THE PRIMARY
Erik Aadland ran for Congress in CO-7. Going into the primary, it was considered a close race between the 3 candidates.
The campaign's strategy was based on a robust, high-touch grassroots organization using the SwipeRed app for volunteers to share Friend-to-Friend, Peer-to-Peer Messages, social media posts, campaign events, issue positions talking points, and to keep volunteers engaged.
“SwipeRed provided a unique nimbleness and platform integration that was invaluable in our outreach efforts in Colorado’s 7th District. SwipeRed’s data driven outreach system and intuitive UI allowed us to quickly reach voters with the targeted message for the Erik Aadland field team to share an ever-changing election. SwipeRed provided us with the scale needed to reach out to over 400,000 voters and generate the highest turnout of any district in Colorado in the 2022 election." ....Patrick Davis General Consultant
How to reach voters in a fast and effective way to turn out voters. Along with in-person tactics, the Aadland campaign adopted SwipeReds’ cost-effective all-in-one outreach.
THE SOLUTION
SwipeRed automatically syncs advocates' personal contacts to the app, and advocates can easily call, text, and email messages to those they know from the app. SwipeRed played a crucial role in Aadland's victory. Using the Friend-to-Friend efforts, the campaign was able to identify nearly 1,000 voters, not in the voter file. SwipeRed had a 62% adoption rate!
All these efforts allowed the campaign to maximize the contributions from volunteers from across the district. Aadland won with 33,945 votes, and the volunteers had touched 23,792 unique voters multiple times. Aadland’s campaign volunteers messaged 23,792 people and sent 290,562 messages.
Thanks to the support of over 80 primary Aadland advocates and the power of peer-to-peer texting and relational organizing, Aadland led highly successful grassroots organizing campaign and secured 48% (12pp more than his closest competitor) of the votes to win the primary.
The campaign team created curated messaging with localized information for voters, allowing volunteers to contact their friends and other voters swiftly. The campaign also took advantage of SwipeRed's events and data capture forms functionality to drive voters to the events and stay in touch with them after the event. Coordinators in the campaign kept their operations running smoothly by using push notifications to motivate volunteers to send messages and send progress updates.
Going into the General Election, we knew the odds were with the Democrats since a Republican had not held that seat since 2004.
The strategy was to divide the district into precincts and deploy Area Coordinators across CD-07. As part of their role, they recruited 166 SwipeRed volunteers who reached out to friends, family, and others in the district. They shared 1,149,177 messages from SwipeRed. They also shared campaign-crafted social media posts on their profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Linkedin. Overwhelmingly, the Aadland volunteers did share their contacts with the SwipeRed app. Using the SwipeRed conversation capability, they engaged 5,394 voters in a one-on-one text conversation.
In the final weeks leading up to the election, the Campaign Engineer started to chase ballots using targeted data from Delphi, and SwipeRed advocates would message voters to return their ballots.
THE CONCLUSION
CD-07 is a D+7 district, but Erik Aadland outperformed all expectations. His performance topped Donald Trump and Mitt Romney. Using SwipeRed, he increased the conservative turnout by 25.7% compared to 2018. 97% of all new votes were for Aadland; 43% of votes that had gone to the libertarian party in the past were cast in support of Aadland. In terms of total turnout, Aadland added 7.3% to the votes cast compared to 2018.