Thanks to the support of many people who’ve contributed to Bigtent, over 200 young people between our paid creators and paid staff were paid to do voter registration and turnout work for the first time. These are 200 more people whose contribution made a difference.
With the election results now nearly solidified and the transition finally underway, it’s clear that Bigtent Creative contributed to flipping former red states like Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and GEORGIA of all places, blue.
Bigtent by the Numbers
TikTok
With 44,710,144 views over 293 videos made by 186 of our Digital Organizers on TikTok, we met Gen Z voters where they were in a time when traditional organizing practices weren’t possible due to COVID-19. What’s more, we engaged more young voters than are typically reached by traditional campaign organizing tactics.
Lenses and Filters
On Snapchat and Instagram, we doubled down on the tactics that helped our team get its start back when we were a volunteer organization for Warren’s Meme Team. With 7,250,169 shares and 182,277,594 views of our Snapchat and Instagram lenses we engaged millions of young voters throughout the 2020 cycle, making a massive impact.
We are incredibly proud of all of the work our Digital Organizers have done this cycle to create authentic, thoughtful, and informative content for their followers on TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitch...and even with creators from OnlyFans!
Gen Z, a 2020 Force to be Reckoned With
The impact of young voters and voters of color cannot be discounted in key states where black and brown communities came out in full force to organize themselves and others, making their voices heard this election. This election, youth turnout was much higher than in 2016, increasing by as much as 10% overall.
Georgia led the nation in youth voter registration, with a 34% jump from 2016 to 2020, something we hope comes in handy this January. Factors such as diversity (a true hallmark of Gen Z) in the changing population as more and more Latinx and Asian voters move to Georgia from other northern areas, and the general population becoming increasingly younger, were key to the state flipping blue for the first time in 28 years.
We’ve seen this trend play out in many other critical areas where 2020 saw voter demographics change, confirming the reality that Gen Z is the most diverse generation ever. This along with the fact that their pairing with Millennials makes them the largest voting bloc, edging out older, white, Boomers has enabled this tide of change that we previously mentioned could be a reality.
In a study by Tufts’ Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), they found that young voters preferred Joe Biden to Donald Trump in 32 of the 39 states for which they had data and that in the seven states President Trump won the youth vote, he did so by less than 10 percentage points.
An anecdote our team found fascinating in this study was that while Texas (a state we had a ton of traction and engagement in) went red for Trump, it went pretty solidly blue for Biden in terms of the youth vote with 62%, a much higher rate than swing states that went blue such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia. Maybe this is a sign of what the future of politics in Texas will look like???
Black, Latinx, and Indigenous Voters helped end the Trump Presidency
We owe a debt of gratitude to people of color for helping us put Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the White House. While white youth voted for Biden by a slim margin (51% to 45%), youth of color gave him overwhelming support. In fact, in states like Georgia and Arizona, Black and Latino youth may have single-handedly made Biden competitive.
They did impressive work that has been in the making for decades as these two voting blocs have quietly grown larger and larger and been led by powerful women. That being said, they weren’t alone in this fight; the Tribal Nations were also active in record numbers this year helping turn critical states blue.
As reported by Phenomenal Woman Action Campaign on Monday, November 2, 2020
Latinas were one of the biggest bets this election cycle, exceeding expectations by not only bringing in Arizona and Nevada, but also in states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Georgia where they helped increase Latinx voter turnout exponentially by over 2x and 5x in certain states.
Navajo Nation and other indigenous tribes played perhaps the largest role they’ve ever played in an election. Despite having some of the highest COVID-19 rates in America, Navajo Nation increased their turnout and went 97% for Biden - an unbelievable feat we’ve never seen before. Their impact was especially felt in Arizona, where we worked with Digital Organizer Kymon Palau to engage Gen Z voters in Navajo Nation. The state flipped blue for the first time in 24 years and saw 89% of Navajo Nation turnout to vote, mostly for Biden. Looking at the below maps, it’s easy to see the tribe’s impact.
As pundits across the world commented on the election results, Abby Philip from CNN noted that for the first time, black women who have long been the backbone of the party doing the work, will see one of their own in the White House, a home built by slaves. This is not only a powerful image, but one we can’t take for granted as we think about these communities and what comes next.
Our most viewed TikTok post of the election was made by a young, black Gen Z voter Marco Ellis from Florida whose video got 2.6 MILLION VIEWS. While you might expect a post with that many views to have a viral TikTok dance-y flair to it, Marco’s post was heart-wrenching and impactful, educating his peers about the reality of what a second term under Trump would look like depending on the issue the viewer cared about. Check out the post below:
As the CEO at Bigtent, I made an effort this election cycle to invest in young people of color, especially women, as Digital Organizers because when I was growing up in the Bronx I almost never saw people from my own community in traditional political organizing jobs. That’s changing now, and I want Bigtent to play a major role as we continue to think about ways we can engage Gen Z voters around social justice issues.
Experimentation and Ideation: Lessons on Digital Organizing in 2020
This election cycle, Bigtent experimented with a wide variety of social media platforms: so far, we have been organizing with a diverse set of platforms from YouTube to Twitch streams to collaborating with OnlyFans creators alongside our longer-running work on TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram.
These experiments were just that—experiments that sometimes underperformed but other times astounded us with new areas to organize in, that we could utilize. We never would’ve anticipated that the YouTube horror movie world was so into voter registration, or that OnlyFans creators were so eager to work on GOTV efforts!
These experiments taught us how to best organize online for this election cycle, and therefore how to organize better in all future elections, whether the upcoming Georgia runoffs or down-the-line midterms.
Georgia on My Mind
The work, and the election doesn’t stop with the Presidential election though; it’s never stopped. The run-off election of Reverend Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff is not only critical to flipping the Senate and making sure Biden can work with Congress in his new administration, it’s also the single most important unknown shaping the next decade of U.S. politics.
Right now we’re looking at a pretty stark reality in which Republicans dominate 2020’s redistricting, they hold a majority in the SCOTUS, and they can block all Biden judges as they’ve done previously. Should we win these seats, a Democratic Senate would limit these outcomes.
Registering new voters is key to succeeding as we saw in the results that enabled Democrats to flip Georgia, and those voter registration efforts were mostly done by groups like us. That being said, in March, 24,000 Republicans turned out to vote in the Primary but for some reason did not vote in the General. It’s unclear why they didn’t vote, but if they voted in March we need to prepare for the potential that they might vote again this January -- so how do we handle this? We register more voters. Between now and January 5, 2020 there will be approximately 23,000 new eligible Gen Z voters turning 18. We need to register all of them and get them out to vote.
Stay tuned for more information on this work and our work with other grassroots partners, coming soon!