Voice for Values: Rural Revival Plan
In 2024, Voice for Values embarked on an ambitious text-to-register program designed to engage progressive voters in our democratic process. Our program focused on the key swing states of Arizona, Michigan, & Pennsylvania. While implementing this program, we discovered massive disparities in resources and time dedicated to rural areas vs urban areas. Therefore, we decided for this upcoming election cycle, Voice for Values will establish and launch our Rural Revival Plan. We are developing a year-round voter empowerment program, specifically focused on building progressive organizing infrastructure & voter education in rural, non-competitive districts. Read below to learn more about how the Rural Revival Plan will work and how you can help.
Target Districts
We chose the following districts based on two criteria:
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Majority Rural District: The majority of the district population lives in U.S. Census designated rural areas. Since rural areas seldom garner attention from campaigns, we felt it was important to focus specifically on rural communities.
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Lack of Competition: When districts are non-competitive, it discourages new candidates from throwing their hats in the ring and local party organizations from dedicating resoruces to voter contact in those areas. Our long-term goal is to build the organizing infrastructure to give progressive candidates a fighting chance and give voters options on their ballots.
Phase 1: Voter Registration
Our first step to building progressive support in long-shot districts is identifying voters who are disengaged in the electoral process and likely to support progressive causes. For this, we are partnering with a company called Civitech.
Civitech is an award winning data firm that specializes in collating public records from multiple sources to create a more accurate version of state voter files. After compiling this data, they then perform analysis using demographics, voter engagement history, and more to score voters based on their support for progressive causes.
How It Works:
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Each voter identified receives a pre-filled in, voter registration packet with return postage included. All they have to do is choose their party designation and put their completed packet back in the mail.
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Each voter will receive up to 3 reminder texts to complete and return their voter registration packets.
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Return label tracking is analyzed in real-time to identify who registered and who didn't. Then, our team at Voice for Values evaluates who needs additional contact to get them registered.
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The Numbers:
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The total cost for sending the packets, postage, and the reminder texts is approximately $2.00 per individual contacted. Working with Civitech we have identified the following number of unregistered, likely progressive voters in each of our target districts: ​
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AZ-02: 10,023 unregistered, likely progressive voters.
MI-04: 8,657 unregistered, likely progressive voters.
PA-13: 4,186 unregistered, likely progressive voters.
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Total Est. Cost: $50,000
Phase 2: Organize, Organize, Organize
The next step in our plan is to engage with passionate community members who want to take a proactive role in growing democratic participation in their communities. To this end, we will be hiring three professional organizers in each district. They will begin work in January 2026 and will engage voters through a variety of means including:
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Organizing educational events and panels to provide voters with information about the policies impacting them and jumpstart meaningful conversations about changes voters want to see in their government.
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Recruit & train volunteers to use relational-organizing techniques to engage with their families and friends, thus building a more enthusiatic and informed electorate.
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Continue voter registration efforts through in-person events, door-knocking and crowd-canvassing.
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The Numbers:
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Organizing is always the most expensive part of politics, rural organizing even more so. The success of this plan relies on the strength of the people who are carrying it out. The best organizers have strong existing ties their communties and have the latitude to organize in ways that they know their community members will respond positively to. For this reason, we will be hiring directly from the districts we plan to organize in, and will be paying wages commiserate with the cost of living in those areas.
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Staff Budget: $250,000. This includes salaries, payroll taxes, and health care premiums for three full time organizers.
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Operational Budget: $200,000. This includes cost of event production, mailers, literature, and general overhead costs for our organizers to adminster robust voter engagement programs.
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