Whether or not Democrats hold onto their U.S. Senate majority (and the final votes for that might not be tallied until early January if there are senatorial runoffs as many experts [4]expect), what’s clear about this election is that Democrats and progressives have tried to break the old script that says a president’s party always loses badly in a midterm year.

They have done that not just by bombarding the airwaves in battleground states, but also by clogging the online platforms used by anybody political marketing experts think are likely voters. Every successive national election cycle breaks the previous spending record [5] and 2014 is no exception. But what’s different this year is where the messaging has occurred, especially a shift to online media. And the messages themselves are a bit different, in that many are not designed to poll well, but to provoke people to vote.

“They do have more information now,” said Travis N. Ridout, co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project [6], which analyzes campaign ad trends. “Part of it is the political parties and outside groups are devoting more to mobilization than they did in the past. They figured out in 2012 that just airing more and more ads in Ohio doesn’t cut it. We know from scientific experiments that you’ve got to work the mobilization side too.”

In 2010, the Democratic Party largely sat on its hands and expected the coalition that first elected President Barack Obama to show up. It didn’t. Young voters, people from communities of color, and women largely stayed home [3], disappointed that the federal government didn’t do more to end an economic downturn. Meanwhile, whiter and wealthier Tea Partiers came out and helped the GOP win a U.S. House majority.

Today, there have been deliberate efforts on the political left not to repeat that mistake. What follows are summaries of four campaigns that have tried different messaging and outreach this year, compared to the 2010 midterm. While it remains to be seen what the national political map will look like after this cycle’s votes are counted, it is clear that old-fashioned organizing and new online communications make a difference.

These dynamics can also be seen at the state level, where a handful of radical right-wing governors elected in the Tea Party wave are fighting for their political lives, such as Florida’s Rick Scott, Kansas’ Sam Brownback, Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, Maine’s Paul Le Page and Pennsylvania’s Tom Corbett.

Pennsylvania: Good Riddance

Gov. Corbett is expected to lose, according to polls [7] that have had him behind for months. The reason is not because of his support for the natural gas fracking industry, for which he helped adopt some of the country’s most anti-environmental laws. It’s because Corbett went after the state’s public schools and the teachers union in its biggest city. The teachers have been fighting back with genuine zeal, and voters have taken notice.

Early in his term, Corbett and the GOP-controlled legislature cut school budgets by $1 billion while reducing corporate taxes. He launched his re-election campaign by trying to provoke a new fight with Philadelphia teachers by blaming them and their union, the American Federation of Teachers, for a statewide public school crisis. AFT started fighting back last fall by airing issue ads on TV showing how the state was mismanaging districts under its control. It ran newspaper ads saying how much was cut from local school budgets. It encouraged a growing coalition [8] of educators, parents and students to speak out about the impact of Corbett’s cuts, such as when a 12-year-old girl died from an asthma attack in a school that had lost its nurse due to budget cuts. When Corbett recently fought back by trying to cancel the city’s teacher contracts, that also became a rallying cry to mobilize volunteers and run phone banks to voters.

This nasty fight wasn’t covered in the national media, but by September education was cited as the foremost issue for Pennsylvania voters in a poll by Franklin & Marshall College. Twenty-six percent of voters ranked it first. Meanwhile, Corbett had fallen further behind [7]that any other right-wing governor in poll after poll this fall.

“It’s been a long struggle in Pennsylvania,” said AFT president Randi Weingarten. “Gov. Corbett cut funding to the bone for schools across the state, and then he tried to blame teachers. We’ve done everything we can to reverse the damage he’s caused. But there’s one thing left, and that is, of course, to vote.”

Help Campaigns By Helping Voters

Nationally, most voters sit on the sidelines as action is confined to a handful of tight, high-profile races in battleground states. This is the case in the only national theme in 2014, which is whether the U.S. Senate loses its Democratic majority to the GOP.

Four years ago, MoveOn.org tried to directly help campaigns seen as endangered. Today, MoveOn spokesman Brian Stewart said the focus has shited to directly mobilizing voters. “In 2010, MoveOn members made calls to recruit local volunteers to help out in targeted campaigns around the country. Our political objective was to fend off the Tea Party wave that engulfed House and Senate races around the country, and we succeeded in saving some progressive Democrats, like Barbara Boxer in California,” he said. “This year, our members are calling voters in targeted Senate races directly. Our political objective is to save the Senate from a GOP takeover.”

MoveOn, like many left-of-center groups, is trying to ensure that the voting blocks that sat out 2010 don’t do that again in 2014.

“Specifically,we’re working to turn out young people and other Americans who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 but are likely to stay home in a midterm election without extra encouragement to vote,” he said. “To get there, MoveOn members will make 5 million volunteer phone calls to drop-off voters in target Senate races from MoveOn field offices in New York City, Chicago, Seattle, and Berkeley and from their homes. We’re on track to secure more than 100,000 pledges to vote from these infrequent (but progressive) voters.”

One difference between 2010 and today is that today’s effort is data-driven, Stewart said.

“One big thing that’s different is our use of data and analysis,” he said. “We’re using social science research, voter turnout data, and—crucially—new experimental research by the Analyst Institute to dramatically improve the targeting of our voter contact effort; so our volunteer-to-voter calls are projected to be significantly more effective per caller than similar calls in previous years.”

Poking Voters Gently And Not So Gently

Ridout, co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project, confirmed that the messaging to each party’s base has become more nuanced and delivered with greater precision, especially in online ads and email blasts. Unlike television, which is geared toward a more mass market audience, Ridout said online messaging is used to deliberately provoke the base voters—even on issues that are no longer polling well in the general public.

“The best mobilization messages are the ones that fire up the base,” he said. “On the Republican side, they’re talking about Obamacare. It doesn’t poll that well anymore, but it makes some people mad enough to get out there and vote. So they’ll use it.”

There are similar examples from progressive groups. Some are softer sells while others aren’t holding anything back. Headcount.org, which registers younger voters at concerts and live music events, has a softer approach. It didn’t just increase those numbers this year compared to 2010, it also collected pledges from people who promised to vote. Andy Bernstein, HeadCount’s executive director, said being more creative was the key.

“We added limited edition artwork to our Pledge to Vote postcards, which was a big hit. I don’t believe anyone has done that before,” he said. “And our registration increase was almost all from [September’s] National Voter Registration Day, which didn’t exist in 2010. For us, the lesson is better ideas lead to better results.”

“We hope this carries through to Get Out the Vote and Election Day, when 300 musicians and entertainers will post their photos on social media holding #GoVote art work,” said Bernstein. “The reach of the campaign should be north of 350 million social media impressions. We did nothing like that for Election Day 2010 or even 2012.”

On the more aggressive side, ColorOfChange.org, a nationwide civil rights group, has accused Republicans of institutional racism to provoke people from communities of color to vote. One flyer, using imagery from anti-police protests in Ferguson, Missouri, said, “Republicans are targeting our kids, silencing our voices and even trying to impeach our president.” The larger print headline said, “Vote November 4!”

“Our goal is to reach black drop off voters in seven states (Illinois, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Arkansas, and Louisiana) with tested messages,” said Rashad Robinson, executive director. “The messages were both partisan and non-partisan and are intended to help contextualize some of the issues that the black community is facing.”

“We know that some folks are less likely to vote in the midterms when we don’t have the same urgency of a national candidate,” he said. “But when we engage people in our community on the issues of the last couple of years that have not only shaped our lives up to this moment but will continue to impact us for years to come, we can shed a light on the true power that lies in the ballot box.”

The early voting totals—of registered Democrats and Republicans mailing in vote-by-mail ballots or showing for in-person voting before Tuesday—show that these kinds of strategies are working to increase [4] Democratic voter turnout, according to academic turnout experts who track the historic state-by-state patterns.

Whether that will be enough to keep the U.S. Senate in Democratic hands or oust the most right-wing governors remains to be seen. But the messaging and voter outreach in 2014 is nothing like it was four years ago. Americans might be sick of campaign ads, but from the campaign side of this dynamic, there’s never been more targeted messaging and deliberate efforts to turn out voters in a federal midterm election.