See you in Court, Mr. Governor
23,500 Voters Registered and a Lawsuit in Texas
🚨 Alert: We just filed a lawsuit in Texas 🚨
On October 1, Gregory Abbott, the governor of Texas, issued an executive order aimed at suppressing voters across the state by limiting the number of ballot drop off locations to one per county.
This cheap tactic is not okay. That’s why we decided to take action by joining forces with Perkins Coie, (You may have heard of a few of their clients like Hillary Clinton, the DNC, DSCC to name a few….) and the Texas Association for Retired Advocates in filing this lawsuit.
Governor Abbott’s executive order was designed to disenfranchise voters, it suppresses Gen Z and voters of color and serves as an attack on democracy. Sadly, this won’t be the only tactic we see this year to silence the voices of the young, the marginalized and the working class, but we are ready to do what we can to stop it.
As of this moment, here’s what we know:
We expect Governor Abbott to direct the state to respond to our filing within the week, and we hope to have a hearing.
If all goes well, the court will rule next week in time for Early Voting, so that everyone in Texas has accessible ballot return locations available to them.
As you may recall from previous newsletters, we’ve seen overwhelming demand among Gen Z to register to vote and take part in the democratic process. As an organization that represents these young voters, it’s our job to ensure we do everything in our power to make that happen by speaking up for those who are being underserved in our democracy, and ensuring they have a fair and free election.
Want to join the fight? Join me and a bunch of voting and election experts this Thursday for “Every Vote Counts,” an event aimed at plugging voters in solid blue districts like SF, NYC, and others into helping protect the vote in Swing States across the country.
BTW, while we’re talking about big things happening at Bigtent…
We hit 23,500 voters registered today. Damn that feels good.
This is our week over week data. It’s Tuesday morning and we’ve already passed 1k voters ! This is likely due to Voter Registration Deadlines yesterday and today.
In two months, we've multiplied our weekly voter registrations by more than130x over what we were registering in early August, reaching 23,500. Boom.
Swinging - 8 Points up in Arizona, and other Target States
Additionally, we've seen Texas voter registration increase by 135% week over week, and in that same time, Arizona registration increased by 21%. Polls in Arizona are finding a strong lead for Biden driven by Latinx voters, young voters, and women, which is consistent with our registration data.
We're also seeing a steady number of registrations in the swing states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and we expect registrations to continue to go up there as voter registration deadlines get closer in the upcoming week, just like we saw happen in Texas and Arizona.
Here’s what we’re seeing just from our “Target States” which include typical battleground states like Wisconsin, Florida, and Pennsylvania, but also a few of the potential wildcards that have picked up speed since 2018’s blue wave 🌊 like Arizona, Texas, and Georgia.
#WhyImVoting
Speaking of Voting Rights and increasing numbers, we launched a powerful campaign last week with our creators called #WhyImVoting. As you can tell from our almost 10k jump from last week, we’ve seen some incredibly engaging content from Gen Z with #WhyImVoting, but it’s not all silly dance videos. It’s fact driven, information reporting from one Gen Zer to another.
Take Yadeal Asfaw and Brenna Lip for instance - they’ve used this platform to give full on history lessons to their peers that are not only engaging, but let their peers know how important this election is.
Brenna Lip’s #WhyImVoting post gives a history lesson on voting disenfranchisement along with a plea to her peers to get involved by registering to vote and voting
Some Bigtent Creative Fast Facts and Figures
The “Secret Sauce”
People keep asking how we’re registering as many voters as we are, but the simple truth is there’s no secret sauce - we’re just mostly organizing on Tiktok.
You don’t need to be in college to be on TiKTok, you don’t need to be wealthy to be on TiKTok. You don’t need to believe that people are investing in your future to be on TiKTok. You just need to be scrolling on your phone, standing in line somewhere. If you’re poor, you spend a lot of time standing in lines. That’s how we’re reaching new voters. We’re reaching out to people who aren’t normally invited to be part of the electoral process.
How do I know? The data speaks for itself! We broke down our voter registrations by platform and found the following:
Bigtent Creative’s voter registrations, broken down by social media platform percentage
One thing we’ve been curious about the last few weeks as we’ve made the final push for voter registration deadlines is where all our voter registrations are coming from. At any given time, we have dozens of influencer campaigns going on on different platforms as we test things out, while expanding beyond TikTok. Despite our expanding efforts, TikTok is very clearly our leading platform, followed by Instagram, as the main platforms we engage voters on most.
Who are these 23,500+ Voters on TikTok and Instagram?
The next obvious question is who are these voters? While the number of Instagram registrations was a little surprising for us, the following breakdown wasn’t.
Bigtent Creative’s voter registrations, broken down by age group percentage
While we know we’ve been reaching Gen Z more than any other group, the sheer number of first time voters we are likely reaching and registering in the “18-20” category, is inspiring. Whoever said young people don’t care about voting, clearly hasn’t met Gen Z.
When’s the best time to register to vote?
You know how there are certain recommended times around when to send an email if you want to reach someone? Well, we’ve also learned a thing or two about when to push Gen Z to register to vote.
Our Rock the Vote Data showcasing what days of the week have the most activity for voter registrations
While it may sound a bit silly, the above research from a pool of Rock the Vote data gave us a little more insight into the activity and response of our audience, specifically what days they like to take action. Oddly enough, even though people say not to send a big email on a Friday, apparently that’s the day to get things taken care of when it comes to voter registration, closely followed by Tuesday. And we all know that Tuesdays are important to voting!
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We’ll be back with new information, data, and analysis from our campaigns every week from now until Election Day. Help us spread the word about how crucial TikTok, online voter registration, and the other work we are doing is by forwarding this email to friends who care about democracy and voter outreach. Have questions or media inquiries? Contact us at bigtent@bigtentcreative.com.