2020 Election Impact

Clean & Prosperous America is a small organization with a big impact. In 2020, our first year of operation, we dove into the general election and Georgia runoff elections with strategic investments that filled gaps. We launched a unique research effort to evaluate the opinions and attitudes of young voters living outside urban centers and shared this research with hundreds of campaigns in competitive districts across the country.  We launched a grant-giving program that focused on regions where multiple competitive and influential candidates were on the same ballot, and on young and BIPOC voters in rural and suburban areas who face barriers to voting and are often ignored by big campaigns. CaPA’s grant program provided funds, tools, and resources to community-oriented organizations that knew their audience and were trusted by local voters.

Clean & Prosperous America invested $1.25 million during the general election cycle to reach young voters in 11 competitive states and focused our efforts on the difficult races in Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and Iowa. CaPA’s investments included $300,000 in non-urban ambivalent young voter research and candidate education, $300,000 in digital ads, and $650,000 in direct grants to 41 community-oriented organization’s field programs. 

These 41 organizations activated trusted voices from within the community, utilizing peer-to-peer and relational organizing tactics that helped move low-propensity voters to the polls in a way traditional ads simply could not. In Arizona, for example, our investments helped our partners use creative strategies to engage Latinx and Indigenous young people, such as distributing boxes of vegetables along with voting kits in the Apache and Navajo nations and training BIPOC youth to lead voter registration efforts in their underserved neighborhoods in Flagstaff. This city had 3 competitive state legislative races, a competitive congressional race, a competitive Senate race, and the competitive presidential race all on the same ballot.

Clean & Prosperous America moved quickly after the general election, deploying its first grants on November 6th and eventually routing an additional $600,000 to 20 community-oriented organizations engaging the two Senate races in the critical Georgia runoff elections. We focused our support on community-led organizations using peer-to-peer tactics to engage BIPOC youth, especially young Black voters in the rural part of Southwest Georgia. 

These creative partner organizations worked to turn out voters using unique tactics including holiday dinner and toy giveaway events in poverty-impacted rural areas, distributing candidate guides in English and Spanish at college campuses and launching mutual aid networks alongside Get Out The Vote drives.