Episode 17: A (Voting) Party at the Mailbox with Dr. Melissa Michelson

11:47PM Apr 19, 2022

Speakers:

Dr. Ian Anson

Campus Connections

Sophia Possidente

Dr. Kimberly Moffitt

Dr. Melissa Michelson

Keywords:

people

michelson

party

voting

umbc

mailbox

community

vote

election

niki

turnout

baltimore

box

voters

precinct

black

part

primaries

local

paper

Hello, and welcome to Retrieving the Social Sciences, a production of the Center for Social Science Scholarship. I'm your host, Ian Anson, Associate Professor of Political Science here at UMBC. On today's show, as always, we'll be hearing from UMBC faculty, students, visiting speakers, and community partners about the social science research they've been performing in recent times. Qualitative, quantitative, applied, empirical, normative. On Retrieving the Social Sciences, we bring the best of UMBC's social science community to you.

You might not realize it, but right now, all across the country, people are gathering up their money, their resources, volunteers, consultants, and that's right, really over the top haircuts, all with one central goal in mind, winning the 2022 United States General Election. That's right, 2022 is an election year in the United States. And while we may not choose a president this cycle, the future of the country, all 50 states and 1000s of localities, will be determined by this outcome. While elections are as American as apple pie and the Liberty Bell, we don't always think about them until we start seeing all those campaign ads on our televisions and in our social media feeds. But social scientists are thinking about elections all the time, and their insights help us understand why voting and election outcomes happen the way they do. That's where Dr. Melissa Michelson comes in. Dr. Michelson is the Dean of Arts and Sciences and a professor of political science at Menlo College near Palo Alto, California. Dr. Michelson is a nationally recognized expert on Latino politics, voter mobilization experiments, and LGBTQ rights. She's the award-winning author of six books, including "Mobilizing Inclusion: Transforming the Electorate Through Get-Out-the Vote Campaigns," and most recently "Transforming Prejudice: Identity, Fear, and Transgender Rights."

In Dr. Michelson's recent lecture, presented virtually to a UMBC audience as part of the fall 2021 Social Sciences Forum, we hear about an important new experiment on voter turnout called the Party at the Mailbox Project. Party at the Mailbox was first launched in Baltimore in 2020 by the nonprofit Black Girls Vote, and offered a way to make voting and elections fun despite social distancing and the lack of traditional community interaction afforded by in- person precinct voting. Black Girls Vote is a national nonpartisan nonprofit that inspires black girls to use the political process to improve the quality of life for families and the collective community, according to their website, and with this particular initiative, they hoped to boost voter turnout and civic efficacy using their creativity and their dynamism. In her lecture, Dr. Michelson describes how social scientists can study Party at the Mailbox to learn whether and how it works to improve voting outcomes. Let's listen in.

Good afternoon, I have the honor of introducing Dr. Melissa Michelson, who is a nationally recognized expert on Latino politics, voter mobilization experiments and LGBTQ rights. She is the award winning author of six books, including one entitled "Mobilizing Inclusion: Transforming the Electorate Through Get-Out-the-Vote Campaigns," and then most recently, "Transforming Prejudice: Identity, Fear and Transgender Rights." Dr. Michelson is currently Dean of Arts and Sciences and a professor of political science at Menlo College. Her academic work is solidly based in activist scholarship. Whether the focus is on members of the Latino LGBTQ or other marginalized groups. She uses her research to motivate greater equality and justice for all. Dr. Michelson went to graduate school to become a teacher and delights in leading classroom discussions, but also to write books that might make a difference. She has since written six books and dozens of journal articles and book chapters and is a nationally recognized expert in Latinx, voter mobilization and LGBTQ politics. And true to what her bio tells us. Dr. Michelson, in fact, does walk the walk, and my opportunity to see that was in working with her on this project with Black Girls Vote and the phenomenal program of Party at the Mailbox in last year's election campaign. And so this is a joy to be able to hear her work come to fruition and to see what that relationship with Black Girls Vote introduces to us. So I'm really looking forward to hearing what she has to share with us. So thank you so much for being with us today.

Thank you, I am really excited to be here to tell you all more about this fantastic project. I want to tell you about Party at the Mailbox. We are mobilizing black voters with celebrations of community. So that's really the motivating spirit behind these, right? Celebrating community and that leading to turnout. So the motivation for this project, as Niki mentioned, came from the need to pivot because of the pandemic, right? Everyone's getting ready to vote in the 2020 primaries, and now all of a sudden, it's not really a safe to do so in the traditional manner of going to your local polling place. And so Baltimore switches to an all mail ballot election, and Niki decides this is an opportunity to try something new to get out the vote, right? Again, this idea was to celebrate community, to celebrate being part of the City of Baltimore, and that that should lead folks to go and participate. It's grounded, though, in a thing called election festivals that some other scholars have been testing since 2005. They started with a small experiment in Hooksett, New Hampshire, and then another one in New Haven, and then branched out to do it hundreds of times. And the idea is that they were doing randomized controlled trials, RCTs, which means that they are doing a treatment and a control. So this is very much like a medical trial, which I think we're all a lot more familiar with these days, because we're all talking about vaccines. So the idea is, you have a pool of potential participants, you randomly divide it up, one group is the treatment, and one group is the control. For a Party at the Polls, they would take two potential precincts at which to host the party, and then randomly assign one to have a party and one doesn't get a party. And then they would throw these parties at the treatment, polling places. They'd put up a tent, they'd have a DJ with music, they'd have free food, maybe a cotton candy machine. They'd have hot dogs and hamburgers. And they would advertise at this party all over the precinct, right? Maybe that was pieces of mail delivered to people, or social media, advertisements in the local paper. And so people heard, hey, on this day, during voting hours, there's going to be a little free party with food and celebration. And so folks would go to these parties, and they'd sit and eat and talk and dance. And overall, they found, hey, this really works, right, bringing people together just celebrate their neighborhood. And if that happens to be right next to a polling place, that increases participation. So Party at the Mailbox is kind of similar to and inspired by these election festivals that have been held between 2005 and 2018. But of course, you can't have an election festival if it's a vote by mail election. And you're probably like, okay, you've told us all this cool stuff about Party at the Mailbox, but what is the Party at the Mailbox exactly? So let me tell you, what Party at the Mailbox is. It's a box of stuff that people go, mostly educational materials, but then also celebratory things, a poster that says "I love Baltimore, so I vote," a coloring book and crayons to get younger members of the household involved. Noisemaker, balloons, a t shirt that says "Baltimore votes," right? Local treats like these Berger cookies, which I'm not really from Baltimore, but I'm assuming you all are like, Oh, yeah, Berger cookies, right? And so that's part of Niki's brilliance on this is that every box for every city we went to she's like, this is the thing that goes in the box, right? So if you wanted to get a box, you had to sign up. So that is part of the reason that there's all these community partners, right? And so they would say to people, Hey, there's this thing going on, go to this website and sign up. And we had people put in their name and address and their birth year. We were careful to try to not ask for too much personal information, like just the bare minimum so we can match them to the voter file because we don't want to freak people out that we're asking for all kinds of details about their identities. And then once we got those lists, the grad students matched them to the voter file. And then we randomized and so we had here are the people in the treatment group, they're going to get a box. And here are the people in the control group, they asked for a box, but we're not giving them one, right. And you can imagine there was a lot of people who wanted to get one of these boxes. There were also activities that weren't part of the box. There was a car caravan. Something again, a lot of you are probably familiar with. So West Baltimore had a 40-car caravan that drove through the neighborhood and Niki's voice was going out over the the loudspeaker encouraging people to vote. There was an election night dance party on Facebook, that got over 10,000 viewers. And so even if you didn't get a box, you could be part of this. So we are doing RCTs. Right, we are definitely doing the, you know, gold standard evaluation method. But the evaluation also included many other components. We did surveys in every city, where we asked people to respond to an online Qualtrics survey, and give us feedback about the program and and how they felt about it. We also did interviews with local voters and organizers from these partner organizations that Niki and her team were working with to conduct the effort. I mean, we also had zoom focus groups, where, again, we invited people in these communities to talk to us and share how they felt about voting, how they felt about Party at the Mailbox, and what kinds of other effects we could see. So in the RCT, we can measure whether turnout goes up. But in these other methods of collecting data, we can see how did it make people feel? Did it make them feel prouder of being a member of their community? Did it enhance their feelings of identity as voters? Did it make them feel like they had higher levels of political efficacy? And so we can really get at all the different ways in which we think Party at the Mailbox was affecting people. So we go into the field expecting that this Party at the Mailbox idea that Niki comes up with is going to create a celebratory community, it's going to make people feel a stronger feeling of political efficacy, it's going to make them feel more a member of their community and a stronger identity as voters, and it's going to make them more likely to vote. So we wanted to know, okay, did this work? So right now, I'm focusing on the pilot, which is the June 2020, primary in the city of Maryland. We are doing our quantitative analysis using validated turnout data that we get from the state. And then we're also doing this qualitative analysis. So let me first tell you what happened with the validated turnout data. And before I go there, I want to give you a definition of who's at these parties, right? So traditional party at your house, you're the host, and you also have your guests. So we are labeling as hosts, the people who signed up to get a box. And then we have the guests at the party. And here we're defining that as anybody else in your household. And so the idea here is, even if you didn't know about Party at the Mailbox, once that box shows up at your house, now you're in the treatment group. And so what we're really fabulously impressed by when we look at the data, is how much Party at the Mailbox increase the turnout of guests, right? Not particularly surprising, the people who asked for a box, whether they're in the treatment or control group, their high propensity, and so there's just not a lot of room for their turnout to go higher, right? They're already voting right in the high 80s, low 90s percentages. But the guests, right, the people who interacted with this box without expecting it to show up. That's where we really see the movement, particularly low propensity guests, where we are seeing the increase in turnout. And while that was not exactly what we expected, it is so logical. When we look at our qualitative data, our interviews and our focus groups, here's where we start to get the themes that are coming out about community and duty to community. So now we're really getting an understanding of the mechanism by which Party at the Mailbox is having all these effects on people's ad attitudes and behaviors. So we find that the box, again, is creating these new avenues of communication, to talk to other people, that it created this idea or reinforced this idea as voting as a community effort as making people feel part of their local communities. And part of that was because as I mentioned, Niki and her team made, took so much care to make the boxes feel local, that they had local items in them, right. That they, that they felt like, this is something local. This is not some national organization, parachuting in and telling us what to do. Tthis is us, right? We find a lot of evidence that the media campaign was successful, that people heard about it and heard, heard about it in a way that made them excited about voting, especially through social media. And really understood it as a message about, I'm part of this community, and I want to go out and vote as a member of this community, right. So really thinking about it now as Party at the Mailbox encourages voting as a celebration of community. That is the fabulous Part at the Mailbox project and all the evaluation that we're doing. Thanks to Niki's fantastic idea and the work of dozens and dozens of people, and I'm ready to take some questions.

Campus Connections, campus connections, campus connections, campus connections.

Now it's time for Campus Connections, a part of the podcast where we connect today's presentation to the work of other scholars at UMBC. Today, our production intern Sophia is with us to describe one Campus Connection that has everything to do with the complexities of voting behavior. What do you got Sofia?

For this week's installment of Campus Connections, we're looking at the research of Dr. Laura Antkowiak, an associate professor in UMBC's political science department. While Dr. Michelson's project helped us understand how to get people into the voting booth, a recent paper by Dr. Antkowiak explains what happens once they're there. This paper called "Coping with Cross Pressures: the Seamless Garment and Catholic Political Behavior" describes the difficult political choices stemming from the intersection and frequent contradiction of religious beliefs, cultural identity, and the American political system. According to Dr. Antkowiak, these conflicts referred to in the paper as cross pressures happen because the teachings of Catholicism don't fully align with either political party. While the church has often stood with the GOP on social issues such as abortion and same sex marriage, the traditional Catholic views on topics like war, climate, and immigration align more closely with the beliefs of the left. This can cause cognitive dissonance in practicing voters, especially since the current political climate is so polarized. Dr. Antkowiak's paper also pays special attention to Latinx Catholics and how their voting behavior differs from that of their white counterparts. According to the paper, they are more likely to identify with the Democratic Party. This could be the result of a collection of factors including theological differences, interpretation of religious texts, different perspectives on immigration, and the experience of being a minority group in the US. This adds a whole other layer of cross pressures to the act of voting, which is already an emotionally complex experience by itself. As much as current politics could have it seen, voting isn't black and white, nor should it be. From rallying others to vote to stepping into the booth yourself, the democratic process extends beyond any simplification.

Well, if there's one thing I've learned from today's episode, it's that we should never hesitate to remind people to vote. So please, everyone, mark your calendars for the upcoming 2022 primaries general election. And as always, keep questioning.