Michelle King Fights ‘The Good Fight’ to Get Millennials to Show Up for Midterms

By Cynthia Littleton

LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – Michelle King, co-creator and co-showrunner of “The Good Wife” and “The Good Fight,” doesn’t mind being called a nag. She owns it, for the sake of democracy.

King has launched a nonpartisan get-out-the-vote effort aimed at boosting the low level of participation among adults in the 18-to-34 age range in the federal midterm elections. She spearheaded the creation of a website dubbed Nag the Vote that allows parents and others to sign up their millennials to receive a series of emails reminding them (more than once) about deadlines for registering to vote and to go to the polls on Election Day.

King was inspired to act after she heard the statistic that less than 20% of millennial-age Americans voted in the 2014 midterm elections. She was stuck in an airport watching CNN, and she couldn’t get the figure out of her head.

“I stewed about it for a couple of days, and I thought, ‘What can I do?’” King says. “Then I realized — the only thing I do with that age group is nag.” She hit on the phrase “Nag the Vote,” and a website was born.

With help from her assistant, Eric Holmes, and Lyle Booth, a member of the art department on “Good Wife” and “Good Fight,” King crafted a pop art-style logo. She hired a web design firm, Roundhouse Designs, to create NagtheVote.com, which went live last month.

King has long been engaged in politics, although she doesn’t consider herself an activist. But she finds the woefully low level of voter registration rates among young Americans troubling enough that she used her own checkbook to fund the entire Nag campaign.

“It just made sense that this was my responsibility,” she says. “It’s not like the millennial in my life is going to make her own oral surgery appointments. We’re all constantly nagging our kids to do things like that. I thought, why not something like this?”

King has so far relied on prominent friends and colleagues to spread the word about Nag the Vote through social-media posts. “Good Wife” alums Josh Charles and Alan Cumming have tweeted the link. At a time when elections can be decided by razor-thin margins, getting even one more person to the polls is significant.

“What’s gratifying is that I’m hearing from friends and family saying they’ve sent [the link] out to a couple of people who weren’t registered but now they are,” she says. “We’re trying to raise awareness of the site right now as registration deadlines come up. We’re finding that there are a lot of people out there who are interested in sending out a nag, or three.”