It’s an expression so common in every election cycle, you might not even notice it. A benign catch-all term for both nonpartisan voter registration drives and sophisticated influence operations. A phrase that is so firmly lodged in the electoral firmament, it almost feels intrinsic to the democratic process, as much a part of the routine as ballot boxes and super PACs.
I’m talking, of course, about the phrase “Get Out the Vote.”
Other slogans like “Vote early and often” and the Obama-fueled “Don’t boo, vote” may make the rounds sometimes, but “Get Out the Vote” is the gnomic campaign strategy that reliably turns up everywhere in all of America’s major elections. The phrase’s ubiquity is even more impressive, however, given how much its meaning has evolved over the years, and how long it’s been around (much longer than one might expect).
A rather literal beginning
It’s unclear just who coined the phrase, but its earliest citation dates to May 1861, a month after the Civil War began. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “get out the vote” first showed up in print in an Ohio-based newspaper, the Daily Commercial Register. It was the headline in an article urging “the friends of Judge Worcester,” who was apparently up for election at that volatile time, “to be active today in securing a full vote for him in the city.”
Well before “the vote” became a metonym for “voters and the votes with which they vote,” though, Get Out the Vote had a slightly longer precursor. Apparently, “Get out the voters” was in circulation decades prior, appearing as early as 1838, when it cropped up during debates about proposed amendments to the Pennsylvania constitution. Once the shorter, sleeker version of the expression emerged, it gradually supplanted its predecessor in posterity—the same way Facebook’s lopped-off “the” is now merely a footnote.
By the early 20th century, Get Out the Vote had graced the New York Times in a 1901 article about Edward M. Shepherd’s unsuccessful mayoral bid (“Election District Captains Instructed to Get Out the Vote”), and appeared in Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel, The Jungle (“On election morning, he was out at four o’clock, ‘getting out the vote’”).
Many of these early examples suggest the phrase started out with its most literal incarnation. To “get out the vote” back then meant knocking on doors on Election Day and nudging voters toward their polling places, or in the case of The Jungle, physically transporting them there. The meaning of the phrase would drastically expand over the next half century or so, though, as technology improved—and as more people demanded the right to vote.
A boost in participation
After the 19th amendment was ratified in 1920, securing women’s suffrage, Get Out the Vote took on a new connotation. It not only meant getting voters to the polls, but reaching a vast, new demographic of voters. Suddenly, candidates campaigning for office had to reach more than just the usual suspects—they also had to reach women.
The year women finally got the vote happened to be the same year the first commercial radio station launched. Pittsburgh’s KDKA went live in November 1920, its initial broadcast a breathless narration about the returns of that year’s presidential election. (Congratulations, Warren G. Harding! Or, at least, for a while!) In the 1920s, efforts to “get out the vote” moved beyond newspaper ads, editorials, pamphlets, and flyers, and into a new realm of mass communication. Potential voters could now hear Get Out the Vote messaging without leaving their houses—or opening their doors to knocking strangers.
In the decades that followed, the increasing popularity of television coincided with the brewing Civil Rights movement. As activists fought to further expand the vote, especially to people of color, they were joined by such beloved entertainers as Sammy Davis Jr. and Harry Belafonte, familiar to millions from TV shows and movies. While reflecting on singer and actress Lena Horne’s legacy decades later, New York Mayor Ed Koch described her efforts during the Civil Rights struggle of the early ‘60s as: “ . . . working with Martin Luther King Jr. and getting out the vote down South . . .”
The expression had transformed from one of civic engagement to one of civic empowerment.
A modern update (or two)
Every classic brand eventually gets some kind of revamp. In 1990, in the middle of President George H. W. Bush’s White House tenure, Virgin Records America cochairman Jeff Ayeroff launched a new organization essentially meant to rebrand Get Out the Vote for the MTV Generation. “Rock the Vote” leveraged Ayeroff’s many connections throughout the music industry toward reaching its younger, more disaffected fans. “If I can market Madonna, Prince, and the Talking Heads,” he said at the time, “I can market voting.”
Rock the Vote kicked into high gear the following year, with a racy Madonna PSA (imagine any other kind in 1991), a series of concerts, and an incredibly successful voter registration drive throughout Lollapalooza’s summer tour. (Yes, Lollapalooza used to be a traveling music festival.) The ostensibly bipartisan effort helped bring about a 20-year-high youth-voter turnout in the 1992 election, and may have had a hand in tipping it to Bill Clinton.
As a still-enduring organization, Rock the Vote has been inarguably successful in its get-out-the-vote efforts. As an expression, though, it never quite burrowed all the way into cultural vernacular.
And the less said about its music-world successor—the 2004 “Vote or Die” campaign, created by Sean Combs—the better.
The election year that Combs introduced Vote or Die as a slogan turned out to be the same year that Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook, prefiguring a massive shift in how campaigns are conducted. “Facebook helps get out the vote” read a Los Angeles Times headline in 2012. The article itself described in detail just how the platform did so at the time: “Facebook’s usual get-out-the-vote effort includes a banner with a short message accompanied by pictures of friends who said they had gone to the polls. That message was displayed to more than 60 million Facebook users who were deemed eligible to vote in the U.S.”
Two presidential elections later, in 2020, Facebook offered an entire suite of products dedicated to “Get Out the Vote content creation,” advertising and warning against voter suppression and misinformation. Of course, by that point, Get Out the Vote initiatives on social media had evolved into data-driven, highly microtargeted broadsides—as likely to inform and persuade as they were to manipulate. Political data shops can now discern, say, which blue voters in which red districts are most likely to be motivated, based on their online activity, by which messaging.
Incredibly, all these initiatives still fall under the umbrella of a phrase coined in the 19th century.
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