Campaigns are fast-paced pop-up organizations. They tend to stick to the same familiar playbook, leaning toward doing what's always been done -- hoping it works out, then repeating the 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
Meta-analytic answers from the experimental literature — with disagreement, uncertainty, and sample sizes on the surface, not buried in footnotes.
Tactics scored across effect size, cost, evidence quality, and feasibility. A matrix, not a leaderboard.
Paste a link or a claim. Get a verdict on whether it holds in your electoral context.
Every tactic crossed with every salience level, colored by evidence strength. The empty cells are findings too.
BUILT FOR THE INFRASTRUCTURE LAYER
We measure. We ingest all the available high-quality research. We test. We partner. We improve progressive campaigns.
...at advocacy organizations allocating tactics for scores of races.
...deciding how we will improve campaigns for cycles to come.
...setting the defaults that hundreds of campaigns will inherent.
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.