 2020 to reach veteran voters who could make a difference in key battleground states. Since there wasn’t quality data available on persuadable veterans, VoteVets decided to create a vote file of Democratic-leaning veterans across 18 states that were hosting competitive presidential or Senate elections.
By Election Day, VoteVets had built a voter file of 267,000 veterans or military family members who told them they would support Biden, including almost 18,000 in North Carolina, more than 29,000 in Pennsylvania, more than 12,000 in Wisconsin and more than 18,500 in Arizona.
“The idea that Democrats for the first time ever were able to target and create veterans and military families as a constituency that we organized GOTV [Get Out the Vote] is a really, really cool part of the foundation [of Biden’s win],” Soltz said. “When this came down on the last day, the turnout in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, we had our numbers and they turned out to vote.”
VoteVets built the list by whittling down existing, massive state voter files of millions of residents to filter out for veterans, then further cutting veteran voters who were already committed to vote Democrat or Republican.
In Georgia, that left about 50,000 voters who were potentially persuadable. VoteVets then matched up those names with social media profiles, where people had self-identified as veterans on their Facebook pages or commented on one of VoteVets online ads.
Once VoteVets had the voter file information, a small army of volunteers took over an intense veteran-to-veteran texting operation to see if they could get them to support Biden. That ultimately narrowed their list to 12,000 in Georgia.
“This program absolutely made a difference, and [Georgia] could have ended up in Trump’s column without it,” said Soltz.
“We were particularly encouraged by how many so-called low-propensity voters we moved,” Soltz added. “Among the low-propensity-voting veterans and military families we contacted in swing states, including Georgia, it was about 60% and climbing as we get more data in from boards of elections. Not only did we move voters in Georgia, we moved thousands of voters who otherwise might have never voted early, or even voted at all.”
Each day VoteVets would post up a voter file list online and volunteers would grab sections and begin texting.
“As soon as we knew it [the voter file] was coming on our group would jump on,” said Navy veteran Mark Linver, who flew P-3 Orion surveillance aircraft for 10 years. “You know how vets are, we are all very competitive. It was, ‘who could do the most texts.’ ”
“We’d send out the initial text, ‘Who are you supporting?’ ” Linver said.
If they answered Biden, the group would follow up with polling locations and stay in touch. If they answered Trump, they would thank them and move on. If they were on the fence, the veterans would take a more personal approach, bringing their own experiences and why they were getting involved now.
This vote file is only the beginning, Soltz said. The group ultimately would like to expand its outreach to military voters casting absentee ballots. For now, the group is focused on the Georgia runoffs and the upcoming midterm elections.
“We’re certainly on the path now of having this voter file for the Democratic Party because now we have a quarter-million ID’d Democratic military families and veterans for these battleground states,” Soltz said. “And we know every cycle we are going to go back to you now, that are persuadable, that we want to keep.”
This story has been updated with new information about the voter file.
This story was originally published November 23, 2020 at 2:00 AM with the headline "Did veterans help Biden win Georgia? How one group mobilized them to vote."
