2021 End of the Year Update

Dear DNC Members,

With just days left in 2021, I wanted to share a note of gratitude for your partnership with the DNC. This year has been proof that Democrats don’t just show up on Election Day. You were out there rallying for progress, registering voters, serving your communities, and much more. You spent every day this year inspiring hope and I can’t thank you enough. The passion and generosity you’ve shown us in 2021 has lifted up the party and the country, and as we reflect on this year, we’d like to highlight what’s made us proud.

Communicating Our Successes to the American People

Managing the world’s biggest megaphones: At the beginning of this year, we inherited the @JoeBiden, @KamalaHarris, @DouglasEmhoff accounts from the Biden-Harris campaign, growing our combined social following to a titanic 104 million – one of the largest social portfolios of any political organization in the world. In the year since, we scaled our team, adding 15 new content creators, including the former head of video at BuzzFeed. With a rigorous focus on metrics and producing content that shares the core message of the Biden administration, this team generated 8 billion impressions on our content, with more than 507 million video views. For context, you’d have to pay in the ballpark of $50 million to generate this amount of impressions via paid social. In 2022, we will continue scaling these channels, adding more staff to our team to crank out even more content, with a specific focus on channels where voters – especially young voters – spend time, including YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok.

Explaining and promoting the Biden administration’s agenda: From the moment President Biden took office, the DNC Communications team has been leading an aggressive, sustained effort to promote President Biden’s agenda and ensure every American knows that when it mattered most, President Biden and Democrats have stepped up and continued to deliver results. We deployed comprehensive campaigns to break down and explain the direct impacts of the American Rescue Plan and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, as well as worked collaboratively with state parties across the country to ensure we’re reaching voters in every community. To date, our work has generated more than 1,600 news clips, meaning we saturated local and national outlets with an average of ~4.3 clips per day. 

The DNC also deployed innovative visibility tactics designed to draw attention to President Biden’s agenda and highlight the critical work Democrats are doing to build our nation back better. Notable tactics include a billboard in Times Square, static and digital billboards in more than 20 states, projections on buildings, planes carrying banner messages, and a 3-week, nationwide bus tour focused on the incredible impacts of the Build Back Better agenda.

Building a Party That Reflects the Diversity of America

Truly a grassroots-powered organization: No hyperbole: This has been the best fundraising off-year in DNC history. In 2021 so far, the DNC has brought in $146.5 million, with most of that coming from grassroots fundraising channels. 61% of our 1 million donors are women, our average gift is $43, and teachers are the number one reported occupation of our donors. And we’ve built a strong foundation for the future – 2021 broke the record for monthly sustaining donor revenue raised in any year, beating even 2020 in sustaining revenue.

Coalition building and organizing in communities of color: The DNC invested in coalition building and organizing in communities of color to lay the groundwork for a more permanent and community-based program. Connecting with grassroots communities early, often, and meaningfully, pays off when it comes to winning elections – more volunteer leaders and more physical presence in the community means even more critical votes. 

As states prepare to scale efforts on the ground, the DNC invests resources to engage Black, AAPI, Latino, and tribal leaders and beyond through a variety of outreach events, cultural celebrations, and mobilization activities. One of our most successful programs was the celebration of culture and diversity across constituencies, reaching tens of thousands with large headliner events for Hispanic Heritage Month and AAPI Heritage Month, as well as an artist collaboration with an Indigenous artist for Native Heritage Month. In tandem with this programming, the DNC engages with over 150 organizations to collaborate in building electoral strategy and mobilizing key constituencies. The partnerships span across every coalition and include major national, state, and local organizations.

Expanding the electorate: This year the DNC announced an initial investment of nearly $5 million on a new voter registration program, which prioritizes multimodal outreach to communities of color in order to strengthen our ground game across the battlegrounds and lay the foundation for Democrats up and down the ballot to be successful in 2022 and beyond. This investment supports on the ground voter registration outreach efforts in states like Arizona, Florida, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Nevada, where we know there are critical opportunities to expand the electorate for Black and Latino communities as well as college campuses.

Talent development and diverse, local pipelines: The DNC launched the Campaign Readiness Project to recruit, train, and place staff on the ground early ahead of the midterm elections. This effort emphasizes diverse, local talent, and has already helped train, place, and fully-fund dozens of state party staff – a majority of whom are people of color. Programs for distributed organizing, protecting the vote, and data and analytics resources are off and running.

Developing Early Midterm Infrastructure

Organizing and mobilizing voters: We maintained and grew our Biden-Harris distributed volunteer community, which included 200,000+ supporters across the country trained in talking to voters via phone calls, text messages, and relational outreach. In addition, we developed a community of supporters to be ambassadors online on behalf of Democrats and the Biden-Harris administration, with an emphasis on distributing content across various platforms. Our Organizing team spent the year building and maintaining the volunteer infrastructure necessary to be successful in 2022 and beyond – directly supporting state programs with upcoming volunteer and voter mobilization efforts. These efforts resulted in more than 14,000 shifts being completed by volunteers, 1.5 million phone calls and 6.2 million text messages directed to get out the vote (GOTV) efforts for NM-01, the California recall, Virginia and New Jersey, and other elections on behalf of Democrats up and down the ballot. 

Protecting the right to vote: This summer, the DNC announced a major expansion of the ‘I Will Vote’ initiative to address and overcome pernicious efforts across the country to make voting more difficult. We built our largest ever state infrastructure, with teams already on the ground in 12 states; supported 12 elections in 2021; massively increased national volunteer capacity; ran a successful staff training bootcamp that placed staff on the ground; and improved reporting mechanisms leading to tracking 10x as many voting issues than in 2019. The DNC will continue the work of building out our voter protection infrastructure by staffing the largest voter protection program in DNC history, maintaining and improving our data and technology tools, and building capacity through year-round engagement with volunteers.

$20 million investment in technology: The DNC, and its team of 60 technologists, knows the data, infrastructure, and tools needed for victories should be built to last and leveraged across the entire Democratic ecosystem. This year, the DNC rebuilt core systems, tested new data sources, and trained current and future data staffers to leverage these cutting edge technologies. Total technology investments – from purchasing VoteBuilder licenses for the entire hardside ecosystem to enhancing the voterfile with advanced targeting models and contact data to provide cybersecurity trainings at scale – topped $20 million in 2021. We also continued to attract top tech talent, with twenty new team members, including our new Head of Engineering.

Doubling Down on the 57-State-and-Territory Strategy 

$15.5 million in State Party Partnership funding: This year, the DNC announced an agreement with our state parties, with a commitment to send $12,500 to every state, every month through the State Party Partnership (SPP) program. This represents a 25% increase over 2020 and is a vital resource for historically red states to build a sustainable foundation for targeted electoral programs. These grants will ensure innovation and early organizing by putting more boots on the ground throughout the country to help elect Democrats up and down the ticket in 2022.

First-of-its-kind $2 million Red State Fund: The DNC established a brand new Red State Fund to put Republicans on defense and build tailored programs for traditionally Republican states. The Red State Fund includes $2 million in direct investments and grants for states that meet two of the following criteria: no Democratic senator or governor, less than 25% of the congressional delegation are Democrats, and a supermajority of Republicans in their state legislature. In June, the DNC boosted its monthly investment up to $15,000 for 20 state parties and began granting from the Fund. This has meant more than $400,000 for red states already this year, acknowledging the unique challenges they face. This has included investments in Nebraska Democrats’ municipal organizing and GOTV in Lincoln and Omaha; funding for West Virginia Democrats’ political director and partnering on coalition-building; and seeding South Carolina Democrats’ voter registration program with a six-figure investment.

No Off Years
Investments in New Jersey, Virginia, and California Democrats’ coordinated campaigns: The DNC approached 2021 with a “no off years” mentality, and provided substantial 2021 electoral support up and down the ballot by working closely with the Virginia Democrats and New Jersey Democrats to invest over $6 million and over $1 million, respectively, to support coordinated campaign staffing, distributed organizing capacity, training, voter protection support, coalition-building, GOTV, and more, in both critical states. 

In New Jersey, Democrats upended a decades-long trend of losses for the incumbent president’s party in year one of a presidency and reelected a Democratic governor in the state for the first time in 44 years. And while the final result was not what we had hoped for in Virginia, there were positive signs that we got a lot right about our approach. Terry McAuliffe won a staggering 50% more votes than last time he was on the ballot in 2013. We even surpassed the historic turnout that propelled Ralph Northam into office in 2017. In counties that President Biden won last year, turnout was up 14%. 

Since November 2, the DNC has conducted internal and external post mortem analyses on Virginia and New Jersey program takeaways, best practices, and areas of improvement, which will be useful as the DNC ramps up for the midterms.

Additionally, the DNC worked with the California Democratic Party to ensure that Governor Newsom’s campaign had the support it needed to be successful in September’s recall election. Throughout the campaign, the DNC leveraged our distributed organizing program to make calls urging California voters to vote no on the recall and our digital organizing infrastructure to GOTV. This work included a weekend of action with volunteers across the country to GOTV and specific phone banks designed to reach and turn out voters of color.

Competing up and down the ballot: The DNC invested in many key races and special elections across the country in an effort to get more Democrats elected up and down the ballot. 

In Pennsylvania, the DNC made a six-figure investment to support the Pennsylvania Democratic Party’s mobilization programs for races across the state, including the statewide Supreme Court and county races. In New Mexico, the DNC contributed $25,000 to the state party to support early vote and GOTV efforts for the special election in NM-01. In cities across the country, the DNC supported GOTV programs for the Democratic Mayors Association’s priority races, including Mayor Joyce Craig’s reelection in Manchester, New Hampshire; Ken Welch’s race in St. Petersburg, Florida, making history as the city’s first Black mayor; and Mayor Quentin Hart’s reelection in Waterloo, Iowa, reelecting the city’s first Black mayor for another term.

Because of the crucial foundation we laid this year and the stellar team we have at the DNC, I am more confident than ever that we are positioned for success going into next year. I’m excited about all we’ve done because we have real results to show for it. Forget words like “historic” or “transformative.” This work is a big deal because it addresses the everyday needs of Americans across the country. 

You’ve heard me say it a million times, and you’ll keep hearing me say it: Democrats deliver. And I thank you for everything you’ve done to make that possible. 

Happy Holidays!

Jaime