Voter Persuasion & Turnout Research
Know which voters you need to win, why, and what to say to persuade and turn them out.
The voter file tells you who voted before. The polls tell you what the district thinks right now. Your consultant tells you what worked in the last race they won.
None of them tells you why your persuadable voters are still undecided, what is keeping your supporters home, or what to say to either one. So campaigns guess. They knock on doors, send mail, and hope the message lands.
In each cycle, the persuadable universe keeps shrinking, and the demographic blocs that campaigns have always relied on keep getting less predictable. Winning now depends less on broad demographic targeting and more on understanding how specific kinds of voters actually make both the decision to support you and the separate decision to show up.
We research how the voters in your district decide. Through interviews and surveys with the voters you actually need, we identify the voter types your race will be won or lost with, including the ones not worth your budget. For each type, you learn what they believe, what is blocking them, what moves them, and what to say at each stage between today and Election Day.
Then we map every finding back to your voter file, so your team can pull the lists, write the scripts, and put the research to work the day you receive it.
What You Get…
Which voters. The voter types that decide your race, sized against your actual electorate, including who to skip so no door knock or dollar is wasted on voters who cannot be moved.
Why and what to say. The motivations and barriers behind each type, and message guidance for each stage of their decision, built for your field scripts, mail, and digital.
Built for your systems. Every voter type defined in voter file terms, so the research plugs into the universes, walk lists, and tools your campaign already runs.
Who is this for?
This research is built for campaigns in races that will be close, where multiple candidates are competing for overlapping voters, or where winning requires speaking to several different groups at once. It serves campaigns at the local, state, and congressional levels, along with advocacy organizations and ballot measure campaigns.
It is not built for safe seats, single-bloc races, or campaigns that have already settled their strategy and only need execution.
Where to Spend and Where to Skip: A National Map of Winnable Races
A climate organization needed to decide which Congressional races deserved its money. We scored all 435 House districts on a decade of election results and demographic change, rated every primary candidate's actual climate commitment, and delivered tiered funding priorities that included the races not worth a dollar. One finding shaped the whole strategy: of the candidates publicly claiming climate commitment, fewer than one in five held up under scrutiny.
Four Decades of Election Data on Why the Old Voter Assumptions Fail
A political consulting firm asked whether the assumptions behind its advice still held. We built a dataset spanning more than forty years of federal elections from a dozen public sources and found the old patterns breaking down: turnout that surged against a candidate more than for him, endorsement win rates that owed more to incumbency than influence, and voting blocs that no longer moved as blocs. The analysis became the firm's framework for advising campaigns in a realigning electorate.
Two Audiences, Two Messages: Launch Research for a News Platform
A civic tech company preparing to launch a platform built to counter misinformation needed to know who would adopt it first and why. A weighted survey of 385 target users and twenty in-depth product sessions revealed two distinct audience types with different reasons to trust, and head-to-head message testing showed each one responding to a different message. The client launched with two tailored appeals instead of one generic pitch.
Rachel Gregory Consulting is led by Rachel Gregory, Ph.D., a researcher with over a decade of experience across academic and industry research and a focus on political communication and women in politics. Read more about us here.
The cycle is short and the research takes weeks, not months. If your race fits, one call will tell us both.
Book a project call today.
