The Environmental Voter Project has a unique approach: rather than convincing people to care about climate change, it identifies people who already do, but don't consistently vote, and works to get them to the polls. In this episode, EVP founder Nathaniel Stinnett discusses how to find these voters, keep them engaged, and measure their impact.
Text transcript:
David Roberts
There are lots of green nonprofits out there trying to make voters care more about climate change, through education and persuasion. As any of them will tell you, it’s incredibly difficult work. People are quite resistant to changing their minds!
The Environmental Voter Project takes a different approach. Rather than trying to talk anyone into caring about climate, it tries to identify people who already care about climate, but who don’t consistently vote, and get them to the polls. In other words, it tries to change behavior rather than minds, which is much easier.
EVP has been involved in thousands of elections to date and has run randomized control trials to test its own efficacy. Its long-term goal is to build a national bloc of climate voters that any candidate for any office must acknowledge and cater to.
Voter turnout is of intense interest these days, for obvious reasons, so I’m eager to talk to EVP founder and leader Nathaniel Stinnett about how all of this works — how to find these voters, how to get them voting, how to keep them voting, and how to be ruthlessly empirical about measuring progress.
With no further ado, Nathaniel Stinnett, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Thank you, David. I'm so excited for this conversation.
David Roberts
Yeah, I've been meaning to talk to you forever. You know, and it's funny, this is one of those classic pods where when I first agreed to it, I was like, "I don't know, is there enough here to talk about for an hour, like...?" And then I started reading into it and digging into it, and now, of course, I'm in my more familiar position, which is, how on earth are we gonna cover all this in one hour? So let's get into it. Your organization is premised on this four-step process. I want to dig into every step of it, but maybe let's just start with the minute to two-minute kind of elevator pitch of what those four steps are.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Sure. So, the Environmental Voter Project is a nonpartisan nonprofit that is laser-focused on turning non-voters into new voters, into consistent voters. We're trying to dramatically increase the number of environmentalists who vote. And the four-step process is as follows. First, we need to identify them, right? We need to find who these people are who care deeply about climate and the environment, yet aren't voting. But then once we do that with a level of certainty where we feel that we're really getting the right people, well, that opens us up to step two, which is being able to then message to them to do one thing and one thing only, and that is vote.
And what's really special about this point in the process is, if we've done our job and we've accurately identified these people who care deeply about climate and the environment, well, then we can be completely agnostic with our messaging. We don't need to talk about climate or the environment. We could talk about chocolate chip cookies if that's what it takes to get them to vote. And so, we run hundreds of randomized control trials and we work with thousands of volunteers, just optimizing which messages work best.
David Roberts
That's a juicy topic.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Yeah, then the third step is — you don't need to live behavioral science each day like we do to be able to intuitively understand that if you want to change people's habits, you can't just pay attention to the big, sexy elections that happen once every two years. You need to maximize your opportunities to talk to these people. So, we work year-round, using every election, even ones that have nothing to do with climate, as an opportunity to change these people's behavior, so that ultimately we can get to step four, which is to change the electorate. Our theory of change does not rely upon politicians stumbling upon the perfect policy or deciding what to do out of the goodness of their hearts.
No, we know that nothing motivates a politician more than the prospect of winning or losing elections. And so, they always have to go where the voters are. And so, it's incumbent upon us to build electoral demand for climate leadership and that's what we're laser-focused on.
David Roberts
Right, so find the climate voters, get them to vote, get them to keep voting, and then change the world.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Absolutely.
David Roberts
All right, well, let's start with step one then. This is — you know, I have a little bit of skepticism about all these things relating to figuring out what voters think and what they do. So let's talk about identifying them then. Basically, what you're doing is looking at polls and identifying people who say climate is their top priority. That is a radical simplification. Maybe talk us through how you find someone who is registered to vote. So, is a voter, but is not currently voting, but highly prioritizes climate change. That's a very particular kind of voter. How do you find them?
Nathaniel Stinnett
Yeah, so no sophisticated campaigns target by demographic group anymore. So, no more soccer moms, no more NASCAR dads. They're all targeting individuals. And the process works like this. At the Environmental Voter Project, we want to target these individuals who list climate as a top priority and aren't voting. But we obviously can't interview every single American to find out which ones prioritize climate. So, we need a more efficient and actually doable approach that doesn't sacrifice too much accuracy. And the way we do it is we build predictive models on voter files. And this process that I'm about to explain to you is the same technique that presidential and Senate campaigns are using right now in the 2024 elections to target voters.
So, the first step, as you alluded to, David, is a huge poll. We poll like tens of thousands of people. So, let's, as an example, pretend we're in Pennsylvania —
David Roberts
Just to pick a state at random.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Just to pick a state off the map, to throw a dart at the map. Let's say Pennsylvania. We poll 10,000 people and we ask them one question. The one question is, "What's your most important political priority?" And let's say 800 of them say climate or clean air or clean water, some environmental issue. Well, we can then isolate these people on voter files and start trying to learn as much as we can about them. And we work with data scientists who scour voter file data and census data and publicly available behavioral and consumer data.
David Roberts
Yeah, part of this process — I've heard you present this a couple of times now, and I feel like part of what the audience is going through is realizing the creepy extent to which information about them is out there in the public.
Nathaniel Stinnett
It is creepy. Totally. I mean, every time you really just want to download something from the Apple store, and so you quickly scroll to the bottom of the 40-page, like, legal contract and just hit like, okay, well, you are giving up some data about yourself. And, yeah, I freely admit it is creepy, but the climate crisis is pretty creepy, too, David. We're trying to solve some big problems.
David Roberts
I mean, it's all public information. It's all out on the public record and accessible.
Nathaniel Stinnett
That's right. And so these, like, 800 Pennsylvanians in our example, have self-identified as being climate-first people. And we have all this data, and we can slowly but surely start to see patterns and correlations and groups of characteristics that different types of environmentalists have in Pennsylvania. So maybe, like, we find a lot of Latina mothers who live in suburbs and lease a compact car and buy Apple products, who list climate as a top priority, and then maybe there's another bunch of, like, 30-year-olds with graduate degrees who subscribe to National Geographic and buy fancy dog food.
And there are lots of different clusters. Some are strong and some are weak, but we keep on testing and testing and testing these. After a long, iterative process, what we can do is assign a score from 0 to 100 to every individual voter in a state voter file, telling us how likely they are to not just care about climate and the environment, but literally list it as their number one priority.
David Roberts
So, you're pulling a subset. A subset of that subset says climate is their most important priority. You analyze that subset of a subset and then project that out to the whole population. You're trying to figure out what kind of people put climate as their top priority.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Yeah, I would say, what kinds of people. Because there are lots of different clusters like this. And maybe you have a really high probability of being an environmentalist and you look nothing like the environmentalist who lives three blocks over. Because you have all these different data groups. But at the end of it, what's really important to understand is, we assign these probabilistic scores to people and then we say, "Okay, thank you very much, data scientists." And usually, what we do at the Environmental Voter Project is, we chop off the top 15%. We say, "Okay, we're really only interested in people who have at least an 85% likelihood of listing climate or the environment as their top priority. Let's test the accuracy of this model that was just built."
And so, what we do is we call up a polling company and we say, "Hey, can you poll this list of people and ask them what their number one priority is?" And every time we've done that, at least 85% of the respondents have said, "Oh, you know, climate change. Why do you ask?"
David Roberts
Aren't you getting into kind of small sample sizes at that point? Like, if it's a group of 800 people that lists climate as their top priority, and you poll those 800 people, I'm assuming it's like, whatever, 5% of people respond to the poll. You have like 40 responses. Are you getting into too small numbers?
Nathaniel Stinnett
No, because when I say we're testing the accuracy of the model, this is now the model that has been built and applied to the entire state of Pennsylvania. So, we've now put scores onto seven or eight million people, and we've taken the people who this predictive model tells us have a greater than 85% chance. So that's more than a million people. And then we say, "Okay, let's test the accuracy of this model. Let's poll these million people who should have at least an 85% likelihood of listing climate as their top priority." And every time we test it, at least 85% of the respondents say, "Oh, yeah, climate's my top priority."
And I want to be clear, that's not because we're particularly good or bad at this. We don't even build the models ourselves. We hire data scientists to do it. This is how precise this method of political targeting has gotten.
David Roberts
So, I mean, one big question I have is, how do you know what it means exactly that someone puts climate as their top priority? To me, that doesn't necessarily mean anything behavioral. It doesn't necessarily mean anything. Like, it could just be like they think of themselves as the kind of person who prioritizes climate, but that doesn't, like — do I know from that how they're going to behave in a particular context? Or, you know what I mean? You know what I'm fumbling toward here? Like, what do we really know about a person from the fact that they check this box on a poll?
Nathaniel Stinnett
So, I think you're absolutely right to ask that question. And the answer is, "not nearly as much as we would want to," right?
Let's look at the context here. I mean, do we ever know anything about how people vote when they go into the voting booth? Like, you know, this one story that I read, I think it was an Axios story back in 2019, still haunts me, David, where it said that there was a Trump rally in El Paso, Texas, where 50% of the people who registered, when they were, you know, compared back to the voter file, were registered Democrats. I mean, I would suggest to you that party affiliation doesn't tell you how someone is going to behave.
Whether someone tells you over the phone, "Oh, I'm going to vote for Harris or Trump," well, how can you necessarily trust that?
David Roberts
Yeah, and I would just say that, like, even on a broader level, it's not necessarily that you — that I think or that anyone thinks that people are lying on these things. It's just that, like, I'm not necessarily the authority on what I'm gonna do. Do you know what I mean? Like, people are not transparent to themselves. They're not necessarily the authorities on their own behavior either.
Nathaniel Stinnett
That's exactly right. But what gives us confidence is a few things. One, what we are trying to do is change climate and environmental policymaking and what policymakers do to figure out, like, what issues to prioritize and what approaches to take is that they poll voters. And so, chances are they are asking the same questions in the same way as we are.
David Roberts
Well, this is the other side of my skepticism. Maybe we can touch on this later, is whether that is, in fact, how politicians decide what to do.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Yeah.
David Roberts
What to prioritize. There are, after all, lots of issues that command enormous majority agreement across all Americans, which politicians won't touch at all. I mean, go to gun violence or whatever. I mean, it's not a one-to-one correlation between voter priorities and politician priorities.
Nathaniel Stinnett
That's where I think that the distinction between voter preferences and voter priorities is so important because I'm sure you are familiar with, as are many of your listeners, tons of polls that say, "You know, majorities of Americans would prefer their politicians to lead on —" Well, like, you know, majorities of Americans want to get rid of daylight savings. That doesn't like —
David Roberts
They want anything good. I mean, you could just say, like, "Do you want puppies?" Yes, 85% of people want puppies.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Exactly. And this is a particular problem in the climate movement. I mean, we need to be honest with ourselves that support for our sort of bucket of issues is often a mile wide and an inch deep.
David Roberts
Yes.
Nathaniel Stinnett
And so, this is why we think it's so important to build models that don't identify people who would prefer government action on climate change, but rather people who prioritize it as their number one issue over all others. Now, does that guarantee that every time they go into the booth they would do exactly what Nathaniel Stinnett wants them to do? No, like, of course not. But these are people who, when they do vote, or at least when they are polled about voting from a whole list of issues, say, "Oh, yeah, yeah, that's my top priority, climate change or the environment."
David Roberts
So you think at least priorities are a better indicator than preferences at the very least?
Nathaniel Stinnett
Absolutely. It's not only a better indicator of how they are going to vote, but, yeah, I mean, I don't know if you want to get into this now or later. You referenced it, but there is a lot of research showing that, yes, politicians do prioritize the priorities of voters over the priorities of non-voters. And so, it's a really good way to drive policymaking, too.
David Roberts
One thing you found is that low-propensity voters, voters who don't consistently vote, are more likely to prioritize climate change than high-propensity voters. Why? I mean, I'm sure your entire life, all your research is haunted by this question of why? Because you can't really ask it or get a good answer for it. But in your considered judgment, why is that?
Nathaniel Stinnett
Well, first, if you don't mind, because I think it's interesting, I'd like to talk about what we don't know before I get into what we do know. Because I think it's important to be precise about what social science can and can't do. Social scientists are really good at setting up experiments to figure out how to get people to do things right, like buy a product or exercise. It's a lot harder to figure out why people don't do things, because when you ask them, especially if you're asking them about something that society views as important, like voting —
David Roberts
They lie to you.
Nathaniel Stinnett
They lie their pants off. Right. It's called social desirability bias. They're gonna try to give you what they think the most socially acceptable excuse for not voting is.
David Roberts
What I wish people would see about polls generally is that answering a poll is not a snapshot of internal states. It is a behavior. Answering a poll is a behavior. And so you need to think about it as a behavior, not as a window.
Nathaniel Stinnett
And literally, the very first report we ever did, that very first study we did at the Environmental Voter Project, I think, is titled "Why Do People Lie So Much About Voting?" We polled a whole bunch of, like, never-voted environmentalists and compared them to a bunch of environmentalists who always vote. We asked them all the same questions about the importance of voting, and every single person responded in the same way. And, you know, like, the people who never voted said, "Oh, yeah, politicians don't care about my issues." And the people who voted all the time said, "Yeah, politicians don't care about my issues."
And we asked super voters, "Do you think it's important to vote?" They're like, "Yeah, it's really important to vote." We asked non-voters and they said, "Yeah, it's really important to vote." And so, we are very skeptical as well about what polls can tell us about why people don't vote. But now, let me actually answer your question and tell you some things that we do know. So first, people who care deeply about climate are disproportionately young and people of color, two groups that vote less often, partially because they're the target of most voter suppression efforts.
David Roberts
Yeah.
Nathaniel Stinnett
I don't expect elections officials to be twirling their mustaches saying, "Let's get those environmentalists." But that's kind of what they're doing without knowing it.
David Roberts
Yeah, I'm skeptical that that explains the whole thing, though. I mean, like, young people have voted at low rates for time immemorial.
Nathaniel Stinnett
That's exactly right. And indeed, when we silo those specific demographic groups, like, if we just look at young people or we just look at Latinos, the environmentalists still vote less often than other people in that demographic group. So again, I want to admit what we don't know. This is very hard to measure precisely, but there's a lot of sort of anecdotal evidence, if you look at a lot of Pew Research polls and things like that, that the climate movement is strangely apolitical compared to many other movements, by which I mean, we tend to want to address the climate crisis through individual actions like eating less meat or biking to work. Whereas people who are concerned about healthcare or mass shootings —
David Roberts
Yes, the first thing you ask a person who's concerned about healthcare is not, "Are you currently on a diet?" And if not, you have no authority or you have no credibility or whatever.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Totally. Or, you know, I mean, God forbid, let's say there's a mass shooting in your neighborhood. Are you going to say, "Oh, well, you know, maybe I'll personally get rid of all my guns and that'll take care of everything." No, like, they understand that these are systemic political problems that require systemic political solutions. But we haven't internalized that in the climate movement. And there's a lot of good research showing Naomi Oreskes has done a lot of it, that much of this is due to a fossil fuel PR campaign that's been going on for decades, essentially convincing us that the climate crisis is all our personal fault.
"Don't pay attention to that coal-fired power plant back there. Instead, like, look in the mirror because you're carrying a plastic water bottle." And we bought it. We bought it.
David Roberts
Yeah, but like, I mean, these people who are saying they prioritize climate, presumably they have other reasons to vote. I mean, they have other issues. You know what I mean? Like, I guess I just want to know more about these people. You say they're disproportionately young and of color. That's something at least we know about them. Are there other generalizations you can make about these people? Like once you've done the research and identified this very particular group of people, which is, again, a very specific, registered but not voting, climate is number one priority. That's a very thin slice.
Are there other generalizations you can make about those people, about their demographic characteristics or other things they believe? Is this a kind of person or at least a discernible cluster of kinds of people?
Nathaniel Stinnett
No. And, you know, even giving you those, like, demographic generalizations is in itself a little misleading because that makes you think that those demographic data points are themselves predictive.
David Roberts
Right.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Like, the only thing we need to do to find a non-voting environmentalist is to look for the young, female person of color. And no, these are just sort of very, very broad trends that we see, whereas the truth is, there are lots of different types of people who list climate as a top priority, and many of them likely don't vote for different reasons. But again, it's kind of a black box. But what we do know is who they are. We do know that they have a very high likelihood of listing climate as a top priority, and we do know that they don't vote because that is not something that we need fancy data scientists for.
David Roberts
Yes, yes. This is a great segue to our next topic, which is, like, when you're thinking about how to get someone to do something, the most basic question in the universe, you don't really need to know that much specifically about them. Humans are kind of humans a little bit in this area. So, you've now identified — you have literally a list of people?
Nathaniel Stinnett
Yep.
David Roberts
In the millions, is that...?
Nathaniel Stinnett
Yeah, so we work in 19 states, and this year, in 2024, we have identified 4.8 million already registered voters in these 19 states.
David Roberts
What about, like, in Pennsylvania? Would that be like a — ?
Nathaniel Stinnett
In Pennsylvania, we've identified 246,000.
David Roberts
Got it. Okay, so you literally have a list of 246,000 names, addresses, a decent amount of data about their other behaviors and characteristics, and you want to get them to vote. How do you do that?
Nathaniel Stinnett
First, just very basically, logistically, we reach them in five different ways, all of which need to be communications methods where we can individually contact someone, right. Like, we're not going to use a billboard or a television, because ultimately, we're going to run this stuff through a random, randomized control trial and see who votes and who doesn't. So the five ways that we communicate with voters are door-to-door canvassing, phone calls, volunteer postcards. So those three things are done by volunteers, and then we, as a staff, run digital ad campaigns and direct mail campaigns. So those are the five ways that we target these individuals.
And then, as far as the messaging, and I'll speak sort of in very broad terms first, because I imagine you'll want to get into the nitty-gritty example, we don't message about climate change.
David Roberts
Yeah, I think it's pretty well established that talking about climate change does not get people to vote.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Right, right. But more broadly, what we've discovered — and I use "we" very, very humbly and broadly, I'm speaking about, like, you know, decades of academic research has discovered — that most people aren't rational actors when deciding to take a particular action.
David Roberts
What?! Hang on.
Nathaniel Stinnett
I know. Do you have a record scratch sound effect there? Instead, we are usually acting in a way that behavioral scientists call an "expressive choice," where we're trying to express an aspect of our personality.
David Roberts
Yes, it's social.
Nathaniel Stinnett
It's social. We are social beings rather than rational beings. So much of our messaging does not revolve around trying to convince someone of the value of their one vote, but rather it tries to appeal to the type of person they're trying to be seen as and leverage that to get them to vote. And so, a lot of people would view our messages as being manipulative. You know, we're trying to take advantage of little social pressure stuff.
David Roberts
I know this comes up; I'm sure you face this a lot. But to me, that's just a misunderstanding. Literally, any message is manipulative. It has some effect. Literally, any message has some effect.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Absolutely.
David Roberts
And just because you're aware of what the effect is, then you're automatically in a position where you're manipulating. Like, that's just, you can't get people to do things without manipulating them. That's kind of built into the —
Nathaniel Stinnett
That's exactly right. But we have this, you know, as children of the Enlightenment, we have this bias that like the only appropriate way to convince people of things is to rationally change their minds.
David Roberts
Especially, the over-educated PhD holders that dominate the left these days very much want politics to run on reasoned persuasion.
Nathaniel Stinnett
That's right. But think of this as something that Madison Avenue has figured out for decades. Nike went from a garage company to a global behemoth by asking kids if they wanted to be like Michael Jordan.
David Roberts
Yeah, I mean, try to think about a single commercial you've ever seen that was a brief on the empirical advantages of the product relative to other products.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Right.
David Roberts
You know what I mean? Like, they don't even bother with that stuff anymore.
Nathaniel Stinnett
I like to think of the decades-long ad campaign run by Apple where they had a really hip guy saying, "I'm a Mac." And then they had a really nerdy guy saying, "I'm a PC." And you're like, "Oh, I think I'm going to buy that $2,000 laptop because I want to be like a Mac. I want to be a hip person." And like, yeah, it has to do with the type of person you want to be. Not some weirdly rational cost-benefit analysis.
David Roberts
But just to emphasize this point, because I think it's novel and kind of interesting. So, from — if I'm one of those voters and I'm interacting with you — from my perspective, you're not a climate organization, you're not an environmental organization, other than environment being in your name. I would never know from your communications with me that you cared about climate in particular. Is that right?
Nathaniel Stinnett
That's exactly right.
David Roberts
I mean, from my perspective as one of those voters, I mean, never mind my perspective. In actual fact, you're just voter mobilization. You're just getting people to vote. You're not about persuading people, you're not about endorsing bills or endorsing candidates. There's no environmental content in your communications.
Nathaniel Stinnett
That's exactly right. Now, we don't want to be seen as some secret organization. So, we reveal who we are. We say, "I'm a volunteer from the Environmental Voter Project," but then nothing having to do with climate or the environment or a bill or a candidate at all.
David Roberts
So, I'm sort of wondering if I'm a voter. And once someone from your organization comes to canvas at my door, we're having a conversation. They're not talking about climate.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Nope.
David Roberts
What are they talking about, though? What are we having a conversation about? Talking about the merits of voting. Like, what are you, what are they saying to me?
Nathaniel Stinnett
Yeah. So, it's a perfect example. So, if we're doing door-to-door canvassing, we are doing a very, very simple script where we say, "David, there's an election coming up on November 5. Do you intend to vote?" Okay. That's the first important point in the conversation. Most people want to be thought of as good voters.
David Roberts
Yeah, well, they — I feel like everybody will lie to you at their door. At their door when they're talking about that.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Yeah, they're embarrassed. Like, David, we would only be talking to them if they were sucky voters. And so they say, "Oh, yeah, yeah, I'm gonna vote." Boom. Okay. That's the first thing. Now we've laid a trap for them. We've gotten them to say that they're gonna vote.
David Roberts
Yes, they've made a commitment.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Exactly. The second thing, we then say, "Oh, well, you know, are you going to vote early in person or by mail or on election day?" "Oh, you know, I'm going to vote early in person." Okay, have a good day. Bye-bye. That's pretty much it. And it's very simple, but there's actually a lot of sophisticated behavioral science in that very short conversation.
David Roberts
So, that first visit is all about soliciting that commitment and basically nothing else.
Nathaniel Stinnett
It's also about walking them through what get-out-the-vote people call a plan-making exercise.
David Roberts
How you're going to vote.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Yeah, when you do that, when you sort of deepen that groove where people think, "Oh, you know, I guess I'm going to vote..." they picture in their mind the firehouse around the corner where they vote. "You know, I'm going to vote on election day." It's been shown that simply walking through that plan-making exercise makes them more likely to vote. But the real power in that very brief conversation was getting someone who we know is an awful voter to say, "Yes, I am going to vote."
Because then, what we are able to do is follow up with them right before the election and say, "Hey, David, I'm Nathaniel. Remember, you spoke to one of our volunteers and you said you were going to vote. Well, Tuesday is your opportunity to follow through on that promise."
David Roberts
There's tons of research on this. You know, I used to just personally, I used to read Robert Cialdini and all these guys who are super into the behavioral research. I used to be really heavy into this stuff. I just, in the end, sort of could never discern a truly good use of it. And I always sort of came back to like, the only useful application of all this stuff is to get people to frigging vote. So, I'm glad that whole body of knowledge has finally found its proper application. But, like, there's tons of research saying that if people make that commitment, even if they are making it shallowly or without thinking much, or even if they are lying, even if they're consciously lying.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Right.
David Roberts
Just saying it out loud creates this weird marker, this weird weight, that then pushes them to action later.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Well, it's what is perhaps the most unique thing about Homo sapiens, right? It's that we are this almost pathologically social species. And so, societal norms are really strong drivers to behavior. And one of the strongest societal norms we have is that most people want to be thought of as an honest, trustworthy person.
David Roberts
Right.
Nathaniel Stinnett
And so, if you get someone to say that they're going to do something and then remind them that they said they were going to do that, that's a hell of a lot more powerful than me trying to convince you of the importance of voting in Washington State because you care about climate change and this is a big election. That just ain't going to happen.
David Roberts
So, just briefly, I mean, there's a whole bag of tricks here. There's a whole bag of tricks to get people to do something. Just run through a few of them. We don't have, I mean, we could fill the whole pot up with this stuff, but just hit some of the highlights. One is get them on record making a commitment and then remind them of the commitment. That's bizarrely powerful.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Bizarrely powerful. Another one. So, this is one of my favorites, but it can't be done in a presidential election year. But, I'll mention it anyway. We take advantage of a psychological concept called loss aversion. People hate losing things. People hate losing $5 even more than they are excited at getting $5. And so, we use that in the context of trying to get drop-off voters to vote in elections other than presidential elections. So, as you can imagine, there are a whole bunch of people who care about climate who might vote in a presidential election, but nothing else.
And remember, whether you vote or not is public record. So, what we do is we follow up with these people right after a high turnout election and we say, "David, thank you for being a good voter in last November's election. Now, don't ruin your new good voting history by missing your Seattle city council election." We make it seem like this act of voting in a local election for the first time is actually a potential loss. They could lose their new good voting record.
David Roberts
Right. So, by voting, they have gained something.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Exactly.
David Roberts
And by not voting next time, they'll lose it.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Exactly. Another very simple one. And what I like about this is that I think a lot of people have probably experienced it in their own lives. This is a behavioral psychology concept called endowed progress. Now, I don't know if you've ever been to a coffee shop where they gave you one of those cards where, if you got ten stamps, you got a free coffee.
David Roberts
I mean, they all do now. So clearly, somebody's done some research on this.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Somebody's done some research, right? So, there's a really cool behavioral economics experiment done probably a decade ago where a bunch of coffee shops figured out if they sell five coffees, then if they give someone five stamps, they're so much more likely to then buy another coffee and you should give them a free one. And so, what they did was they had an A/B test where half the population was given a card with five circles and the other half was given a card with ten circles. So, you go, you buy a coffee and the person says, "Way to go, David," and they stamp one of your circles, but then their friend behind you gets a card with ten circles and they say, "Way to go," and they stamp the first six of them.
Well, both of you only have to get four more stamps to get a free coffee. But your friend, who has six out of ten circles, buys coffee much, much faster than you did with only one out of five circles, because they have been endowed with this sense of progress that they're almost at the finish line.
David Roberts
And "We're making progress. Let's not mess it up now."
Nathaniel Stinnett
Exactly.
David Roberts
"We're almost there. Let's not mess it up."
Nathaniel Stinnett
So, how do we use that in the voting context? Well, we have all of these people who have never voted, and we don't want to make it seem like they're going from zero to one. We want to make it seem like they're already almost there. And so, we will send them digital ads or direct mail that just has three lines of text and three open boxes next to each line and will say, "You're registered to vote." Check. "You're active on the voter rolls." Check. The last step is being a voter.
David Roberts
"We're here, right on the verge. Right on the verge of success."
Nathaniel Stinnett
You are two-thirds of the way there. Come on. We're endowing them with this sense of progress. And it is very simple, but it works. I mean, just one postcard mail piece like that boosted turnout in a statewide primary in Pennsylvania by half a percentage point, which might not seem like a lot, but it is.
David Roberts
These days, every vote is precious. I think everybody gets that these days.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Yeah, a 50-cent postcard, if it can boost that much, it's totally worth it.
David Roberts
Right. You do follow-up experiments on all these to see which of these kinds of tricks works best. Curious about some failed attempts? Are there things that you thought might work that didn't?
Nathaniel Stinnett
Yes. Yes. And we, you know, we don't just publish this stuff. We, like, have webinars. People love learning about our failed experiments. So I read once about an anthropology experiment where anthropologists were looking at primates, and primates are almost hardwired to smile when someone smiles at them. Not just chimpanzees, but other great apes and human beings.
David Roberts
Mirroring.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Mirroring, that's right, facial mirroring. And so I saw an experiment where somewhere in the United Kingdom, they tried to take advantage of this facial mirroring in primates, and they used it in those electronic speed signs. You know, those signs that, like, if you're going 35 in a 25, it'll show you your speed limit. Well, what they did was if you were going faster than the speed limit, they showed you a little frowny face. And David, it worked so well. People were, like, slamming their brakes and screeching all over the place.
David Roberts
I don't want to make the sign frown.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Exactly. And I'm like, "Hot damn, this is totally gonna work with the Environmental Voter Project." And so, we sent mail to people that just had, like, an emoji smile face, and under it was voter, and then an emoji frown face, and under it was non-voter, and then on the back there were all of these footnotes showing that, like, voting is a social determinant of health, and it makes you feel happier. And, yeah, the results came back and it didn't work at all. It did not increase turnout one iota. But that's the process we take. We thought it was worth testing something like that.
David Roberts
It's haunting. I guess it's all true for all social science research. It's like, you know, that that didn't work, but you'll never really be able to know exactly why it didn't work.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Exactly.
David Roberts
You know, like, I'm sure it's an eternal mystery. Like, works in this one setting and not in this other setting.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Yeah, you know, it's like the situation where, like, you wanted to have the perfect joke, but you didn't think of it until ten minutes later. Like, I keep on wanting to come back to that, I keep on wanting to, like, try it again and try it again because I was so in love with the concept.
David Roberts
A bigger frown.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Right, right.
David Roberts
So, you try to persuade people to vote via all these means of reaching out, using all these kinds of social tricks and triggers to get them to vote. And then, as you say, you don't just want them to vote once. You want them to become voters. And so, I assume there's some research out there on, like, how many times you have to do something before you become the kind of person who does that thing. What's the sort of threshold there? Like, is there a certain point at which you've made someone into a regular voter, and then you can just leave them alone?
Like, what's the process after the first round?
Nathaniel Stinnett
Yeah, so I wish there was a clear answer, but there are so many variables at play that it's hard to say something as simple as, "Well, you know, you get them to vote three times and then they're done." Because, you know, we're always going after unlikely voters. But an unlikely voter in a presidential election is different from an unlikely voter in a city council race.
David Roberts
Everybody's an unlikely voter in a city council race.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Exactly. And so, maybe if you start getting someone to vote in local elections, well, they were already a pretty darn good voter. And now that they're voting in locals, well, it's much easier for that to stick, whereas it's harder if you get someone to vote in a presidential for the first time. But what I can tell you is searchable public voter files make it very easy for us to always see which of these environmentalists we've identified are still voting in local elections or primaries or generals or presidentials or things like that. And as soon as one of them builds up a voting history that makes us think that they're likely to vote in this upcoming election, we don't talk to them, they don't need a turnout organization.
And then, two years later, if they fall off the wagon, they're right back into our turnout universe again.
David Roberts
They just keep voting just to keep you guys from hassling them all the time.
Nathaniel Stinnett
That would be fine. That would be fine. But this habit-making aspect of our work, I think, is so important to understand because I freely admit, David, it is really boring. We are involved in hundreds of elections each year, many of which, I freely admit, have nothing at all to do with environmental policy making. But they have everything to do with building good voting habits. And our sort of biggest heuristic is never let an election pass us by without using it as an opportunity to at least have a light touch on one of these voters. Because the simple truth is, no matter how clever our messaging is, it's almost never as powerful as repetition.
David Roberts
Yes, repetition is magic. Can you generalize? Do you have a sense of the fall-off rate? You push on a particular election, you get X number of people to vote for the first time. How many people go on to vote for the second time? What are the fall-off rates?
Nathaniel Stinnett
Yeah, so we obviously need to compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges, because there are a lot of people who vote in a presidential and then don't vote in a city council. But what we do measure as sort of our long-term metric of success is, we have individually tagged and can track every unique voter we've ever spoken to. And we've now spoken to over 10.5 million unique individuals. And what we do is, every year we measure how many of them have become such consistent voters that they voted in their most recent federal election, their most recent state election, and even their most recent local election.
And last time we did that, it was over 1.8 million had become consistent voters like that. But the other thing that that metric is helpful for is getting drop-off — the question you asked. Because then what we can see is, okay, you can't year to year measure presidential drop-off because there's only a presidential election every four years. But we can measure how many of these people were consistent voters and then lost that consistency. And that's usually anywhere from 7% to 10%. It's pretty low.
David Roberts
Hmm. So the habit, by and large, the majority of the time, will stick.
Nathaniel Stinnett
It will stick. But I want to be clear, that isn't just because there's some, you know, magic in the behavioral science and we've created some habit here. It also has to do with the public nature of the voter file. Because let's say I get you to vote for the very first time in a Seattle city council race. Well, it only takes a few months for the record of you having voted to show up on public voter files. And then everybody who is running for anything says, "Holy crap, gotta go talk to David, because if he'll vote in a city council race, he'll vote for anything."
David Roberts
Right. So, once you vote, everybody descends on you to try to get you to vote again.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Exactly. And it's like the cavalry comes in and they're now turning out our voters at no cost to us.
David Roberts
Right. So, in a lot of ways, getting people to vote that first time is just trying to sort of put them on the radar. Put them on politicians' radar, almost.
Nathaniel Stinnett
That's exactly right. And not just for political purposes, but also for policymaking purposes.
David Roberts
Right.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Because if you are an elected official, I promise you, you don't spend any time polling non-voters. You don't. You don't. And so, once we push you, you know, once you vote for the first time in that city council race, you've now become a first-class citizen. You're actually someone whose opinions politicians do care about.
David Roberts
And just to reiterate this, like these people are saying on polls that climate is their top priority, you don't really have any way of knowing how they express themselves politically once they start voting and answering other post-voting polls. Like, you're just relying on their prioritization of climate to reflect itself to politicians at some point.
Nathaniel Stinnett
That's right. But to be clear, no one does. I mean, the Harris campaign doesn't know how any of the people they're mobilizing vote. Now, what we do know is that when we test these models, people do consistently, yes, come back and say, "Oh, yep, yep, climate is my number one priority." But no, when they go in and vote, we do not know who they vote for. There are lots of public polls of people who list climate as their top priority.
David Roberts
Right. So, I guess what I'm getting at is, you're taking a bunch of people who prioritize climate, shoving them into the electorate, and then assuming that that is going to have effects on politicians, that that's going to change the issue landscape. I mean, there's nothing else you could do but assume. But that's just like, that's the process. There's some element of faith involved here, I guess.
Nathaniel Stinnett
That's exactly right. And it is counterintuitive. We're used to viewing politics from the sort of supply side of the marketplace. We're used to saying, like, "Hey, let's elect the right people and we'll get the right policy." And of course, that's important. I would never deny that it's important to elect the right people. But I would also suggest that even when we do elect the right people, it isn't like they can just snap their fingers and get everything they want done. They still need to pick and choose what to spend their political capital on. And they aren't going to spend it on the thing that, like, only 4% of voters care about.
David Roberts
So, this is about shaping the electorate.
Nathaniel Stinnett
It's about goosing demand in the marketplace. And the only marketplace that matters to politicians is the marketplace of voters. Not citizens, not adults, not non-voters. It's voters.
David Roberts
I want you to say just a word about the testing you do to verify what's happening here. These are randomized control trials. Just enough to give us a sense that you're not just hoping for the best here.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Right. And to give you a sense, we do these randomized control trials not just so we can measure our impact, but also so we can figure out which messages work and which messages don't work. You know, it's also a message testing sort of laboratory. And the way this works is, let's go back to Pennsylvania. For no reason at all. Well, we'll go back to Pennsylvania. I told you earlier we'd identified 246,000 of these non-voting environmentalists there. That's actually not quite true. Those are the people we're targeting. We actually identified about 290,000 non-voting environmentalists in Pennsylvania.
But before talking to a single one of them, what we did was we randomly set aside around 15% to 18% and set them in a control group. That's exactly right. And we never talked to those people. Then the remaining 246,000, they're the ones we canvass and call and mail and send digital ads, all with this souped-up, behavioral, science-informed message. Then the election happens. We still don't know how we did, but it'll be a broken record here, I'm going to talk about public voter files again. About two months after the election, voter files are updated.
And then, what we can do is, we can compare turnout in our control group of non-voting environmentalists and see how many of them voted to turn out in our treatment group, the people we did communicate with. And as long as that initial separation process was truly random, what that allows us to do is isolate our impact on turnout while controlling for all outside variables. Because, like, if it rained in Pittsburgh and that depressed turnout, well...
David Roberts
Yeah, right. It rained on everybody.
Nathaniel Stinnett
It rained on everybody.
David Roberts
So, the only difference here between the control group and your group is your communications with them.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Exactly. And what we've seen, you know, obviously, there are a whole bunch of elections, these dinky little elections, and, you know, in odd years, where we could increase turnout five or six percentage points, but it's still not reliable. It's not what statisticians call statistically significant.
David Roberts
Just because there aren't enough to make a proper sample size.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Exactly. You need big, fat denominators.
David Roberts
Well, but just as a general matter, are you increasing turnout more in those elections, or are you increasing turnout the same amount, it just matters more and is a bigger percentage in those smaller elections?
Nathaniel Stinnett
Yeah, so a little bit of both. It is easier to increase turnout, and so we get gaudier numbers in low-turnout elections. But it is also harder to prove that your impact was not random when you have a really small denominator. And so, it takes more of an impact for us to achieve statistical certainty in these sort of lower turnout elections. But what we've seen just since 2020, we've had statistically significant randomized control trials showing that we were able to increase turnout among our targets by as much as 1.8 percentage points in statewide general elections, 3.6 percentage points in statewide primaries, and 5.7 percentage points in local elections.
David Roberts
And just to be clear, these days, well, maybe not just these days, but definitely these days, those can easily be the margins of victory, especially in some states.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Absolutely. I mean, we're targeting 490,000 people in Georgia this year. Georgia was decided by 11,779 votes. So, if we can increase turnout just one percentage point among our almost 500,000 targets in Georgia, that's 5,000 brand new voters showing up who otherwise would have stayed at home, which is half the size of the margin of victory four years ago. Yeah, it can really, really make a difference. But over time — let's stick with Georgia again. This is one of my favorite examples of what makes the Environmental Voter Project so unique. I'm sure you remember in 2021, those two US Senate races going to a runoff in Georgia, right?
David Roberts
I recall, I recall vaguely.
Nathaniel Stinnett
1 billion with a B. $1 billion were spent on those two races, David. We spent, yes, it is laughable. We spent a little over $500,000. And we could see in our randomized control trials that even amidst that $1 billion worth of static, we were solely responsible for boosting turnout 0.9 percentage points among our 300,000 targets. We were very, very proud of that. But what we're even more proud of is the day after that, it was like a whooshing sound, like you could hear everybody leave the state of Georgia because why the hell would they all stick around?
And we went right back to work, mobilizing low propensity climate voters for the Griffin Judicial Circuit, District Attorney special election. Now, if you don't know what a judicial circuit is.
David Roberts
I recall it well.
Nathaniel Stinnett
You recall it well. That was also had a cry on, on CNN. These are like counties that are too small to even have their own DA. So, they, like, get together with other counties and have a judicial circuit. And of course, that had nothing to do with climate policy making. But you're damn right, we were going to talk to these voters so that next time there was a big election, we would have even more habitual climate voters showing up.
David Roberts
Right. In a sense, that 0.09% that you did last time, you can just sort of bank that and assume that'll show up next time. And then next time, you're rousing a new 0.09%.
Nathaniel Stinnett
That's exactly right.
David Roberts
And presumably, over time, this will be cumulative.
Nathaniel Stinnett
It absolutely will.
David Roberts
Why not do your work all and only in swing states that matter here for the presidential election? Why not focus entirely on this big upcoming race that matters more than anything else in the universe?
Nathaniel Stinnett
Great question. So, first of all, we are in lots of swing states. We're in most of them, but not all of them. The second thing is this cumulative aspect of our work is where the most power is. I mean, the simple truth is, if your only goal is to win one election on a Tuesday in November, you probably shouldn't be spending a whole lot of money talking to really awful voters. This is not a special election-winning strategy. This is an electorate-changing strategy. And so, what that means is we decide what states to work in based on three criteria.
First, where is there a disproportionately large population of non-voting environmentalists? Because no matter how good we are, if there are like 20 non-voting environmentalists in Idaho and we get them all to vote, who cares? That's not going to do anything. Right. So that's the first criteria.
David Roberts
I don't know if you could find 20 in Wyoming that might actually make a difference.
Nathaniel Stinnett
That could make a difference. Right. So, for instance, we're in places like Arizona and Pennsylvania because there are tons of non-voting environmentalists. We're not in Wisconsin because there are almost no non-voting environmentalists there.
David Roberts
Interesting. And do we know why that is?
Nathaniel Stinnett
No, no. I wish we did.
David Roberts
There's lots of different stories you could tell. Right? I mean, one story you could tell is the Democratic Party is so good in Wisconsin, thanks to Ben Wikler, that all the voters have been activated. Right? Like, there's not a lot of slack left.
Nathaniel Stinnett
And we do see some evidence of that when we do some testing. It's not that we don't see environmentalists in Wisconsin, it's that the environmentalists we do see are voting. And so, yes, there is some reason to believe that the typical three-legged stool of a campaign, where you've got registration, persuasion, and turnout, is almost a two-legged stool in Wisconsin now where it's registration and persuasion. So that's the first way that we choose states. The second way I alluded to earlier when I was speaking about how important repetition is, we need to have lots of bites at the apple.
And so, there are some states like, say, Oregon. Oregon has lots of non-voting environmentalists, but for good government reasons, they now only have elections in even years. And so, if we were in Oregon, we would only be able to talk to our voters twice every two years. And that just ain't enough. Whereas in a place like Georgia, where every election, every primary goes to a runoff, every general goes to a runoff, every special goes to a runoff, they have odd year elections, they have — like there are some years where we speak to our targets in eight different elections in Georgia.
Then, the third and final criterion is we don't just care about changing federal policy making, we also care about state and local policy making. And so, playing in Nebraska, where there are publicly owned utilities, where a 1000 person election could shut down a coal-fired power plant, is a really high leverage opportunity. But also, New York City is going to have a mayoral election next spring. And you better believe that that's a very important climate policy-making position. Yeah, we're not just in purple states. We're also in these red and blue states where we feel like all of these criteria come together and give us an opportunity to really change the political dynamic and policymaking.
David Roberts
Interesting. Yeah. So, I think that's a good distinction. I mean, there are groups that are focused on turnout to win a particular election. And then, your group is focused on long-term voter activation, which, you know, might be a suboptimal way of maximizing turnout for any particular election just because you have longer-term goals.
Nathaniel Stinnett
That's exactly right. Now, obviously, our randomized control trials show that we often do have significant impacts in specific elections. But that's not our primary goal. Our primary goal is to be earlier on in the pipeline. We want to stuff the pipeline with mediocre or good voting environmentalists that all the campaigns will say, "Oh, holy moly, look at all those environmental voters. Let's go get them."
David Roberts
Right, right.
Nathaniel Stinnett
So, we're earlier on in that pipeline.
David Roberts
One of the things that I kept coming back to is when you think about if you want someone who cares about climate to vote and they're going to vote based on climate concerns in today's political landscape in the United States, that means they're going to vote for Democrats. I mean, that's, you know, we might wish it were otherwise, but that's basically true. So, like, de facto, you're acting as a Democratic turnout operation, a long-term Democratic turnout operation. I mean, you're increasing the number of Democrats voting in particular elections. Is there, from a distance, any distinction between that and what you're doing?
And does that — I don't know. Do you care? Does that bother you at all? I mean, obviously, I personally view that as a good thing, but maybe you feel otherwise.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Yeah, well, so we are a nonpartisan organization, but I would say there are good Democrats and there are bad Democrats. There are also good Democrats who can't legislate and lead in a good way because of the way that their district is. And so, we really are taking this demand-side approach to it. And I want to be clear. Some of our targets are independents. Some of our voters are even Republicans. Not nearly as many.
David Roberts
Yeah, tell me, do you know out of, like, say, the 246,000 in Pennsylvania, you know, at least, like, the party registration of all those voters? Right. Can you give us a sense of the proportions?
Nathaniel Stinnett
Yeah, so I don't have Pennsylvania on the top of my mind, but what I can say is we usually try not to talk about this party registration data, in part because it's misleading. So, I'll give you an example. I live in Boston, Massachusetts. Like, dark blue Massachusetts. Right. Do you know that only 27% of registered voters in Massachusetts are Democrats?
David Roberts
Hmm.
Nathaniel Stinnett
64% are unenrolled, 8% are Republicans. Yet, in a different state, you're not allowed to be unenrolled. You can be independent, Republican, or Democrat. In a third state, if you say you're an independent, that means you are a member of the Independent Party of the United States. And so, like, it's really this weird 50-state patchwork quilt.
David Roberts
So it doesn't really tell you anything, state to state, comparing state to state?
Nathaniel Stinnett
No, but what I can say is, we really, truly believe in this demand-side approach to politics. Yes, in general elections, plenty of public polls tell you which party these people are voting for. But as I said earlier, just because the so-called right person wins doesn't mean they can do whatever they want.
David Roberts
Right.
Nathaniel Stinnett
You know, the example I keep coming back to is the very beginning of the Obama administration, where they were very public about the fact that they were deciding between Waxman-Markey and the Affordable Care Act, and they couldn't spend their political capital on both. And surprise, surprise, David, they went with the thing that 20% of voters list as their top priority instead of 1% of voters. And that's not because Obama was a bad guy. It's not because he didn't want to address the climate crisis. It's because politicians need to be stingy with their political capital.
David Roberts
Yes, and no Democratic senator was frightened to say no about Waxman-Markey. Quite the opposite.
Nathaniel Stinnett
I first started the Environmental Voter Project in part because I had come off a string of mayoral and other municipal elections in Boston where all we could ever talk about was potholes and public schools, because that's what all of the people who vote in municipal elections care about. Yet, everybody who was running for mayor or city council was deep down an environmentalist at heart. They just couldn't lead on that because there was no voter demand for it.
David Roberts
Yeah, I mean, there's a real argument to be made, and I think I buy this argument that, and I think lots of people on my side of things are wrong about this or have the wrong idea about this. I actually think climate is much more deeply rooted in Democratic elites than it is in the Democratic voter base. People don't want to hear this. But, like, a lot of climate action on the Democratic side has been elite-driven. It's not voter demand that's dragging things along, really. So, you know, I think you probably have more than voters dragging an unwilling politician into doing something.
More often, I think, on the Democratic side, you have a politician who wants to do something and doesn't have the voter support to do it. So, in a sense, the work you're doing could just enable a lot of Democratic politicians to do what they want to do anyway.
Nathaniel Stinnett
I think that's really right. Issue advocates usually like to sort of pound their chest and pretend that, like, we're really strong and, like, how dare you do what we don't want you to do and you're gonna pay for it on election day. The simple truth is that I think those of us in the climate movement need to admit that we don't have nearly as much political power as we need. Like, not even close. Not even close. And we need to really quickly get to the point where we can scare the bejesus out of politicians so that they are doing what we want them to do out of political necessity.
David Roberts
You know, your thesis is the fastest way to at least get started on doing that is to take people who already care about it and just get them to friggin' vote. So, glad to see this social science research all being put to some productive use rather than, you know, getting people to buy Febreze or whatever. Whatever people typically do with it. Thank you so much for coming on and walking us through this.
Nathaniel Stinnett
Well, thank you for having me, David. I really appreciate it.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out, especially to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes my guests and I sound smart every week. And it is all supported entirely by listeners like you. So, if you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf. Or, leave a nice review, or tell a friend about Volts. Or all three. Thanks so much and I'll see you next time.
How to activate climate voters