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Version 1.0 • November 18, 2024

Preliminary Summary

We lost big — and, local organizing helped save us from far worse.

This was a hard-fought election and we lost. We lost the Presidency and the Senate. We failed to win back the House. The next 2-4 years will be full of peril. All this leaves us asking: Did our work matter?

If you look beneath the Electoral College map (with its depressing sea of red), one thing is clear: Our work mattered. MVP’s local partners helped secure critical wins from the Senate to school boards. In the face of devastating losses, these wins will help us meaningfully block Trump’s agenda; improve millions of lives; build state-level power; and win back federal power in 2026 and beyond. 

A thorough 2024 Report will follow in December, with a deeper analysis of what happened and where we go from here – in 2025-2026 and the long term, for MVP and the movement. But in the meantime, here are toplines on how our partners held back a Red Wave that could have been a tsunami:

1. In the presidential race, MVP partners helped Harris overperform in the top seven swing states by five points relative to “safe states”, despite a sweeping global trend of party-agnostic anti-incumbent anger due to inflation. It wasn’t enough to win but it lessened the margin.
2. We stemmed losses in the Senate, where our partners helped protect at least four contested seats (Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, and Nevada), three of which by less than 30,000 votes.
3. We fought to a draw in the House, where our partners helped flip at least five seats and hold nine. With five races to call, we will likely lose the House by 15,000 votes across 3-4 seats.
4. Down ballot, our partners helped defy national headwinds by winning key state contests — some by mere hundreds of votes. Our partners helped hold and expand liberal state Supreme Court majorities in Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, and potentially North Carolina; hold the North Carolina governorship; break up GOP supermajorities in Montana, North Carolina, and Wisconsin; hold a trifecta in Maine; hold chambers in Minnesota and Pennsylvania; and hold off GOP expansion in Tennessee and Nebraska. They also helped win ballot measures protecting abortion rights in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Montana, and Nevada; and ballot campaigns to advance economic fairness in Florida, Missouri, Nebraska, Kentucky, and more.

Our investments were necessary, but far from sufficient.

The moral of this story: Local organizing saved us from even worse outcomes in 2024, generated important down-ballot wins, and will be an essential part of how we rebuild stronger over time.

It boggles the mind that over $1,000,000,000 was raised for a campaign that was ephemeral by design – and that billions more were sunk into TV ads that are now nothing more than a memory.

In a cycle in which billions were spent on purely short-term tactics, MVP is proud to have supported hundreds of year-round voter organizations that engaged tens of thousands of staff and volunteers to contact tens of millions of voters — and whose impact will extend long after Election Day. 

Let me be clear: We are humbled by our losses. MVP is committed to learning the lessons of 2024 – and facing hard truths, and evolving our strategies so that we can use “political Jiu-Jitsu” to turn this massive breakdown into a breakthrough. 

It’s time to level up our year-round field and digital infrastructure.

In partnership with our local and national partners and allies, the MVP team is doing a deep dive on our strategic path forward. Frankly, two things are already abundantly clear:

1. We need a bigger, deeper, more effective year-round ground game.
2. We also need an audacious and visionary digital strategy. As our right-wing opponents have done, we need to build, nurture, and scale up a permanent media ecosystem that is relational, builds social capital, is grounded in a deeper worldview, and can transform culture writ large.

We’re going to be working with the best practitioners on our side to figure this out. We have a lot of upgrading to do and will be talking much more about this in our 2024 Impact Report and 2025 plans.

We are grateful to be among a community of strategic donors who understand that – try as we might to use asymmetric strategies – there may be no shortcuts to building deep, long-term people power to create the progress we need. 

Thank you for being on this journey with us.

Billy Wimsatt, Founder & Executive Director
Movement Voter PAC

 

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We Lost the Presidency (by Five Points Less)

MVP partners helped Harris greatly overperform in the swing states.

From 2020 to 2024, the top seven swing states moved toward Trump by an average of 3 points, while “safe states” shifted toward Trump by an average of 8 points — a rather stunning 5-point difference.

Red and blue “safe states” like Florida, Texas, and New York each lost roughly a whopping one million net Democratic votes. Illinois and New Jersey each lost half a million. These are staggering losses. By comparison, the top seven battleground states lost generally one to two hundred thousand Democratic votes. This suggests that MVP’s local partners’ years of work had an enormous impact on the margins — the sandbags, unfortunately, just weren’t big enough to stop the tsunami.

We can’t empirically discern how much of this 5-point effect was caused by local voter organizing, the Democratic field operation, or campaign ads. But we can posit that, in the swing states, ad saturation on both sides largely canceled itself out, and that the smaller swing-state shift to Trump was due to an asymmetric Democratic advantage: A massive independent ground game funded by MVP and others. 

Beyond our inferences in the 2024 elections, a growing body of empirical research pre-2024 suggests that the kinds of warm, relational voter engagement tactics used by MVP’s year-round local voter organizing partners have a larger effect on turnout relative to ads and more impersonal methods.

 

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We Helped Save Four Senate Seats

MVP partners helped protect four Senate seats, weakening the GOP majority.

Democratic candidates greatly overperformed the Harris campaign in every key Senate battleground and prevailed in four of these contests, leading to a GOP Senate majority of 53-47 instead of 57-43. Though these wins are likely due to a few variables, our partners played an important role – thanks to years of locally rooted voter organizing, engagement, registration, persuasion, and mobilization.

The silver lining: Thanks to these wins, we now have a chance of mitigating some of the worst parts of the Trump agenda. 53-47 is a plausible stretch, while 57-43 would be a near-impossibility.

Implications for 2026 and 2028

Protecting these four seats in 2024 wins will put in striking range to win the Senate back as early as 2028. Here is a fairly optimistic scenario (assuming we lose the Pennsylvania recount):

• In 2026, we could get to 49-51 by defending every Democratic seat (e.g. Michigan, Georgia) and flipping two vulnerable GOP seats (e.g. North Carolina, Maine).
• In 2028, we win a majority by defending every vulnerable Democratic seat (e.g. Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Nevada) and flipping two more GOP seats (e.g. North Carolina and Wisconsin).

 

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We Fought to a Draw in the House

MVP partners helped flip at least 5 seats and protect 9 others, denying the GOP all but the thinnest majority.

As of now, the 119th Congress has a pending 218-212 GOP majority (five races uncalled). MVP partners mobilized voters in all five districts Democrats flipped, and in nearly every competitive district.

Additionally:

• In Alabama, partners like The Alabama Alliance helped elect two Black Democrats for the first time, because they fought all the way to the Supreme Court for fairer Congressional maps.
• In New York, the new Battleground New York coalition won five of six targeted House races and is now set to be a permanent force in advancing progressive power in New York.
• In California, the new Battleground California coalition has won two of its six targeted House races, with two still to call, and has laid the foundation for House victories in years to come.

 

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We Won a Lot of Victories Down Ballot

MVP partners helped defy national headwinds by winning key state contests.

While Republicans made small state-level gains, MVP partners (and allies like States Project and Sister District) helped secure critical victories and stunt the effects of national rightward shifts.

• Abortion rights ballot measures passed in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Montana, and Nevada.
• Other ballot campaigns prevailed: Protecting nonpartisan school boards and public financing (by 0.8%) in Florida; passing a minimum wage hike and paid sick leave in Missouri; passing paid sick leave in Nebraska; protecting public education funding in Kentucky; and more.
• State Supreme Court wins: Kentucky flipped a seat, shifting its Supreme Court one step to the left; Michigan expanded its Supreme Court liberal majority to 5-2; and Montana maintained its liberal majority (with women now running the court for the first time in history). As of this writing, a Democrat leads in the North Carolina Supreme Court race by 66 votes.
• In North Carolina, Democrats held the governorship; won the Attorney General and Secretary of State races; and have broken the GOP supermajority in the state House (by just one seat in which the Democrat is leading by just 233 votes), preventing Republicans’ unchecked ability to pass their regressive policy agenda. In the Superintendent of Schools race, Democrats narrowly defeated a MAGA extremist who publicly “joked” about Former President Obama’s execution.
• In Wisconsin, Democrats broke the GOP supermajority and flipped fourteen legislative seats, picking up ten state Assembly seats (with AD-26 and AD-89 won by under 900 votes) and four Senate seats — thanks to new, fairer maps which MVP partners worked for years to achieve.
• In Pennsylvania and Minnesota, Democrats narrowly held one-seat state chamber majorities.
• In Montana, Democrats broke the GOP supermajority in one or possibly both state chambers, netting two seats in the state Senate and 9 in the state House, with each House seat won by under 600 votes with one more not yet called. These are the biggest gains in 34 years, thanks to new, fairer legislative maps. MVP partner Montana Rural Voters appears to have won 16 out of 19 competitive legislative races they worked in.
• In Maine, Democrats have tentatively held their state governing trifecta, losing seats but keeping control of the state Senate and state House.
• Alaska retained its bipartisan coalition in the state Senate and flipped the state House from GOP to bipartisan control, creating a new, more moderate legislative chamber.
• In Tennessee, Democrats stopped the GOP from expanding its state legislative supermajority, and they elected Gabby Salinas, the first Latina and LGBTQIA+ member in the state House.
• In Nebraska, Democrats staved off a GOP supermajority, flipping LD-35 by 125 votes.
• In Michigan, Democrats held HD-61 by 715 votes, lessening the loss of their House majority.

MVP partners won local progress and built power — even in the reddest states.

• In Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Public Education Action Fund helped pass a record 169 school funding referenda in 145 school districts, authorizing $4.4 billion in new funding. MVP is proud to have given them multiyear support, helping them sustain their year-round organizing and deploy local action teams of pro-education volunteers. We got this message from their Executive Director: “MVP helped make this possible and we are so grateful. Thank you for believing in us and I hope this little bit of proof that you are making a huge difference helps.”
• In Arizona, Rural Arizona Action helped re-elect its Development Director, Sherri Jones, to the Florence Unified School Board as part of its Rural Votes Count campaign, which reached over 750,000 voters across eight counties.
• In Georgia, the GA Working Families Party helped flip the Chatham County Sheriff race by an 8.1% margin, unseating incumbent John Wilcher, who took financial contributions from a health care contractor while people died under that contractor’s care, and who walked back policies that reduced the jail population, even as they helped improve safety during the pandemic.
• In Texas, the Texas Organizing Project and Workers Defense Action Fund helped win the Harris County District Attorney seat by a 1.7% margin. Texas is the epicenter of the U.S. mass incarceration crisis, locking up more people than any other state. District Attorneys have the power to change this reality.

  Additionally: Texas Campaign for the Environment’s PAC helped win the Corpus Christi City Council District 2 race by just 1,653 votes. Corpus Christi is the center of significant fossil fuel expansion projects on the Gulf Coast. While Texas has prioritized plans to build liquified natural gas (LNG) plants, plastics plants, and more, the City Council has a significant say in approving the needed infrastructure for this expansion.

  Finally, our partners at Ground Game Texas won every election they ran or supported, passing propositions in Dallas, Lockhart, and Bastrop to decriminalize misdemeanor marijuana possession; passing two pro-democracy initiatives in McAllen; and defeating Prop A, an anti-abortion ordinance, in Amarillo.

• In Tennessee, Nashville’s Davidson County approved a transit tax referendum to fund bus systems, sidewalks, and other improvements, an enormous win in the making since 2018.
• In Florida, Democrat Monique Worrell was re-elected as Orlando prosecutor, after Governor DeSantis suspended her last year.

This is just a small sampling of the hundreds of reports coming in from MVP local partners. Many more stories and analysis to come in our 2024 Report in December.