The 2025 Research Review

Galvanize Action’s award-winning Research Team taught us all so much this year! Through more than 25 different projects, they measured, evaluated, surveyed, and shared so much valuable knowledge with our team and the world at large.

You can see all of their public research here on our website!

As we wrap up the year, let’s walk through what our big year of research taught us about how economic security, social cohesion, and civic engagement interact with each other and influence our audience of ideologically-moderate white women.

ECONOMIC SECURITY

Once again, our audience indicated that the economy is the most important issue to them every single time we asked this year. Amidst rising prices, confusing tariff legislation, and cuts to essential federal programs, women in our audience worried about their financial stability. While most women we surveyed this year reported they are able to cover basic expenses, nearly a quarter (22%) said they were unable to make ends meet, and a majority were deeply stressed by the high cost of living and economic uncertainty.

Interestingly, healthcare shows promise as an opportunity for prosocial movement when it comes to the economy. Our ecosystem mapping project taught us that our audience sees themselves as more ideologically-progressive than other people they know when it comes to healthcare. Healthcare also prompted the highest activation in our qualitative research on civic action. For Centrists in particular, appeals to fairness and collective solutions offer an opportunity to connect their values and needs to prosocial policies, so healthcare is likely to be a great way to connect with them!

The economy remains top of mind for ideologically-moderate white women. That doesn’t just mean they’ll make civic choices based on the economy: economic stress and fear of instability are leaving women in our audience vulnerable to scapegoating and authoritarian promises of control under the guise of safety and fairness.

SOCIAL COHESION

This year, we all heard a lot of rhetoric designed to divide the American people, raise questions about who belongs, and activate safety concerns. Our audience has always been susceptible to “othering” narratives due to their internalized biases, and the authoritarian weaponization of immigration and identity culture wars has only strengthened this susceptibility. This makes strategies that build social cohesion even more important.

In the Start of Year Survey, many ideologically-moderate white women agreed with the concept of being accepting and standing up against discrimination. But they also believed that initiatives intended to help underrepresented groups are a zero-sum game; if a program or policy helps an outgroup member, they feel it comes at the expense of their in-group. Economic insecurity certainly doesn’t help alleviate those fears.

When it comes to othering, we learned that familiarity matters. For example, the majority of ideologically-moderate white women report not knowing someone who is transgender and close to half don’t personally know members of any immigrant community. This lack of personal connection appears to correlate with a higher tolerance for discriminatory policies.

CIVIC ENGAGEMENT

As part of the coordinated attacks on marginalized communities, we all watched efforts to dismantle the norms and institutions that are essential to a thriving democracy in 2025. Actions like invoking wartime and emergency powers during peacetime, deploying the National Guard against protestors, ignoring judicial orders, seeking retribution for political enemies, and coercion of the media, universities, and law firms are clear signs of authoritarianism. We asked our audience how they were feeling about these events multiple times.

While many were concerned about rising authoritarianism, our audience initially took a cautiously hopeful “wait and see” approach. This attitude aligns with the conflict avoidance we know many women in our audience internalize. Participants reported their commitment to staying civically engaged, but throughout the year we witnessed a disconnect between their awareness of anti-democratic threats and their own desire to take action.

As the year progressed, our research suggested desensitization to authoritarianism as the attacks on democracy continued. Ideologically-moderate white women became less likely to see anti-democratic actions as red lines and more likely to say they wouldn’t take action to oppose punitive laws. 

While that desensitization might be discouraging, this year’s research gave us reasons to be hopeful, too! 

In a year of so much hatred, fear, and erosion of rights, some of us here at Galvanize Action are heartened by how communities have stepped up to protect each other. Yes, ideologically-moderate white women are susceptible to narratives that activate their safety concerns, but we have seen our audience tap into their desire to help others and recognize when policies are inhumane. 

We also feel hopeful about how many partner organizations are committed to fighting authoritarianism. None of us can do this alone, and it’s wonderful to share our research, narratives, and ads with so many incredible partners in the pro-democracy movement. 

ADS & TESTING

Galvanize Action applied all of this insightful research to make narratives and messages that connect with ideologically-moderate white women on the issues that matter to them. We tested 46 different messages and ad scripts that resulted in statistically significant positive movement this year, successfully moving our audience toward various prosocial success measures.

By the numbers, Big Number was the top-performing ad that Galvanize Action deployed this year:

As we move into 2026 together, you’ll start to hear a lot more about testing overarching narratives rather than testing individual creative content: it’s all part of our Research Team’s plans to help us do more, better, faster, with a longer-lasting impact as we work toward creating even more culture-first content for our audience. You’ll also see a lot more of our “economy plus” messaging addressing what our audience cares most about: economic security, health, and safety. We’ll be contrasting that with their current reality: they are not currently experiencing economic security, health, and safety because of the corruption and greed that is running rampant.

As we close out this year of learning, one thing is clear: economic security, social cohesion, and civic engagement don’t just shape ideologically-moderate white women’s lives—they shape the path forward for our democracy. This year’s research showed us how deeply these three forces intertwine: how economic stress fuels zero-sum thinking, how social disconnection heightens susceptibility to othering, and how both can dampen the motivation to act even when women recognize real threats to democratic norms.

But we also learned that these same forces can be powerful levers for progress. When women feel economically grounded, when they see themselves as part of a community that looks out for one another, and when they have clear, welcoming on-ramps into civic life, they become more willing to engage, more open to prosocial solutions, and more resistant to authoritarian appeals. That’s the foundation we’ll carry with us into 2026 and beyond!

One more shout out to our award-winning Research Team: they’re amazing and the importance of their work cannot be overstated. If you’d like to tell them what your favorite bit of research was this year, please drop us a line using the feedback button below!

And if you’re interested in channeling your anxiety about 2026 into support for our work, gifts to Galvanize Action are very much appreciated. We can’t do this work without you, and we still have a budget gap to close! Please consider helping us power our research by donating below.