Knowing that Pennsylvania was a battleground state in the 2020 presidential election, PA Voice recognized it was facing an unprecedented election and came to Spitfire for support. President Trump was attempting to discredit mail-in ballots as fraudulent and sow doubt in election integrity across the state. PA Voice and its partnership members, nonprofit organizations from across the state of Pennsylvania, had invested years working in BIPOC communities, organizing around priority policy issues, registering voters, holding election officials accountable and building community power. The organization wanted to ensure that its voter protection work and its partners’ work to register and turn out Black, Latinx and Asian Americans and Pacific Islander voters in significant numbers did not get overlooked or misrepresented in post-election analyses and media coverage. PA Voice also noticed a gap in messaging guidance coming from national partners and felt the messaging was not adequately centering the voters they were engaging. Spitfire quickly got up to speed on these challenges and proposed a strategy to both effectively engage PA Voice’s BIPOC voter audience on and after Election Day and center their participation in post-election coverage.
Spitfire held two sessions with the partners to jointly think through both the scenarios they might encounter on Election Day and post-election, with a particular eye on how to best center BIPOC voters. The messaging framework that Spitfire developed, with significant input from the partners, equipped members of the partnership with defensive responses to a variety of scenarios including accusations of election fraud, ignoring BIPOC voters as a significant share of the electorate, and threats or actual physical violence by police or militia, just to name a few. This message framework also proactively influenced the post-election debate to center the power of BIPOC voters, name racism and white supremacy, and set up a campaign to hold the Biden-Harris administration accountable to BIPOC communities and support policies and funding that prioritize community needs.
Using the messaging framework, Spitfire created supporting materials including talking points, social media graphics and sample social media posts. The full toolkit was also translated into Spanish, Vietnamese, Arabic, Chinese and Korean. At various points throughout election week, Spitfire distributed relevant content to the full partnership to facilitate ease of use for social media posting and deliver talking points to those interviewed by the media. One partner also turned the graphics into signs for their rally in Harrisburg.
The week following the election, the PA Voice partnership deployed the messaging again in an ad campaign across the state to influence the conversation about BIPOC voter turnout. The ads featured an open letter to the Biden-Harris campaign, noting BIPOC voter turnout and calling on the new administration to remember their support when they set funding and policy priorities. The ads included a homepage takeover of the Philadelphia Inquirer, which earned more than 400,000 impressions, and full-page ads in English, Spanish, Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese across 15 other newspapers in Pittsburgh, Lancaster, Harrisburg, Erie, Allentown, Reading and Scranton.
Spitfire also pitched several BIPOC leaders in the partnership to the media on Election Day, the following Friday (when we anticipated the election would be called), and the day the ad campaign launched. Spitfire prepped many of the spokespeople with talking points before their interviews with outlets like HBO Axios and The Intercept. The PA Voice partnership members successfully shaped coverage within the state through stories like NBC Philadelphia 10: How This Grassroots Organization Mobilized Immigrant, Persons of Color to the Polls featuring Alonzo Washington of CASA in Action and PennLive: Black voters in Pa. played a pivotal role in 2020 election, tipping Joe Biden to victory featuring Kadida Kenner of Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center and Brittany Smalls of Black Voters Matter. This piece ran online and in print above the fold on the front page of the Sunday Patriot-News, the outlet widely read by the PA state legislature.
