The result was a victory for RootsAction's #VoteTrumpOut campaign, which launched in early August with the goal of convincing left-wing voters in swing states to cast their ballots for Joe Biden -- and then hold him accountable from day one of his administration. The organization, which strongly supported Bernie Sanders in the 2016 and 2020 primaries and is aligned with much of the Green Party platform, decided early on it would need to pull out all the stops to help defeat Trump, including mobilizing and motivating Bernie supporters wary of voting for Biden.
#VoteTrumpOut focused its organizing on three battleground states in particular -- Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin -- battlegrounds that all flipped against Trump.
"We disagree with Biden's corporate-friendly record on everything from healthcare to climate change. Our campaign was never about supporting or endorsing Biden -- it was about defeating Trump so that democracy could live to see another day," said Norman Solomon, national director of RootsAction. "And we knew the Biden campaign wouldn't do an effective job of persuading leftist voters, so we stepped into the breach."
The unprecedented campaign identified an audience of over 1 million left-wing voters across the closest battleground states, and flooded them with persuasive Facebook ads featuring trusted messengers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Angela Davis. Each of the voters saw the #VoteTrumpOut ads an average of 16 times. The campaign also recruited a team of hundreds of volunteers as "digital canvassers" to scour the hundreds of thousands of comments, shares, and likes the ads generated, engaging voters one-on-one in comment threads and direct messages.
In the final month before the election, one element of the multi-pronged campaign succeeded in texting every Green Party registrant living in swing states where data were available, engaging in good-faith conversations persuading them not to cast a third-party protest vote.
"Over time, we saw the tenor of conversation shift in the online progressive spaces we were organizing," said Daniel Sherrell, the campaign director for #VoteTrumpOut. "It went from critiquing and almost equating both candidates to consolidating around the strategic need to defeat extremist Trumpism, and then push Joe Biden toward a bold progressive agenda. In short, we helped deliver Biden's margin of victory. Now he needs to deliver policies like a Green New Deal and universal healthcare -- policies that will help the people who got him elected, not the corporate donors who want to return to a 'normalcy' that was a disaster for so many."
In addition to its voter contact efforts, the Vote Trump Out campaign recruited prominent leftist validators to promote their message, including Noam Chomsky, Rashida Tlaib, Ro Khanna, Linda Sarsour, Daniel Ellsberg, and Bernie 2020 senior political adviser Winnie Wong. Longtime Green Party activist Ted Glick joined the effort.
"Encouraging swing-state progressives to vote for Biden was the right move, morally and strategically," said Glick, a former U.S. Senate candidate for the Green Party in New Jersey.
"Now it's on Biden to deliver for the working people who got him elected, and give more than just lip-service to progressive policies. If he fails, the pendulum's going to swing back hard, and the next Trump will be even more dangerous than the one we just defeated."
#VoteTrumpOut Digital Ad Campaign Statistics
-- Each of over 1 million targeted swing state progressive voters saw our ad content an average of 16 times.
-- In October alone, more than 5 million people saw one of our Facebook, Instagram or Twitter posts.
-- Since August, we had nearly 1 million engagements on one of our paid ads in swing states, including 85,000 shares.
Green Party Vote Statistics 2016 2020
(*GP not on 2020 ballot in AZ, PA, WI)
