Democrats Missed the Mark in Virginia. But While It Went Down, We Ran an Experiment Under the Radar to See What Messages Can Break Through in Tough Elections. What We Found is a Big Deal for 2022.

Micro-influencers break through the noise of election season. We have the receipts.

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BIG TAKEAWAY: It’s not just the message; it’s the messenger. Micro and nanoinfluencers — the same tactic that helped Biden win in 2020 and flip Georgia blue a year ago last week — broke through the noise in Virginia. 

1. Micro-influencers are only getting more important in politics: They’re good enough messengers to build up an audience but small enough to have a genuine connection with that audience. Despite that, there’s never been a scientific test to prove they really work during election season. We ran that test.

2. The bottom line: People who see micro-influencer messages about Democrats have seriously higher message recall than those who don’t.

3. And the more often you’re online, the likelier you are to remember the message.

This fall, we had nearly 300 microinfluencers share pro-Democratic messages in Virginia. The strategy was simple: Share a personal story about why we need to win. We had moms talk about their kids’ futures, doctors talk about healthcare, young people talk about generational justice, and a lot more — but everything led back to the importance of voting on November 2nd.

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Top Performing Pro-Democratic Micro-Influencer Posts in Virginia

Then we did something that had never been done before: We created technology to find these influencers’ followers in the real world. And we sent them a survey to find out if they’d seen that message — and if they’d really heard it.

What we found was hard to argue with:

Recall of Political Messages from Micro-Influencers

People who saw these micro-influencer posts were 28 percent more likely to remember Democratic messaging than people who didn’t.

And the kicker:

Recall for Frequent Social Media Users

If you used social media several times a day, your odds of remembering the Democratic message went up — with this group, you were 45 percent likelier to remember seeing a pro-Democratic message if you followed one of the micro-influencers who posted.

That’s no small thing: Being online often means you’re exposed to that many more messages. So in a bigger flood of content, one message could easily get lost.

But it didn’t. When a micro-influencer combined politics with a personal story, their followers sat up and paid attention.

More than that — they returned the favor.

Example Responses to These Pro-Democratic Messages

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Bottom line: We’ve been talking about micro-influencers in politics since 2019 because we believed persuasion was moving online. Since then, we’ve entered a pandemic that has people in front of their screens more often than ever, and ad bans from Facebook and Google that make normal digital ads a shadow of their former selves. Unfortunately, neither of those changes are going anywhere any time soon — which means we need a new tactic if we’re going to hold the House, Senate, and state chambers this November. It’s fitting that that new tactic is the oldest of the old school: People who care, talking to people who will listen.