Patagonia’s $100 voting incentive has run out after four days, with more than 112,000 people signing up to encourage friends and relatives to take part in this year’s US midterm elections.
The outdoor clothing company launched its 11.2 Million Vote Project on September 26, offering participants either $100 in Patagonia credit or a $100 donation to the League of Conservation Voters after they sent voting plans to at least three people.
By September 30, almost 500,000 people, including participants and those they contacted, had made plans to vote, Patagonia said.
The campaign was designed with the Environmental Voter Project to address a perceived gap between concern about climate change and participation in elections. Research by the organisation suggests many Americans respond to environmental issues through recycling and purchasing decisions rather than political action.
Corley Kenna, Patagonia’s chief communications and impact officer, said the incentive had been decisive in helping the company reach its target.
“Offering a meaningful incentive was a game changer,” she said, adding that the goal might otherwise have taken longer than four days to achieve, or might not have been reached at all.
Patagonia voting campaign relies on personal outreach
Participants used a voting-plan app to add friends and generate personalised information. They could also complete optional training, while people who were not registered to vote could receive details about registration or updating their records.
After sharing the plans and logging their outreach to three friends, participants qualified for the reward. Their contacts did not have to register or vote for the participant to receive it.
Donald Green, a Columbia University political scientist who has studied voter mobilisation, said the arrangement was different from paying people to register or vote, which is illegal in federal elections.
He described Patagonia as “essentially hiring people as temp workers, as temp political workers”, comparing the arrangement to a short-term task-based job.
Green said the midterms were a suitable setting for the initiative because people who usually vote in presidential elections can be less likely to take part in midterm contests.
David Nickerson, a political scientist at Temple University, said messages from friends were more likely to be noticed and trusted than approaches from strangers. He added that creating a voting plan could help people picture themselves following through.
Campaign linked to concerns over public lands
Patagonia’s campaign also reflects its concerns about the future of public land. Kenna said 90 million acres were under threat and that the company would continue telling its community which areas were affected and what action people could take through Election Day and beyond.
The company has renewed its dispute with President Donald Trump over public lands. In July, Mr Trump sharply reduced Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, and Patagonia said in September that it had joined a coalition challenging the Bears Ears decision in court.
Ryan Gellert, Patagonia’s chief executive, has described apathy as “probably the single biggest thing that concerns me right now”. The name and budget of the project refer to research suggesting that 11.2 million registered voters who identified as environmentalists did not vote in the 2024 presidential election.
Nathaniel Stinnett, founder of the Environmental Voter Project, said respondents offered political solutions when asked how to address issues such as immigration, gun violence and education. On climate change, however, personal solutions outnumbered political ones by about four to one, with recycling the most common response.
“We’re not going to recycle our way out of the climate crisis,” Mr Stinnett said.
He said people who cared deeply about the environment could still fail to vote because they focused on changing what they ate, bought or how they travelled, rather than casting a ballot.
Mr Stinnett argued that politicians knew which groups voted and which did not, meaning non-voters risked having their priorities overlooked. He said the project aimed to make voting a more consistent part of how environmentally minded people acted on their concerns.
However, the number of people reached by the campaign does not show how many additional voters it created. Nickerson said volunteers might mainly contact friends who were already likely to vote.
He said a randomised study, comparing people who received the outreach with a control group and examining public voting records, would be needed to establish whether the Patagonia initiative had increased turnout.
