Turnout Nation started with a pretty simple observation. I’d spent decades working on democracy and elections in countries that were relatively new to contemporary democratic elections. Then I moved back to the United States after many years away and noticed something odd. Almost everything in the US said about elections was about who people voted for and why. There was surprisingly little conversation or data about the millions of people who simply didn’t vote and their not voting was the most decisive thing about the outcome of the election. The more I looked at it, the more I thought we might be making the whole thing too complicated.
Most regular voters aren’t politically obsessive. They don’t spend their evenings studying candidate websites. They vote because that’s what they do. It’s a habit. So I started talking to people who were eligible to vote but didn’t. I asked what might actually get them to vote. Again and again, the answer was pretty simple: if a friend they trusted helped them through it, and knew whether they actually voted, they'd vote. That didn’t seem very complicated. Or difficult.
So we started Turnout Nation. The basic idea was that ordinary people would each help ten friends vote. We called them Captains. Then, because we wanted to know whether this actually worked rather than merely congratulate ourselves for having a clever idea, we tested it. It worked. Really well. Then we tested it again. It worked again. So we kept going. It came to be known as the Captain Method.
Along the way, we realized something else. People already belong to communities: teams, clubs, workplaces, neighborhoods, schools, congregations, book groups, friend groups and a thousand other little collections of human beings. Those relationships are far more powerful than another advertisement from somebody you’ve never met.
Those communities are who Turnout Nation is trying to help, at a much larger scale.
It's nonpartisan. It’s surprisingly simple. It works.
And, unusually for something involving elections, it can actually be fun.
We’re building something a little different.
We hope you'll come be part of it.
Turnout Nation started with a pretty simple observation. I’d spent decades working on democracy and elections in countries that were relatively new to contemporary democratic elections. Then I moved back to the United States after many years away and noticed something odd. Almost everything in the US said about elections was about who people voted for and why. There was surprisingly little conversation or data about the millions of people who simply didn’t vote and their not voting was the most decisive thing about the outcome of the election. The more I looked at it, the more I thought we might be making the whole thing too complicated.
Most regular voters aren’t politically obsessive. They don’t spend their evenings studying candidate websites. They vote because that’s what they do. It’s a habit. So I started talking to people who were eligible to vote but didn’t. I asked what might actually get them to vote. Again and again, the answer was pretty simple: if a friend they trusted helped them through it, and knew whether they actually voted, they'd vote. That didn’t seem very complicated. Or difficult.
So we started Turnout Nation. The basic idea was that ordinary people would each help ten friends vote. We called them Captains. Then, because we wanted to know whether this actually worked rather than merely congratulate ourselves for having a clever idea, we tested it. It worked. Really well. Then we tested it again. It worked again. So we kept going. It came to be known as the Captain Method.
Along the way, we realized something else. People already belong to communities: teams, clubs, workplaces, neighborhoods, schools, congregations, book groups, friend groups and a thousand other little collections of human beings. Those relationships are far more powerful than another advertisement from somebody you’ve never met.
Those communities are who Turnout Nation is trying to help, at a much larger scale.
It's nonpartisan. It’s surprisingly simple. It works.
And, unusually for something involving elections, it can actually be fun.
We’re building something a little different.
We hope you'll come be part of it.
Mark Mullen, Founder of Turnout Nation