Tony McMullin, aka Tony the Democrat, started an informal postcard-writing group in 2017 with five friends in order to remind Democrats to vote in a special Congressional election in Tony’s home state of Georgia. This race was the first chance to flip a Republican seat since the 2016 election, and it lit a fire under Democrats nationwide desperate to change the dynamic in Congress. People from all over the country wrote postcards for the Democrat, Jon Ossoff, and after just one month, Tony’s group had grown to 1,200 people.
Ossoff did not win that election, but Tony’s writers started writing postcards for lesser races, forcing the Republican candidates had to work harder and spend more. It was the fourth postcard writing campaign for a state representative in Oklahoma where Tony started to see what he calls “the magic sauce.” A retired teacher was running for a special election, and the district had only 5,000 Democrats and 1,000 Independent voters. Tony’s group was able to write to each one of those voters twice, and the Democrat won by just 95 votes.
Today Postcards to Voters has 60,000 members and counting. They sponsor a select number of local and statewide races every election. In 2018, they wrote 1.9 million postcards in September and October for 32 campaigns, and predict an even larger turnout and impact for the 2020 election.