Voters showed up in record numbers earlier this month during off-cycle elections. A new book, Party at the Ballot Box: Mobilizing Black Women Voters (NYU Press, 2025), exemplifies the importance of Get Out the Vote (GOTV) efforts. Good Authority editor Nadia E. Brown welcomed the opportunity to chat with the authors, Melissa R. Michelson, Stephanie L. DeMora and Sarah V. Hayes, about some key takeaways. This discussion, lightly edited for length, is below.
Nadia E. Brown: This is such a timely book, given the importance for Democratic candidates of Get Out the Vote efforts in Black communities. Additionally, your collaboration with Black Girls Vote offers creative insights into how scholars can work with practitioners to develop effective GOTV strategies. Let’s dive into what makes this book so relevant and why more scholars should pursue research partnerships with community organizations!
At its core, this book is about GOTV efforts, what makes them successful and why people turn out. Yet, the focus on “partying to the polls,” while not novel in Black communities, is not directly addressed in traditional GOTV efforts or political science literature. What do you want readers to take away from this text?
Melissa R. Michelson: One huge takeaway is that there is often a gap between what is happening in communities and what political scientists are doing. And while political scientists have studied the role of emotion as a motivator of political behavior for some time, and while Black communities have used celebration and joy to come together for some time, there was a disconnect. Most political science research about motivating Black voters was about voting as a duty to ancestors and the sacrifices of the Civil Rights Movement, not about the joy of coming together at church and walking in community to the polls.
So it’s really two takeaways. First, political scientists need to keep an eye on what is going on in the world around them and be open to learning from folks who aren’t part of academia but have learned how to motivate their communities and pursue power. Second, positive emotions, even in today’s environment of polarization and violence, can be a powerful tool in the get-out-the-vote toolbox.
You partner with Black Girls Vote to collect data on Nykidra Robinson’s Party at the Mailbox initiative. Can you discuss this partnership? What tips or suggestions would you give to other scholars who want to collect data and collaborate with local nonprofit organizations?
Melissa R. Michelson: Partnering with Nyki was amazing, and we are so grateful to her and her team for their partnership. Her experience and her innovation epitomize the non-academic expertise I noted earlier. Nyki may not have a PhD in political science, but she is a critical and strategic community advocate and political organizer. She understands people. She understands her community. Scholars who want to partner with nonprofit organizations need to respect and be receptive to the community-based expertise of folks in a wide range of organizations.
They also have to keep in mind that organizations have different timelines, different needs, and different ways of talking about their work. A political scientist might have what they think is an innovative and important theory, but sometimes those theories aren’t ideal for testing in the real world – testing that theory would be too expensive, or would answer a small (albeit theoretically compelling) question that the organization doesn’t think is worth the investment of time and effort, or might hurt the organization’s relationship with the community they serve.
For example, the Party at the Mailbox packages we designed and distributed included a number of items: informational literature, a t-shirt, posters, stickers, and snacks, etc. A political scientist looking to test a clean set of hypotheses about which item or items were moving voters to the polls might want to randomly include or not include items in packages shared with voters. Nyki wanted to include all of the items because she believed it would signal a significant investment in the targeted voters. She also wanted there to be a sufficient number and variety of items so that the packages would be shared with household members and children.
We were also limited in which cities and elections we could conduct our random controlled trials because Black Girls Vote was limited by the preferences of their funders. We did what we could to support those fundraising efforts, including speaking to funders and prospective funders, and preparing short memos for Nyki to share. Scholars should make sure that in addition to writing academic pieces that they’re also producing accessible reports that groups can use to share with their communities and their supporters.
By focusing on the political engagement of Black women, how does a gendered analysis provide deeper insight into the distinct strategies, motivations, and barriers shaping civic participation within Black communities?
Stephanie L. DeMora: Gender always matters. Women’s political behavior has long been shaped by gendered expectations around family and caregiving. Even more complicated is the role of Black women in politics. Black women are particularly important in our work because of their intersectional positionality. That is, they hold two marginalized identities simultaneously. They are women, who remain underrepresented in politics as a whole, and also Black, a group that has experienced unique barriers to political participation. This has created a powerful social identity for this group, with ramifications for political engagement. These intersecting identities influence how Black women experience institutions, and influence their emergence as informal leaders in both caregiving and community advocacy.
Furthermore, focusing squarely on Black women was critical because our partners on the ground are Black women, and because the organization was built around empowering Black women and girls. It’s important to highlight that Black women have historically been politically active agents of mobilization within their communities. They have turned out to vote at higher rates than their male counterparts since the 1970s. And Black women have historically played active leadership roles in local community institutions. Through their leadership roles in churches, Black Greek Letter Organizations (i.e., Black sororities), and other community spaces, they play a crucial role in political socialization and community building through “motherwork.” Instead of working and advocating for themselves alone, Black women focus on advancing their entire community.
These GOTV campaigns, spanning elections from June 2020 through November 2024, aimed to empower communities by empowering the Black women who lived there. These Black women were encouraged to share the contents of our party packages with others to spread the joy and, subsequently, the interest and connection to politics. We theorized that because Black women have historically played this sharing and socializing leadership role in politics and their communities, they would be a natural fit as Party at the Mailbox mobilizers – and we were right.
Researchers can look to this text as a model for grounding their own methodological and data gathering techniques. You detail the methodology and data collection efforts of this project to reflect a cultural sensitivity in working with Black communities, institutions and organizations. What processes were particularly useful which were the most challenging and why? How did your own identities come into play when researching this topic?
Melissa R. Michelson: Ensuring that the folks conducting the interviews and focus groups had the appropriate cultural competency was key to our qualitative data collection. If you want people in a historically marginalized community to tell you what they think, not just what they think you want to hear, they have to feel comfortable. Having a team of scholars that included folks living in the different cities where Party at the Mailbox was active, and especially a team with a large number of Black women, was key to cultivating that comfort and getting the best data. At the same time, that means we needed to put more work into ensuring consistency in the data collection process, because a large number of people were conducting the focus groups and interviews. We did a ton of training with our teams across the different cities.
Sarah V. Hayes: Of course, there’s no amount of reading and preparation that can make up for having lived as a Black woman; Melissa and Steph, who are white, focused their efforts instead on aspects of the project that didn’t involve face-to-face interactions with voters. As a Black woman studying Black women’s political behavior, my identity was crucial to accurately capturing how Black women voters understood their role in GOTV campaigns. Cultural competency in political research requires an explicit recognition of how Black women’s racial and gender identity can shape their political behavior. However, what I also find is cultural competency spans beyond explicit recognition of Black women’s identity, but often demands a more implicit knowledge of Black women’s language, history, and social interactions to fully capture the nuanced and complex ways we arrive at our political opinions.
Positionality requires a reflective recognition of how one’s own identity can both aid and hinder qualitative research. To ensure our data collection aligned with our theoretical framework, we intentionally partnered with researchers who shared both the racial and regional identity of the Black women voters we were engaging.
Looking ahead to 2028, what insights do you want others to glean from your work about how communities build resilience and collective action in the face of challenge?
Melissa R. Michelson: One insight that we hope folks will take away is how Nyki pivoted in the face of the covid-19 shutdowns and invented a powerful new way to celebrate Black communities and motivate voter turnout. As we describe in the book, this all started because she couldn’t conduct the polling place festivals as planned for Baltimore’s June 2020 primary; everything was shut down, and Maryland converted to a vote-by-mail election. Instead of canceling her plans to help voters in her city party to the polls, she brought the party to their mailboxes. That pivot was brilliant.
Today, in 2025, the pandemic is behind us and many folks are going back to voting in person, but there will be other challenges, other instances where planned get-out-the-vote efforts are blocked due to a new law or other roadblock. We hope readers will be inspired by this book to think of those roadblocks as opportunities to innovate. John B. Holbein and Sunshine D. Hillygus argue in Making Young Voters that what young people need to learn is persistence. Maybe that’s what researchers need as well.
Especially when working with community organizations or conducting fieldwork, there are always surprises. On Oct. 26, 2020, two Philadelphia police officers fatally shot Walter Wallace, Jr., a Black man, in the predominantly Black neighborhood of West Philadelphia where we were conducting our Party at the Mailbox project. The subsequent protests and curfew made deliveries difficult, and media and public attention was diverted away from the approaching election, which hurt our recruitment efforts. Nyki turned things around with a live interview on the very popular morning news show Good Day Philadelphia, and our teams put in extra time over the next week to ensure that all of the new signups were quickly randomized and all of the packages were successfully delivered.
Throughout the Party at the Mailbox project, there were unexpected events and delays that necessitated quick pivots. Our strong partnership with Nyki and the persistence of our team meant that we were always able to find a way to move forward and continue to collect data and insights.
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