Campaigns are fast-paced pop-up organizations that rely on a familiar playbook. Our approach to campaigninging is: do what's always been done, hope for the best outcome, then repeat next cycle.
What works for a schoolboard race does not translate to a Congressional. And misappropriating effects is causing an overreliance on the wrong tactics and a lot of wasted money.
The experimental literature skews heavily toward low-salience elections, where any contact moves voters more. The famous numbers are real and sometimes large. They just don't apply at that level to large competitive races.
A canvassing result from a respected study gets touted everywhere, then becomes a line item in every campaign of every size. Nothing justifies that leap but the money gets raised and spent for it regardless.
Tactic efficacy varies greatly by context. Yet many tactic-and-context combinations have not been studied. This leads to shaky inferences, educated guesses, and campaign strategies based on wishful thinking.
Decades of randomized campaign experiments tell us a lot about what moves voters. Progressive Labs has broken down every element to tell you what works, what doesn't, and when.
Our work
Create a multi-year, real-time framework to measure what actually drives voter turnout and candidate support.
Partner with state and local campaigns to provide funding and execution support to test promising approaches.
Find, test, and foster new approaches that can influence electoral outcomes at every level of the ballot.
Integrate best practices into campaign tools so organizations of any size can run optimized operations.
The Tools
Our Ask engine has consumed hundreds of scientific reports. So ask it anything.
Compare campaign tactics against your own situation.
Find out if a tactic is good for your campaign.
A map of every campaign tactic studied across every type of election.
BUILT FOR THE INFRASTRUCTURE LAYER
We measure. We ingest all the available high-quality research. We test. We partner. We improve progressive campaigns.
For advocacy organizations allocating tactics for scores of races.
For progressive funders deciding how we will improve campaigns for cycles to come.
For those setting the defaults that hundreds of campaigns will inherent.
Campaign advice is usually someone's opinion. Ours is built from decades of real experiments, checked line by line, and turned into tools that tell you what the evidence actually shows.
The tools are available to advocacy organizations, funders, and party committee staff. Tell us who you are and what you would use the tools for. We review every quest and respond within a day.