Orange County Votes Family Style
How community and culture-led innovation led to wins in a crucial region
Overview
In advance of the 2024 presidential elections, Asian American Futures (AAF) partnered with the AAPI Victory Fund and VietRISE for our “OC Votes Family Style” initiative to mobilize low-propensity Asian American voters in Orange County, California. Our goal was to reach record turnout for Asian Americans aged 18-34 by engaging young audiences who aren’t usually or actively involved in politics. Integrating narrative tactics with organizing efforts led to powerful results on difficult issues: overall turnout, rent control, and non-citizen voting.
Through a comprehensive process that included social listening, narrative landscaping, audience analysis, and message testing, we developed mailers and influencer content that centered our target audience’s perspectives. Additionally, we designed a program to recruit, train, and equip influencers and creators with evidence-backed messaging on local issues, and to understand the importance of building Asian American power.
The results of our campaign underscore the importance of intentionally reaching young Asian American voters through community and culture-led innovation: turnout was statistically significantly higher among the voters that received mailers, and digital engagement beat the benchmark as well.
A preview of our process and findings:
We undertook an unusually rigorous process that combined research and narrative analysis to truly understand our target audiences. We asked, how are young Asian Americans thinking and talking about voting? Rent control? What type of content is influencing them and how they feel?
Countering the sense of doom and despair that people were feeling was key; traditional pro-voter tactics (like celebrity encouragements) and generic appeals to “just vote” did little to inform or empower our audiences.
Our research-informed content—such as mailers with hotpot (!!), a video comedically connecting voting and lactose intolerance, and content that showcased voting vocabulary in Vietnamese—spoke to cultural values and real experiences that so many 2nd gen-ers have when trying to talk to their family members about elections.
We experimented with numerous tactics and strategically partnered with organizations whose expertise complemented each others’.
These campaigns are replicable case studies for organizations appealing to new, previously dis- and underengaged voters.
Why Orange County?
With 33% of eligible voters in Orange County identifying as Asian American, and over 40% of Asian American voters in the U.S. having never been contacted by a political party, the county was a key area for voter outreach in California and in the U.S.
We hypothesized that traditional voter outreach would be less effective in mobilizing low-propensity voters, and were especially interested in engaging these “stretch audiences”—people who aren’t currently politically active or engaged with local civic and grassroots organizations, and may need different tactics to be reached*. These individuals may be completely aware of the importance of voting, for example, but feel overwhelmed by the number of issues on the ballot or distrustful of politicians and the political process. Our narrative research from 2022 suggested that acknowledging their feelings about the process, sharing key facts about ballot issues, and highlighting the benefits of voting would boost turnout.
Community and Culture-led Innovation
We partnered with VietRISE, a grassroots organization with a deep reach in the Orange County Vietnamese American community, to help us engage our target audiences, including the 52% of young Asian American voters in the area who are Vietnamese and Vietnamese American. We also partnered with AAPI Victory Fund, whose team members pioneered the influencer education and direct mail tactics we used to boost engagement with young Asian Americans in previous elections.
Together, we undertook a comprehensive social listening process—scouring the Internet, social media, news outlets, Reddit, and more—to understand how young people were talking about and relating to GOTV and rent control. Centering our disengaged target audiences—those we often see blamed or written off for their disengagement—was of utmost importance to us. We wanted to ensure we understood their perspectives.
After analyzing the landscape and our audiences, we brainstormed various messages and stories that might resonate with each audience. We then tested these messages through a randomized control trial process† using Grow Progress to identify which ones would mobilize our audiences.
Here’s what we learned:
Our strongest, most statistically significant story described voting as a means to advocate for a future beyond the doom world fake news depicted. By empathizing with the confusion, overwhelm, and division that fake news can cause, while reminding Asian Americans that a better future is possible, we boosted their motivation to vote.
Our community cares a ton about our elders, and younger generations have struggled to bridge the gap between older community members who feel validated by fake news and mis-/disinformation.
When it comes to GOTV, social pressure is still a proven tactic!
Voter report cards, for example, using language like “who you vote for is private, but whether you vote is public record.”
Imploring people to vote as a means of fighting against “silent Asian” stereotypes had little to no impact in increasing voter motivation.
Other messages that worked well with some subgroups, but had limited impact overall include:
Insisting that voting matters to make a difference in close races
“Being the voice” for someone who can’t vote
Voting to live up to our elders’ sacrifices
We didn’t see messages with backlash, so we don’t have recommendations around what not to say. All in all, our process revealed we can’t just message our ways to the polls, but need dedicated and intentional outreach from local organizations such as VietRISE to help us meet turnout goals.
After message testing, we developed creative briefs for a series of postcards, and for a cohort of five OC-based, Asian American creators. Our creators produced a total of 11 videos that received 157k views and around 6k engagements with a 4.2% engagement rate, far above the benchmark of 1% for influencers with similar followings. Our content was published on @votefamilystyle, an Instagram account referencing family style dinners to frame voting as a communal effort—not just for ourselves as individuals, but as part of a broader Asian American coalition that is a deciding factor in electoral politics. Our language and framework appeals to our target audiences’ deeper motivations, affinities, cares, and concerns, with content ranging from educational material on voting as a hard-won right (complete with a heartfelt voiceover atop family video footage), to a collaboration between creatives with talking points for discussing elections with family members in Vietnamese.
Likewise, our mailer designs and copy were informed by message testing results. Copy was translated into Vietnamese, Chinese, and Korean. We sent four postcards to 3,600 Asian American voters aged 18-34 in Orange County, and four to 2,690 in Santa Ana. Our turnout was not only statistically significantly higher among those that received mailers, but also beat the benchmark of most experiments‡.
Involving influencers to reach our target audiences proved beneficial on all fronts:
VietRISE strengthened their narrative strategy skills, and expanded their organizing capacity to the digital sphere.
We advanced research-informed narratives about pride and interdependence that helped Asian Americans feel that their experiences—and their vote—mattered.
Educating Asian American influencers on ways to use their voices bolstered their confidence and creativity, while motivating them to create more political, issue-based content in the future—an investment with benefits beyond one campaign.
"[This program] helped me expand my perspective on what kind of content I could create as well as connect with my Asian American identity on social media."
-Content Creator
Our collaboration with VietRISE and AAPI Victory Fund leveraged complementary skills to multiply impact. Each organization’s expertise—local knowledge, creator engagement, and research—enhanced each others’. The results of our direct mail turnout experiment speaks to the efficacy of our methods and implementation, and we hope to develop a suite of replicable, scalable programming to share with the field for future elections, and offer innovative approaches to reaching new audiences in an increasingly influential demographic.
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*We prioritized the following personas: Pragmatic Strivers, Compassionate Peacekeepers, and Independent Skeptics.
†By using a randomized controlled trial process, we’re able to assess the performance of our content relative to a placebo, with statistical significance. This rigorous approach gives us a high degree of confidence when recommending messaging and storytelling strategies to our creators and artists.
‡Turnout experiment was evaluated by Tom Wong, PhD, Associate Professor, University of California, San Diego.