Thread by @WayToWinAF

The title of the first gathering Way had in this cycle, in March of 2021, was The Case for Action. It wasn’t that we thought we could win, or that anyone could predict anything. It was the case that we had to act because our democracy was hanging in the balance. A 🧵.

Deep organizing + strong narratives + bold candidates - that’s the current Way to Win. This thread is about what we did on the Strong Narratives side. It’s long, because we did … a lot. And this isn't even all of it. We're only hitting some of the high points here!

We were all exhausted from the last four years of fighting Trump, and we knew we weren’t going to make up five decades of conservative investment and total hegemony in ideas marketing. But we had to try, and already had the pedal on the floor on Jan 6th.

Of course, it wasn’t just us. We had allies like @anatosaurus, @future_majority and Future Forward, and big national groups like @MoveOn, @IndivisibleTeam and @CAPAction. The DC orgs - DCCC, DSCC, HMP, Priorities - all saw the same stakes we did and have sharpened their game.

Democrats had just gone 0 for 27 in Cook rated congressional tossups. To figure out what the hell was going on, we put together a research project, TV Congress, using data from @adimpact.
americaforward.us/tvcongress/

Which led to a fantastic, clear story from @ThePlumLineGS. This whole cycle, reporters like Greg and @RonBrownstein took our data and explained it so clearly that we’ve even learned things from how they wrote about it! Grateful for their work.

There is a great preponderance of evidence TV ads absolutely do matter. They both directly influence voters and matter in perceptions, and they matter in all kinds of strange earned media feedback loops. Party brands are open source. Ads are a big way to impact them.

Our process - Listening + Art + Science - was built on @DanAncona’s years of experience in tech startups. It’s agile for persuasion, maximizing learning in the face of massive uncertainty. Deeper listening, bigger creative swings, and then we scienced the shit out of it.

The goal here was never to create ads that tested well. It was to create a strong, persuasive, resonant, and comprehensive argument. Testing is crucial but it shouldn’t be an end in itself. The goal is persuading people to agree with our ideas and vote for our candidates!

For all the talk about ancient political wisdom, there’s no “physics” to elections. People vote the way they do because of reasons. It’s the job of movements and parties to come up with good ones.

Our process was conceptually simple but an enormous lift in practice. Partnering with @BartonGretchen and @future_majority, we launched a set of massive qualitative ethnographic studies, talking to hundreds of voters across four states in online panels using Recollective.

In parallel to this, we started creating nearly 100 30-second ads - with @SolidarityLLC, Moira Studios, @AmandiOnAir, @RachelBitecofer, Gutsy, WIN and @anatosaurus and her teams. We threw them into testing (both our ads, and ones from allies and opponents) and started iterating.

The backbone of our evaluation was opinion lift studies, along with qual. We worked with both @Swayable and Open Labs. Swayable in particular gave us crucial insights into how our media was landing across all sorts of segments, and crucially, across political views.

As we ran these studies and polls, we were writing them up and sharing with a wide range of allies as fast as we could. @kramos1841 led the process of churning out memos and decks and getting them into our research hub and the hands of DC decision makers.
waytowin.docsend.com/view/s/53gyqmt…

In the summer, we partnered with @anatosaurus and other orgs for the #ProtectOurFreedoms campaign. Strong ads ran in national cable buys, Gutsy built beautiful toolkits for sharing, and @jenancona and Anat led weekly briefings for 2,000+ activists.

https://twitter.com/anatosaurus/status/1557847599092228096?s=20&t=ikABmAK9VJiqBMfn1iMjSA

We also built out a way for voters to see and share all this content: We Decide ‘22. This started out as a landing page for our digital ad buys but ended up being more integral to our strategy. We even ran a few ads for it on @CrookedMedia!
wedecide22.com

And last, the Tuesday before the election, we launched Freedom for All - an inspiring, gorgeously produced short based on the heart of our message. Our minimum goal for this was 100k views. We ended up getting over 1.3 *million*.

https://twitter.com/WayToWinAF/status/1587442320399441920?s=20&t=ikABmAK9VJiqBMfn1iMjSA

Our paid distribution program was small (around $1M) but mighty. We worked with three firms, including Intrvl, which let us narrowly targeted undecided voters in 19 tough congressionals. We hoped to win 3 or 4. Our final tally was 12 wins and 6 losses. (one still TBD)

We’ve got big challenges ahead still. Too many Americans still think Rs are somehow better on the economy, and other important issues like crime and safety. And too many are still disconnected from our democracy, and very poorly served by our broken information environment.

We are excited about taking on these challenges with you all.

Thank you, get some rest, and don't forget: we the people decide what’s possible!
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