How We Made a State Supreme Court Campaign Cool

The most important question on the 2025 Pennsylvania general election ballot, retention of State Supreme Court judges, was buried halfway down the back page. But thanks to a strategic, multipronged coalition effort, voters in this battleground state retained three Democratic justices and kept the Democrats’ five-to-two majority on the court. This win will be critical for protecting reproductive freedom, workers’ rights and environmental regulations, as well as voting rights and fair legislative maps.

In odd-numbered election years, significant numbers of Pennsylvania voters do not vote their entire ballot, a phenomenon typically referred to as roll-off. Ordinarily, as many as 30% of voters will skip offices or questions closer to the end of their ballot that seem less important or recognizable. But a network of Pennsylvania organizations including One Pennsylvania (One PA), Make The Road PA, Asian Pacific Islander Political Alliance and other members of the Working Families Party–with support from our state donor table–brought roll-off down from 30% in 2021 to 2% in this election–the lowest rate ever.

Our coalition used diverse but integrated tactics throughout the spring, summer, and fall of 2025. This included paid, earned and new media alongside door knocking, volunteer organizing, and greeting voters at the polls. We worked to be sure we didn’t flinch from clearly naming villains, and we attempted to bring an organizing approach to every tactic, thinking as much about who is carrying our message and why they care, as much as how well it is polling. We centered working people’s political instincts and prized their established networks of trust.

Our message needed to be clear about what was at stake and who was to blame. And our tactics focused first on winning over leaders of various types who could then carry the message to the communities whose trust they’d already earned. Because we used strategies that sought to move power into regular people’s hands–rather than relying solely on professional consultants and vended programs–we defended a critical bastion in the fight against authoritarianism.

Who and where

The Working Families Party of Pennsylvania is both a movement coalition and a political party, with 10 organizational members, including One PA, who collectively represent 100,000 commonwealth residents. The member organizations include unions and community groups. Their strongest bases are Philadelphia, Allegheny County (home to Pittsburgh), and the Lehigh Valley, but they’re active in several smaller places as well, especially deindustrialized working-class towns and towns with a majority of people of color–which are often the same. 

One PA in particular is rooted in working-class, majority-Black communities in Allegheny, Dauphin, Delaware and Philadelphia Counties. The PA Working Families Party has been active in elections since 2018; our coordination in this election built on collaborations in several previous fights. These include the election and re-election of Philadelphia City Council member Kendra Brooks in 2019 and 2023; the 2021 elections of Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner and Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey; US Rep. Summer Lee’s win in 2022 and Philadelphia City Council member Nic O’Rourke’s in 2023, and Helen Gym’s run in the 2023 Philadelphia mayoral primary.

Media and message

Polling shows clearly that voters hate the billionaires and corporations who try to corrupt our elections and buy our courts, but some Democratic campaigns have balked at connecting the wealth-hoarding of the rich and their influence on government with growing economic pain among the rest of us. Our coalition’s paid media–recorded ads that aired on cable television, streaming services and social media–centered the class-based antagonism at the center of this election.

Jeff Yass, Pennsylvania’s richest man and one of Trump’s top donors, dumped millions into the race to try and break the Democratic majority on the court. Because of the training, research and coordination work of PAYBAC over the last few years, a coalition closely aligned with the Working Families Party, we were able to call out billionaires in general, and Yass in particular, with a rolodex of receipts. Clearly naming rightwing billionaires as the villains helped voters see the threat we faced not as a causeless apparition of bad, but as the clear self-interested policy of robber barons. Our members, and working class Pennsylvanians more generally, resonated with this message, allowing it to go further.

Our coalition organized direct actions to dramatize this message and create valuable media coverage, what campaigns call “earned media.” To begin with, media paid little attention to the State Supreme Court race. But by hosting direct action mobilizations against Jeff Yass, we were able to force the election into the headlines.

In late September, 50 members of One PA, Working Families Party, and other PAYBAC members converged on Yass’ corporate office and held a speakout in front of the doors. Unlike some political coverage that writes primarily for an insider audience and leaves electoral stakes implied, coverage of this and other actions to follow made clear from the outset who was trying to corrupt the court, and what we could lose – reproductive freedom, workers rights, environmental protections and fair elections.

Typically, direct action isn’t considered an important electoral tactic. However, by protesting the billionaires trying to buy the election, we were able to leverage the power of collective demonstrations to help inform voters about what was at stake on the ballot. One PA members still cite the demonstration at Yass’ corporate headquarters as a highpoint of 2025.

Recognizing that many in our communities get their information from social media, we also launched an effort to organize online content creators–people making content on Instagram and TikTok, who are quickly becoming one of the most relied-on sources of information, especially among younger people. Creators have earned the trust of their audience, many of whom didn’t know about this election.

By bringing content creators together and teaching them the ins and outs of the election, we gave them the tools to inform their audience. Importantly we didn’t treat the creators as a TV channel by acting like advertisers buying time or product placement. Instead, we built strong relationships and used an organizing model, treating the creators as partners. This meant the content posted was much more authentic and shared more often. In addition to strong “view,” “like,” and “share” numbers, we had many anecdotal reports of voters saying to poll-greeters that the reason they knew there was an election at all was that they learned about it on Instagram or TikTok. 

True to theme, the messages in these social media videos generally focused on the attempt of billionaires to take over our courts, and what Pennsylvanians stood to lose. These videos quickly became the preferred way for One PA members to inform their friends and family about the election. 

Building relationships, one voter and one door at a time

From voter registration in the spring, to poll greeting on Election Day, our commitment to an organizing approach led us to prize existing networks of trust, to prioritize relationship building and follow-up, and care as much about who is carrying our message and why, than about whether they are carrying a perfectly crafted poll-tested soundbite. 

Because of tax constraints on funding for voter registration efforts, many voter registration operations are cost-contrained from doing much more than getting a person registered. 

Typically, newly registered voters get no additional information or reminders about voting, so few actually make it to the polls. Our coalition, on the contrary, made an effort to follow up with every voter. We provided timely reminders, support and community to help establish a new voting habit. In addition to being more likely to vote, many new One PA activists and members come into the organization this way.

Our coalition fielded a traditional paid door-knocking program, and augmented it with a community-neighbor door-knocking effort. Over the last decade, we’ve seen contact rates in traditional door-to-door canvassing efforts decline. As the loneliness epidemic sharpens, transience increases, and voters become accustomed to large, cyclical, paid door knocking efforts, fewer people answer their doors. 

However, statistics show, and our experience bears out, that receiving a visit from your neighbor, in particular, is still extraordinarily effective. Voters recognize their neighbors, are more likely to see them as offering helpful information, and are more willing to have frank conversations. 

Our community-neighbor door-knocking efforts averaged a 25% contact rate, more than double the 10% rate common for paid door-to-door programs. These community-neighbor programs are much harder to rapidly scale because they depend on long-term organizing to identify neighborhood leaders, but they are much more impactful. Instead of several dozen expert canvassers, we divested more power into our membership by having several hundred neighborhood election captains. 

Because funders did not make big investments in this important State Supreme Court race, our coalition had many more voters to contact than we could fund. This prompted us to build stronger volunteer programs than we had in recent years. We built phone, text and poll-greeter programs, and empowered volunteer groups to collaborate on strategy, especially one group of volunteers, Red2Blue. Volunteers found that they had some of the most positive experiences they’ve ever had because voters experienced the incoming phone calls and text messages as helpful rather than as pestering. Many voters didn’t know the election was taking place at all. Others knew, but had only received misleading mail and ads driven by GOP billionaires. Both were grateful to get our calls. 

Building a strong volunteer program depends on building relationships and valuing volunteers time and energy. It turned out that One PA members, and many others, were grateful to have a way to get plugged in. 

On Election Day, our coalition implemented a large poll greeter program, which proved to be among our most effective contributions. Despite reaching many people through our other efforts, there were inevitably still tens of thousands of voters who would show up to the polls not having heard about the State Supreme Court race, or understandably, not fully knowing what “retention” meant. 

Almost 30% of voters were undecided on the ballot questions going into Election Day. This was a challenge, because these undecided voters might either be vulnerable to GOP misinformation, or simply leave the Supreme Court retention races blank. The coalition’s poll greeter program mostly solved this problem. We covered 1,000 polls with greeters who were trained to follow applicable law, report election interference and, most critically, give helpful information to voters about what was on the ballot. 

A single volunteer, working for three hours, at peak time, would likely see 300 voters and be able to influence about 30% of them, or 100 votes. This is a huge impact, especially compared to the small handful of voters a volunteer knocking doors on Election Day can earn. One PA member’ loved this program because they could see and feel each vote they earned. 

Feeding the cycle of progress

Our coalition was and continues to be united by a theory of change: We believe that in order to beat fascists and banish them from political viability we need long-term organizing that boldly names villains and unites around a vision of guaranteed necessities, freedom and safety for everyone, no matter where they are from or the color of their skin. These efforts can build a cross-class, multiracial majority that will do more than temporarily flip control of the government; it will sustainably remake the electorate and lead to an upward cycle of progress.

This election gave us a chance to apply that theory to our campaign design. We found that our unapologetic messaging that named villains and our organizing approach that invested in local leaders helped net big wins: we lowered roll-off from 29% to 2%. In the coming years, the cost of elections will continue to spiral. We’ll need to find messages that cut through the noise, and rely ever more on volunteers and local leaders to carry our message. The success of this odd year Pennsylvania election, halfway down the back of the ballot shows a way forward – not only to win elections, but to build power one cycle to the next, to win the deep change our members need.