Increasingly, fewer candidates seem to respond to the League's outreach to participate in candidate forums. As a result—because of the League’s "no empty chair debate" stance—forums are often foregone, leaving those candidates who do want to participate without a venue to do so.

LWV Kittitas County's (LWVKC) goal is to create "super voters" (people who vote in every election for which they receive a ballot) in younger voters and underserved communities. In pursuit of this, LWVKC wants to get lots of candidate information in front of more voters.

In 2023, there were nearly 80 candidates running for 64 positions in Kittitas County (not counting Selah or Naches school districts). 15 positions had two candidates, the remaining positions had a candidate running unopposed. The League reached out multiple times to the 30 candidates in 15 races, offering something new: a one-on-one interview with a League moderator asking 3 questions sourced from the community. Regardless of whether the opponent also agreed to participate, the League would record and share the candidate’s responses.

Of the 30 candidates vying for 15 positions, the League interviewed 18 (including one write-in candidate for Ellensburg City Council). Interviews were conducted on Zoom with a League moderator and one candidate. Resulting videos were stitched together into a playlist. The League provided an intro explaining the purpose of the special district and its responsibilities and the candidate interview. Candidates for the same position were asked the same questions, in the same order. All videos were uploaded to the LWVKC YouTube Channel and shared with traditional and social media. In addition, ECTV2 ran all of the videos throughout the voting period.

In 6 races, the LWVKC interviewed both candidates for each race. In 6 races, only one of the two candidates responded and was interviewed. In 3 races, none of the 6 candidates responded to multiple outreach attempts by the League.

So, what do the analytics show about this experiment? Let's take a look!

Unique channel views represent all views of all content for the specified period of time, so they may contain views of more than our candidate videos. The unique views column on the right in each table represents total views from upload to date. In Kittitas County in 2021, the odd year election before this one, the League featured 9 candidates in 5 contested races in live recorded Zoom events.

2021 Position	Unique Views
Hospital District 1, Position 3	64
Ellensburg City Council, Position 2	43
Roslyn City Council, Position 6	22
Kittitas Mayor	18
Thorp School District, Position 3 (one candidate had family emergency and could not attend)	13
Election Period: Oct 14-Nov 3 Channel Unique Views = 295, Impressions = 1407, click thru = 5.8% 2021 CY Channel Unique Views = 2,282, Impressions = 18,379, click thru = 4.3% Average candidate race video length: 41 minutes

In 2022, the LWVKC featured 7 Kittitas County candidates in 4 contested races via Zoom. Keep in mind, last year we had national, statewide, and county-wide contests. LD 13 candidates ran unopposed, as did many county-wide positions. The 4 candidate race videos we produced got respectable traffic, as shown in the table below. Please note, the table of unique views is for 2022 to date, which is why unique views for the actual 2022 voting period shows considerably less.

2022 Position	Unique Views
County Clerk (one candidate withdrew)	240
County Coroner	298
County Auditor	322
DC Judge	205
Election Period: Oct 19-Nov 1 Channel Unique Views = 625, Impressions = 4974, click thru = 3.2% 2022 CY Channel Unique Views = 2,200, Impressions = 17,224, Click thru = 4.1% Average candidate video length = 40 minutes

 

This year, LWVKC reached out to 30 candidates in 15 contested races and interviewed 18 of them. This is twice as many candidates as in 2021 and three times as many races as the past two years. The "*" in the table below represents the apparent winners.

2023 Position	Candidate	Unique Views
Parks & Rec 1, Position 1	Lucy Temple*	128
	Susie Weis	107
Parks & Rec 1, Position 5	Keegan Fengler	281
	Jennifer Hyatt*	365
Hospital District 1, Position 4	Jason Badgerow	315
	Jon Ward*	254
Fire District 2, Position 5	Neal Houser	258
Fire District 7, Position 2	Jeff Meyer*	122
	Bill Dickinson	81
Ellensburg SD, Position 2	Cathie Day*	177
Cle Elum-Roslyn SD,At Large2	Monica Oertli Medalen*	86
	Rob Iverson	69
Cle Elum City Council, Pos 2	Ken Ratliff*	41
Cle Elum Mayor	Matthew Lundh*	105
	Kerry Clark	100
Ellensburg City Council, Pos 4	Steve Verhey (WriteIn)	133
Kittitas City Council, Position 3	Jerry Lael*	13
Roslyn City Council, Position 4	Cathy Cook*	22
Election Period: Oct 20-Nov 7 Channel Unique Views = 2,629, Impressions = 9056, Click thru = 9.5% 2023 YTD channel unique views = 4,700, Impressions = 33,115, Click thru = 4.9% Average candidate video length: 7 minutes. Average candidate playlist length (two candidates plus intro) = 17.5 minutes, Average candidate playlist length (one candidate plus intro) = 10 minutes.

 

Caveats

For any given date range, unique views include all channel content, not just candidate videos. In 2023, LWVKC created multiple special district video explainers and playlists that also got a fair amount of traffic (775 views).

The YouTube algorithm favors shorter videos. YouTube Impressions are the number of times a LWVKC video thumbnail showed up in a viewer’s feed courtesy of YouTube. ‘Click throughs’ are the rate at which viewer’s clicked on those thumbnails.

In all three years, our videos were shared with ECTV2 and other traditional and social media.

Discussion

Our 2023 candidate interviews received a total of 2,629 unique views during the voting period, with nearly one thousand of those views occurring in the last three days of the election. This is four times the views in 2022 voting period and twelve times the views in 2021.

While the impression score has consistently risen during the voting period, in 2023, it was the click through rate of 9.5% that bears mention. That click rate means around 10% of the time, a viewer clicked on the LWVKC video thumbnail; twice what the amount in prior years.

By contrast, in-person candidate forums rarely exceeded 50 attendees.

Not only did the LWVKC interview considerably more candidates this year, but those interviews represented two to three times the races as in prior years. Half of our interviews were races where one of the candidates chose not to participate.

In viewing the age breakdown shown below, no measurable channel traffic by the 18-24 age group this year is disappointing, however, it is encouraging to see a more uniform distribution in viewers under the age of 65. This suggests success in LWVKC's outreach to younger viewers.

Viewer Age	2022 Percentage	2023 Percentage
18-24	8.1	0
25-34	8.1	17.7
35-44	14.5	16.2
45-54	8.8	19.1
55-64	18.9	21.3
65	41.6	25.7

 

Conclusion

This year, LWVKC offered more candidate content than any previous election and leveraged the YouTube algorithm—and viewership is way up. This method got LWVKC's content out to two or three times as many viewers.

All in all, LWVKC is encouraged by the traffic and viewership in the candidate interview experiment! Much thanks is owed to the Kittitas League's Board for its support of this experiment and especially to Katherine Murphy for moderating the candidate interviews.