No Tricks, All Treats Youth Vote Update 🎃 — October 31st

By NextGen America Executive Director, Ben Wessel

Happy Halloween, folks! There’s officially less than 100 hours until polls close, and the NextGen America team has kicked into high gear to get all the young goblins and ghouls out there to the polls!

BIG NUMBERS INCOMING

NextGen has been prepping for this weekend for two years and our progress has just far surpassed anything I could have imagined. Some eye-popping stats from the NextGen America team:

• We’ve gathered 441,630 pledges to vote from young voters in battleground states this year (116% to our ambitious goal of 381,000 pledges we set this spring).
• We’ve now had more than 20,000 volunteers reach out to their peers and young voters across our states.
• And, in just one day yesterday, we sent 1,305,425 texts and made 741,368 calls.

Head over to https://nextgenamerica.org/insider/ for a full look at NextGen’s stats for the cycle, but I can’t stress enough that the youth turnout surge we’re seeing couldn’t happen without the valiant efforts of hundreds of organizers and thousands of volunteers across the country from NextGen and our allies. Three cheers for the organizers!

EARLY VOTE UPDATE

Yesterday was the last day of in-person early vote in several key states (AZ, NV) and this weekend will be the end in key places like North Carolina and Florida. NextGen has been watching early vote like a hawk. We’ve focused on young people that aren’t necessarily likely to vote at all, let alone vote early. And yet check out the numbers from some key states:

These are amazing numbers. And there’s more:

• Nearly 1 in 4 of the young, progressive voters we’re targeting across the 16 states that will pick the President and the Senate have already voted.
• More than 10% of our TOP targets (very infrequent progressive voters in 11 top battlegrounds) have already voted.

I’ll be digging deeper into the early vote data later today and should have a longer note out tomorrow about what this means for the youth vote.

VOLUNTEER UPDATE!

Just wanted to remind you that you can join our team of more than 20,000 volunteers sending texts and making phone calls. Here’s a special shout-out to star recruiters Ariana Grande and Katy Perry! And shout out to our social media influencer program, which has recruited thousands of influencers who are volunteering in their own way: by reaching nearly 70 million people, including superstar influencer Joshua Rush, who appeared on Good Morning America today.

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Let’s go win,

Ben