Our Origin
After the 2016 election, a sense of emergency led friends and neighbors in Brooklyn to found #GetOrganizedBK. Under that umbrella, we formed Red2Blue, with the goal of living up to our name: flipping red seats blue — especially at the state and local levels.
We are now a member-led organization of more than 2,000 volunteers across the country. We cover a wide range of personal and professional backgrounds: small business owners, programmers, writers, editors, social workers, nurses, students, and many others. We’ve built a close-knit community that we’re proud of, and we’re continuing to grow.
Our Accomplishments
In our first year, 2017, we focused on Virginia where we:
ran texting programs for 45 candidates for the House of Delegates, reaching more than half a million voters;
created websites;
ran phone banks;
managed Facebook pages;
held fundraisers; and
canvassed for eight candidates in difficult but flippable districts.
The result: Democrats gained 15 seats in the state legislature, leaving them in a position to take the majority in 2019.
We also partnered with community leaders and local representatives to text more than 300,000 of their constituents — especially in African-American communities — and helped to secure Doug Jones’s victory in the race for the U.S. Senate in Alabama..
The following year, 2018, was a banner cycle for Red2Blue. Between the November midterms and special elections, we supported 144 candidates in 18 states, and expanded our membership to more than 2,000 volunteers. Our Texting Team sent messages to 3,900,000 voters for 144 candidates and organizations in 18 states. Four of our Congressional candidates won their seats and helped flip Congress. With the aid of victories by five of our New York state candidates, Democrats took back control of the State Senate. And our texting campaigns helped narrow Republican control over the Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Florida state legislatures.
We also wrote more than 46,000 postcards — for state legislative and Congressional candidates in Pennsylvania and New York, and to urge Florida voters to support the ballot measure restoring voting rights to felons who had served their time. (It passed.) In Pennsylvania, we knocked on more than 15,000 doors and made more than 10,000 calls for state legislative candidates.
We managed the Facebook pages of four U.S. Congressional candidates and held fundraisers for 10 candidates. We worked with the Alabama House Democratic Caucus to recruit 74 candidates — its biggest field in years — to run for the State House of Representatives, and then supported them by creating websites and leading text campaigns.
And our Creative Support Team worked for 35 candidates across the country, creating websites and videos, developing scripts for phone and text banking, designing postcards, palm cards, door hangers, and other materials, and providing executive coaching, media strategies, and photography.
In 2019, Red2Blue provided support for more than 130 candidates running for local and state offices in 20 states. In Virginia, we texted more than 2 million voters, made 7,000 phone calls, wrote 28,660 postcards, and raised $12,000 for five underfunded candidates; and we partnered with WinVirginia, Sister District, and the Democratic Party of Virginia to run texting for 72 state legislative candidates. All these activities played a part in the Democrats’ takeover of the Virginia Assembly that year.
In addition, the Creative Support Team provided ten Virginia and four New Jersey candidates with professional assistance on website development, social media assessment, flyer design, video editing, and more.
We also partnered with grassroots groups, local Democratic parties, and political organizations in Florida, Oregon, Texas, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and New Jersey, providing campaign support and texting programs. And we strengthened our connections with organizations that do electoral work to aid and elect candidates from marginalized communities.
Involvement was off the charts in 2020! Hundreds of Red2Blue volunteers wrote 128,400 cards and letters — in support of Pennsylvania candidates, to counter voter suppression in Georgia, and to re-register purged voters. The Creative Support Team provided 35 campaigns in 11 states with writers, designers, videographers, and other creative professionals. In Pennsylvania, more than 100 volunteers did 1001 shifts at 70-plus phone banks, reaching 4,600 voters. Meanwhile, more than 200 volunteers distributed over 20,000 door hangers, and on election day more than 100 volunteers worked as poll greeters for four state-house candidates. We’re especially proud that all this activity for Democrats played a part in President Biden’s Pennsylvania victory.
In 2021 we focused again on Virginia — texting, phone banking, and writing some 21,000 postcards. Although Democrats didn’t hold their majority in the legislature, the candidates we supported outperformed the top of the ticket — a highly unusual outcome.
Now we’re looking ahead to the 2022 midterms, which we all know are going to be vitally important for preserving American democracy. And we need volunteers!