The 2020 Blue Wave, In One Chart

In 2018, the progressive organizing platform Mobilize supported hundreds of Democratic campaigns as they organized the efforts to get out the vote. By just before Election Day, Mobilize reported that it had hosted three-quarters of a million volunteer shifts, of which nearly a quarter million were scheduled to be completed in the last four days before the election. Those shifts were for actions like canvassing, phone-banking, text-banking and post-carding–all forms of mobilizing that move the turnout needle. Ultimately, somewhere close to two million grassroots volunteers took action, powering Democrats to major gains across Congress and in many state houses.

While the final picture for 2020 isn’t complete, here’s an exclusive look at the Blue Wave as it’s cresting across the Mobilize platform, that was just shared with me by Alfred Johnson, its co-founder and CEO.

As the chart shows, since late August, Democratic grassroots activism has been running substantially faster than the last weeks of the 2018 cycle, where almost 40,000 shifts in a day was a high-water mark. Now the high-water mark is nearly 180,000 shifts in a day, and on most days in the last two months Democrats have been putting in at least 75,000 shifts per day.

Johnson says, “We’re seeing wayyy more volume [than in 2018]. Roughly 10x what we were seeing 7 days before the election two years ago.” Waaayyy more, I’d say. I don’t see how anyone is going to put this genie back into the bottle, whatever happens next week.