Memo from NextGen Climate: How Climate & Clean Energy Are Winning The 2016 Election Cycle
To: Credentialed Media
From: Michael Kieschnick, National Campaign Manager
Date: Monday, November 7, 2016
Subject: NextGen Climate’s National Program Success
Introduction
Climate change is the greatest challenge of our time—and addressing it is one of America’s greatest opportunities. For the first time in electoral history, climate and clean energy emerged as a decisive voting issue for many Americans across the country in the 2016 election cycle—particularly millennial voters and working families—and could put Clinton over the top in tomorrow’s election.
Building on this momentum, NextGen Climate undertook a historic effort to ensure that Americans in battleground states across the country had the opportunity to make their voices heard at the ballot box in 2016.
| NextGen Climate Election Program 2016 * | |
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* as of the morning of Monday, Nov. 7 |
NextGen Climate’s 2016 Program
NextGen Climate entered the 2016 election cycle determined to elect a president committed to taking bold steps to address the climate crisis, and a pro-climate Senate prepared to confirm judicial nominations and executive appointments and defend presidential executive actions. It was clear that traditional efforts to mobilize environmental voters would be insufficient, so we undertook a historic effort to raise the bar and expand the electorate.
NextGen Climate’s 2016 effort was different from earlier campaigns in five fundamental ways:
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We raised the bar: We drew a firm line in the sand on fundamental climate issues—setting clear criteria to evaluate which candidates we would support. We organized around an issue—climate change—rather than a candidate.
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We gave millennial voters a platform: The Millennial Generation is the most progressive generation in American politics and equals the size of the Baby Boom Generation, yet they receive the least amount of attention from electoral campaigns. NextGen Climate set out to build the largest youth vote program in the country, reaching millennials where they are—on campus, on their phones and online—on issues they care about, like climate change.
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We started early on campus: We built substantial field programs in Iowa, New Hampshire and Ohio in the summer of 2015 to influence critical primaries, and continue organizing with an eye towards the general election.
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We focused on proven field tactics to engage millennials, and skipped the TV ads: We committed to one-to-one conversations with millions of young voters on the issues they care most about—an approach which has been proven to be the most cost effective tactic in persuading and turning out voters.
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We partnered with the labor movement: We committed to a close partnership with the labor movement, firmly grounding climate change as a kitchen table issue along with racial justice, economic justice and strong public schools.
Raising the Bar (With Climate As Our Candidate)
By organizing around a call for specific climate solutions rather than around a particular candidate, NextGen Climate built a committed base of climate voters and pushed all the candidates to be bolder on climate in 2016. When NextGen Climate announced in July 2015 a goal of transitioning to 50 percent clean energy by 2030, many thought it was too ambitious. Instead, all three Democratic presidential candidates signed on, the candidates competed over who had the strongest plan and, by July 2016, the Democratic Party adopted the unprecedented goal of achieving 100 percent clean energy by 2050 as part of its platform. We also used the #50by30 benchmark, as well as a candidate’s position on the Keystone XL pipeline and the Clean Power Plan when evaluating which Senate candidates we would support.
At every stage of our program, this approach gave us credibility with voters who would otherwise have tuned us out—particularly young voters who originally supported Senator Bernie Sanders—in both the presidential race, and our seven senate races. NextGen Climate endorsed: Hillary Clinton for President; Maggie Hassan (NH), Deborah Ross (NC), Katie McGinty (PA), Ted Strickland (OH), Tammy Duckworth (IL) and Catherine Cortez Masto (NV) for the Senate; and Roy Cooper (NC) for Governor.
Millennials Care About Climate—And We Gave Them A Platform To Make Their Voices Heard In 2016
While millennial voters have the potential to be one of America’s most potent political forces, 18-35 year-olds have traditionally been overlooked by candidate campaigns in favor of their older counterparts. Given that millennials represent some of our country’s most passionate activists—and stand to lose the most if we fail to act on climate change—NextGen Climate set out to mobilize this previously untapped voting bloc on an unprecedented scale.
Climate is a politically potent issue to motivate millennials to both register and show up at the polls: Ninety-two percent of battleground millennials want to transition to 100% clean energy by 2050 and 81 percent say clean air and water is a high priority. Moreover, 78 percent of millennials are more likely to vote for candidates who offer clean energy solutions.
However, turnout among young voters is historically lower than among older voters, which is why NextGen Climate set out to transform young people’s passion on climate and clean energy into power at the ballot box on November 8.
NextGen Climate Was On The Ground Early, Talking To Young Voters In Key Battleground States
Research shows that one-on-one conversations are the best and most cost-effective way to change minds and turnout voters, so NextGen Climate built an extensive campus program to fill a critical void in on-the-ground organizing throughout the primaries and general election.
We started early, setting up operations in New Hampshire, Iowa, and Ohio beginning in the spring and summer of 2015. This approach was crucial in establishing climate as a key issue in the Democratic primaries, and continuing that focus into the general election. This early focus on climate—rather than a candidate—also reinforced our credibility to educate voters about the differences between Clinton and Trump and Senate candidates on the issue. Over the next 18 months, our team grew to over 800 staff and fellows deployed to 300 campuses in 13 battleground states—Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, New Hampshire, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin. Thanks to this early start, NextGen Climate was able to organize on campus in the Spring of 2016—before school let out for the summer and long before the candidate campaigns had any sort of campus presence. On the majority of our campuses, NextGen Climate remained the only group organizing millennial voters.
NextGen Climate Combined Innovative and Proven Tactics To Engage Millennials
Combining cutting-edge tactics with old-fashioned democracy—peers talking to peers—NextGen Climate registered nearly 300,000 millennial voters and collected written pledges to vote on climate from over 800,000 millennials in 2016. Recognizing that to reach millennials more broadly we couldn’t just stay on campus, NextGen Climate’s staff and our more than 6,000 volunteers had one-on-one conversations with their peers through the medium they respond to best: emojis. Together, they sent more than 5.7 million text messages to identify, persuade, and turnout millennial voters.
To engage hard-to-reach millennials off-campus, we worked with celebrities like Aziz Ansari, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ben Affleck, Jessica Williams and Natalie Portman to communicate with millennials where they spend their time: advertising on youth-focused platforms like Tinder, Spotify, and Xbox Live; sponsoring Snapchat filters and ads during prime political moments like the Presidential debates, National Voter Registration Day and Election Day; and offering Puppies at the Polls. We also engaged with the latest digital trends, including being the first political organization to use Pokémon GO to register voters by dropping “lures” in the game, drawing gamers to our registration tables.
In addition to these creative, cutting-edge tactics, we also deployed traditional, field-tested methods to successfully motivate young people to the polls. Extensive research shows that social pressure mail is among the most effective methods of turning out voters—and NextGen Climate sent more than 3 million pieces to a carefully targeted audience in one of the largest GOTV mail campaigns in electoral history.
Our efforts succeeded: Polling released by NextGen Climate in early September showed that the more millennials learned the difference between Clinton and Trump on climate change, the more they supported Clinton. Meanwhile, young voters’ views of Donald Trump remained remarkably stagnant.
NextGen Climate Worked With The Labor Movement To Establish Climate Change As A Core Progressive Priority
In the 2016 election cycle, NextGen Climate worked with the labor movement on key progressive issues through two groundbreaking partnerships: For Our Future and United We Can. In both cases, climate change and clean energy were—for the first time—discussed as a central tenet of a broader justice platform in millions of voter conversations and pieces of mail.
For Our Future was founded by NextGen Climate, AFL-CIO, AFSCME, National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers in an unprecedented effort to mobilize working families and the rising American electorate around a core progressive agenda: addressing climate change, creating shared economic prosperity, building strong public schools, and supporting racial justice. With a $20 million commitment from NextGen Climate, For Our Future grew to include five additional labor unions by the end of the election cycle. Working with more than 150 community-based allies, For Our Future focused on engaging 9.5 million voters in Florida, North Carolina, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to turn out and help elect progressive leaders committed to a just transition to a clean energy economy that will benefit working families across the nation. NextGen Climate also joined SEIU in a partnership—United We Can—committing $5 million to engage and turn out voters in Colorado, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire, and to similarly engage voters on the issues that matter most to working families and the rising American electorate.
Climate Is Likely To Be an Even Bigger Issue In Future Elections
With the impacts of climate change getting worse every year, millennials growing share of the electorate, and the labor movement’s continued engagement in the fight for cleaner air and water, the climate crisis stands to play an even larger role in future elections. The new political reality is that it isn’t enough to acknowledge climate change—candidates for office must support aggressive, concrete solutions.