Getting out the Black Vote in Washington DC: A Field Experiment

Scholars and practitioners have long understood the importance of mobilization for increasing voter turnout, particularly the power of personal contact to increase voter participation in low-propensity communities of color. Compared to research focused on other communities, however, less is known about how Black voters respond to encouragements to vote. This lacuna in the literature can be attributed both to the political capture of Black voters by the Democratic Party and also to rational reluctance by many in the Black community to cooperate with outside researchers seeking to experiment on their communities. Seeking to add to this literature, in the weeks leading up to the 2018 midterm elections we conducted a set of focus groups that informed a subsequent get-out-the-vote (GOTV) effort in two majority-Black wards of Washington DC. The focus group conversations generated valuable insights into the way Black residents think about politics and voting; the GOTV effort yielded negligible effects.