By John Riley on November 5, 2019 @JRileyMW
The Human Rights Campaign invested $250,000 in Virginia as part of a campaign to elect pro-equality leaders and help Democrats flip the state’s Republican-controlled General Assembly, Metro Weekly can exclusively reveal.
The nation’s largest LGBTQ rights organization announced a “six-figure” investment in the state earlier this year — HRC’s largest state legislative investment in its history — but the exact sum was previously unknown.
HRC’s investment formed the core of a wider strategy to help change Virginia’s political landscape and ensure that LGBTQ bills will actually be debated and brought up for votes in the General Assembly, after years of Republican leaders killing, tabling, or otherwise burying pro-LGBTQ legislation.
In addition to the investment, HRC endorsed 27 candidates in key races across the commonwealth and embedded staff members with “Tier 1 priority” campaigns to help maximize turnout among so-called “equality voters” in Virginia — meaning those who say they would be more likely to support a candidate who supports expanding LGBTQ rights.
“In 2017, HRC invested heavily to support Virginia pro-equality leaders, leading to the election of the nation’s first seated openly transgender state representative, Danica Roem,” JoDee Winterhof, HRC’s senior vice president for policy and political affairs, said in a statement. “This year, we knew in order to make change, we needed to invest more than ever before and in key strategic districts to support pro-equality candidates and move Virginia forward.
“HRC knows from our victories across the 2018 cycle that when we invest in organizing and mobilizing Equality Voters early, we emerge stronger and have a higher rate of success.”
HRC ultimately deployed staff, paid media, and increased awareness of anti-equality candidates’ records in nine key House districts, including: Del. Danica Roem in HD-13; HD-40, where Dan Helmer is challenging House Majority Caucus Chairman Tim Hugo; and HD-66, where Sheila Bynum-Coleman is challenging Speaker Kirk Cox — who has led efforts in the House to repeatedly thwart pro-LGBTQ legislation.
The deployed staff assisted with campaign field operations, as well as mobilizing the aforementioned “equality voters” — something made easier in priority House districts that overlapped with priority Senate targets, as HRC staff could identify and recruit members and voters to volunteer for and support more than one HRC-endorsed candidate in those districts.
For example, HD-66 and HD-68 — held by Del. Dawn Adams — overlap Senate Districts 10 and 11, and HD-68 also overlaps Senate District 12. As such, a concerted effort in those districts helped educate voters on HRC’s support for pro-equality Senate candidates Ghazala Hashmi, Amanda Pohl, and Debra Rodman.
In districts that couldn’t have direct staff embedded, HRC utilized digital tools, such as MobilizeAmerica and Hustle, volunteer-led phone banks, and emails from its Online Strategy teams to help mobilize members in all other districts.
In total, members completed over 200 volunteer shifts, knocked on more than 12,700 doors across priority districts, made just under 11,000 voter contact calls, sent texts to voters, and sent 2,000 postcards and “commit to vote” cards to self-identified equality voters.
HRC also launched a paid media campaign highlighting the stakes of the election, the impact of one vote, and the need for pro-equality leadership in Richmond. The campaign took the form of a series of digital ads across social media platforms.
The first ad, “That’s the Tea,” attempted to highlight and emphasize the degree of inaction on LGBTQ issues and gun reform under current GOP leadership.
The second series of ads involved candidates in Tier 1 House races speaking directly to the camera about the importance of one vote in the election. In getting across its message, the candidates invoked the contested HD-94 race from 2017, when Del. David Yancey had his name drawn from a bowl after the State Board of Elections determined he and challenger Shelly Simonds had earned the same number of votes.
In total, the candidate-to-camera ads targeted and reached about 40,000 equality voters in the remaining Tier 1 House districts, generating over 5.3 million impressions. More than 1 in 7 people who saw HRC search ads highlighting the videos clicked on them.
Ads in HD-13 on behalf of Danica Roem, the first out transgender lawmaker in the commonwealth, were the best-performing of the group, with the “click through” rate on Roem’s video (link is for media, so not indicative of actual voter views) being two to three times higher than other districts. Roem’s ad also had the highest level of social media engagement and the highest video completion rate among those targeted voters.
HRC also launched a direct mail campaign highlighting current GOP leadership’s inaction on certain issues, and another highlighting the rise of white nationalism in the commonwealth, invoking the infamous 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. Both campaigns asked voters to support their local HRC-endorsed candidate in the Nov. 5 elections.
HRC’s communications team also worked to pitch stories to local and national news outlets highlighting the dismal records of anti-LGBTQ equality candidates in various races, whether it was Sen. Amanda Chase, House Speaker Kirk Cox, or Republican candidate Kelly McGinn, who challenged Roem in HD-13.
Read more:
Virginia Election: Key Races That Could Flip the House and Impact LGBTQ Rights
Virginia Election: 8 Senate Races to Watch
Republicans won’t stop killing LGBTQ rights in Virginia: A historical perspective
By John Riley on September 25, 2024 @JRileyMW
Hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation and gender identity are on the rise, pointing to a worrisome trend.
According to FBI data, even though violent crime overall decreased by 3% from 2022 to 2023, bias-motivated crimes overall, as well as crimes believed to be motivated by sexual orientation or gender identity, increased.
The FBI counted 2,936 incidents believed to have been motivated by a victim's sexual orientation and gender identity in 2023 -- constituting an 8.6% rise from about 2,700 in 2022.
Bias based on a person's sexual orientation constituted about 18.1% of all bias-motivated crimes, while bias based on a person's gender identity constituted 4.3% of all hate crimes -- comprising the third and fourth most prevalent bias motivations, behind race or ethnicity and religion.
By Will O'Bryan on October 3, 2024
At the corner of 17th Street and Rhode Island Avenue in downtown Washington, the headquarters of the Human Rights Campaign is a beacon. As the largest LGBTQ-advocacy organization in the country, with its shining equality logo near the roof, its similarly styled flag flying above, there's hardly another building in D.C. that so clearly announces its presence as a safe space.
If this mid-century office tower might be considered a factory, its assembly-line workers are churning out legislative action, policy pushes, community advocacy and all the other products one would associate with an iconic human-rights organization. These products, however, aren't merely domestic. HRC also does a thriving export business.
By John Riley on September 19, 2024 @JRileyMW
A recent poll reported that LGBTQ voters favor Kamala Harris over Donald Trump by a nearly 67-point margin in the upcoming presidential election.
According to the poll, conducted in early August by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation in conjunction with the LGBTQ-owned research firm Community Marketing & Insights, 74% of LGBTQ voters plan to vote for the Harris-Walz ticket in November.
About 7.5% of LGBTQ voters plan to vote for the Trump-Vance ticket, with the remainder of LGBTQ voters planning to either select a third-party candidate or planning not to vote.
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