In his 1988 song "Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards," British troubadour Billy Bragg promised, "The Revolution is just a T-shirt away." It's taken a while, but the 2004 election could prove Bragg right, with one qualification: It won't be just a T-shirt; it'll be a million. Among the dozens of groups seeking to stir nonvoters to action this year, none have created quite the sensation that the nonpartisan November 2 Campaign has by reducing the whole of the political debate and the process surrounding it to a single message: the election date. And the campaign has plastered it everywhere: on buses and bus stops, billboards, television and movie theater public-service ads and across hundreds of thousands of chests. November 2 T-shirts are showing up everywhere, from coffee shops in Santa Monica to black churches in Georgia to The Tonight Show, where singer Joss Stone sported one a month before the election.

The November 2 Campaign, operating for the most part below the media radar, grew out of a decision by the NAACP National Voter Fund, the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, the People for the American Way Foundation, the USAction Education Fund, ACORN and 1,000 other nonpartisan groups to create a new kind of voter registration and mobilization effort. The point, explains Mark Ritchie, national coordinator for National Voice, the temporary coalition set up by the nonpartisan groups, is to reach people who aren't touched by traditional campaigns. "There's a huge group of Americans--many of them young people, women, African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans and other communities of color--who have become disengaged from the voting process, some by choice, some by neglect and some by forces beyond their control," says Ritchie. "We wanted to reach them and bring them into the process, and we knew that traditional approaches weren't going to work."

Step one was to pull together a coalition of nonpartisan groups working on innovative projects such as the drive by the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio to recruit voters at homeless shelters and public housing projects; Mi Familia Vota, a push to register and turn out 50,000 new Hispanic voters in Florida; and 1,000 Flowers, an outreach campaign aimed at beauty salons frequented by low-income and young women that hands out neon-bright nail files with the slogan "Don't let this election be a nail biter."

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