In a political off-cycle year, all eyes turned to the special election in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District. This election called for exceptional organizing efforts; by Election Day, McCready’s team ended up sending 750,000 messages to friends and voters. 

Scaling Capacity to Reach Voters

After the 2018 midterms election was overturned due to Republican ballot fraud, Democratic candidate Dan McCready — a Marine Corps veteran and small business owner — ran in September 2019 for the second time in the 9th District. He faced off against Republican Dan Bishop in the 2019 special election. 

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McCready’s campaign was facing the significant challenge of campaigning in a deep red district that hadn’t elected a Democrat since 1963. With several months until Election Day, the campaign partnered with Impactive, which served as their all-in-one grassroots organizing solution.

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Creating a Digital Volunteer Headquarters on Impactive

Impactive became the McCready campaign’s digital volunteer headquarters. The campaign placed signs with details for downloading the Impactive app in their campaign headquarters and each field office. 

Both paid organizing staffers and campaign volunteers completed actions on Impactive, such as:

• Sending targeted fundraising appeals with custom donation amounts ahead of the quarterly filing deadline
• Launching rapid-response fundraising appeals through peer-to-peer text messaging in line with breaking news as the race progressed
• Checking whether friends or family knew 9th District voters through relational organizing via friend-to-friend text messaging
• Encouraging voters to get to the polls in last-minute GOTV on Election Day

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The McCready campaign welcomed over 300 volunteers onto the Impactive platform and sent 750,000 messages to friends and voters about the race. When Election Day was over, volunteers had completed more than 1,000 actions to spread the word, raise money, and get voters to the polls.

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Unfortunately, Dan McCready lost by a narrow margin on Election Day. However, McCready’s campaign was widely praised for building a blueprint for Democrats to flip deep-red districts in 2020.