Campaigns & Elections

How We Got Involved in the 2020 Election

November 11th, 2020

Election 2020 Campaign Consulting

It happened! With the most votes ever, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be the next president and vice-president of the United States. Our team is proud to have been on the front lines of the election this year—from helping to mobilize Black voters to winning ballot campaigns to electing new progressive candidates up and down the ballot to protecting the integrity of the vote.

In the year leading up to Election Day, our team also drove powerful digital campaigns, landed thousands and thousands of major media hits, developed creative media and mail, and booked our clients more hours on air than Steve Kornacki.

Here are some of the campaigns that we worked on during this cycle.

Electing Democratic candidates

We worked with candidates and independent expenditure committees in 170+ races across 22 states. From strategy to message development to targeting. Hundreds of millions of digital ad impressions. Tens of millions of pieces of direct mail. Tens of thousands of gross rating points.

From labor unions working to elect Joe Biden all the way down-ballot to school board positions. Including:

  • The reelections of U.S. Representatives Jim Cooper, Veronica Escobar, Rosa DeLauro and Tom Malinowski
  • Working with state legislative caucuses and IE tables, we flipped seats from red to blue in Connecticut, Indiana, Maine, Minnesota and New York
  • The largest IE for Los Angeles County’s new District Attorney George Gascón, who, upon taking office on December 7, will immediately end the use of the death penalty and the practice of prosecuting children as adults in the most populous prosecutorial jurisdiction in the country

Recruiting poll workers

We worked with Power the Polls, a first of its kind, nonpartisan initiative to recruit new poll workers ahead of the 2020 election. In partnership with Power the Polls, the BerlinRosen team developed a comprehensive digital strategy and secured hundreds of media hits, including a segment on “Today,” NBC News, AP, Vogue, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, as well as targeted local media features. This campaign even received major support from Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Rihanna and Billie Eilish.

The result? Over 700,000 new poll workers recruited across the nation, including nearly 100,000 recruited through our digital outreach.

Engaging the Black community

Following the historic vice-presidential nomination (and now win!) of Kamala Harris, we coordinated with both the internal and field teams to land feature stories on BlackPAC’s voter outreach operations in major outlets including The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg. As racial justice issues soon became the forefront of the ongoing political discourse, our rapid-response media work helped BlackPAC continue to uplift the key issues concerning the Black electorate. Through many historic moments, including a large turnout of Black voters in Georgia, BlackPAC targeted about 1.5 million of low propensity Black voters, of which 39% voted before Election Day this year.

By building on previous years of work, we cemented Color Of Change as the leading group pushing Facebook to enact and enforce policies to remove disinformation and flag violent and hateful content. In a huge and unprecedented win, thanks to the work of the Color Of Change team, Facebook has applied labels to Trump and his enablers’ misleading and bogus posts. With their work in pushing Facebook to make changes to false information spread on the social media platform, we pushed to get coverage with The Washington Post, Buzzfeed, FastCompany, Reuters and more. 

We have been working hard with the Black Futures Lab and Black to the Future Action Fund this election season, working to produce digital events with several activists and politicians—Ayana Pressly, Barbara Lee, Rashad Robinson and Nse Ufot to name a few. In our work with these thought leaders, we ramped up the curation of even more great content through creating videos, infographics, toolkits, live debate coverage and much more that showed prominence throughout the election and especially on election day. Our messaging focused on ad campaigns in key swing states—Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Michigan, Texas and Wisconsin.

As part of our ongoing work with The Movement for Black Lives, we were engaged by the election initiative, The Frontline, a strategic partnership between the Movement for Black Lives Electoral Justice Project, the Working Families Party and United We Dream. We successfully amplified their Election Defenders program, which de-escalated 630 reported incidents at polls with joy and music and continue to amplify the critical role Black people have played in Biden’s victory, with stories in MSNBC, AP, USA Today, Politico and more.

We built out their social media accounts, developed videos and graphics, drove organic strategy, their email program and paid media towards building out their base of volunteers and supporters online, mobilizing them to the streets and to online engagement—from a massive day of action in October to a pre-election event with Stacey Abrams. 

No on Prop 115

Colorado Vote No On Prop 115

In a massive win for abortion access, we led the No On 115 in Colorado to protect the right to full, unrestricted access to abortion at the ballot. Proposition 115, which would have banned abortion at 22 weeks, was the next front in a national coordinated effort to ban abortion outright—and opposition forces thought it was a shoe-in. In partnership with a strong progressive table, the women-led BerlinRosen team oversaw branding, digital advocacy, advertising and direct mail. We raised $190k in small-dollar online donations and mobilized thousands of volunteers. Ultimately, voters rejected Prop 115 by a decisive 3-2 margin—a bigger split than the Senate and Presidential races.

Given Colorado’s status as 1 of only 7 states that has no abortion restrictions, this consequential victory protects access for pregnant people statewide and around the country who travel there to get abortion care later in pregnancy. 

Helping disenfranchised communities vote safely

Helping disenfranchised communities vote safely

Partnered with the Voter Participation Center(VPC) to secure high-impact state and national media placements about VPC’s critical nonpartisan voter engagement work, which focuses on empowering historically disenfranchised communities to vote safely. Placements in 2020 included pieces in The Atlantic, POLITICO, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Tampa Bay Times and many others.

We also began work with the Fair Elections Center, to support their work in the lead-up to the 2020 election. Since our work began we’ve landed interviews with their board chair and former U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors Chair David Fineman around Louis DeJoy’s actions on the Postal Service and vote by mail on MSNBC, CNN, CBS News, PBS Newshour and Yahoo! Finance. 

Amplifying Democratic Attorneys General

Amplifying Democratic General Attorneys

For more than four years, we have worked closely with the Democratic Attorneys General Association to elevate the profiles of democratic state AGs across the country. As COVID-19, racial injustice and voter intimidation swept through the country this year, our team has driven—and continues to drive—daily network- to-network broadcast coverage of the legal fight democratic attorneys general are leading to protect Americans. Placements have included CNN with Chris Cuomo, MSNBC with Chris Hayes, Good Morning America and so many more.