David Beard:
Hello and welcome. I'm David Beard, contributing editor for Daily Kos Elections.
David Nir:
And I'm David Nir, political director of Daily Kos. The Downballot is a weekly podcast dedicated to the many elections that take place below the presidency from Senate to city council. We have a request for you this week. We are closing in on 1,000 subscribers on Apple Podcasts. So we would be particularly grateful if you would open the Apple Podcasts app and subscribe to us on there. And while you're at it, if you could also leave us a five-star rating and review, that would be fantastic.
David Beard:
We're now less than a month from the 2022 midterms on November 8th. So what are we going to be talking about today?
David Nir:
Whoa, there is a lot. We obviously have to talk about the media meltdown over John Fetterman's interview, the completely bonkers story out of the L.A. City Council where the president just resigned over extremely offensive and racist remarks, a strangely competitive race for the Oklahoma governorship, and also we want to share with you an awesome new database that Daily Kos Elections has created explaining the relationship between media markets and congressional districts. Then we are going to talk with Kelly Grace Gibson, a political strategist and democratic ad maker who is the founder of the firm Stronger Than Comms about the work that she is doing on this election, including her work for a campaign to defeat an anti-abortion ballot measure in Kentucky. So much great stuff to talk about. Let's get rolling.
David Beard:
So we have to start with this Fetterman interview that took place on NBC on Tuesday and the extreme reaction that a lot of people had to it. So tell us what's happening there.
David Nir:
Beard, I am so fucking furious. So here's the story. As we all know, John Fetterman, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania, suffered a stroke earlier this year, several months ago. He sat down for an interview with NBC on Tuesday. And as an accommodation due to auditory processing issues that he has suffered during his recovery from this stroke, he asked that he be allowed to use closed captioning.
David Nir:
In other words, he got to see a transcript on a computer screen of the interviewer's questions as she was asking them. It's an extremely reasonable accommodation. Closed captioning is very, very widely used. And in fact, studies suggest that something like half of all TV viewers like to use them when they watch TV. I certainly do. So that's what Fetterman used during this interview.
David Nir:
There were a few occasions where he stumbled over some words in his answers and he explained that that's also part of his recovery. It was actually quite a learning opportunity when he stumbled over the word empathetic, and then explained exactly what was happening. But he was poised and otherwise articulate and really wanted to delve into the issues, particularly abortion, where his opponent, Republican Mehmet Oz—the TV quack doctor Dr. Oz—has refused to answer questions about whether he would support the abortion ban that so many other Republicans do.
David Nir:
The reaction to the interview in certain quarters of the press was absolutely completely fucking disgusting and totally ableist. The worst was Ed O'Keefe, who is a CBS News correspondent, and he tweeted, "Will Pennsylvanians be comfortable with someone representing them who had to conduct a TV interview this way?"
David Nir:
In other words, will Pennsylvanians accept someone who used closed captioning to participate in an interview with a TV reporter, as though this is somehow something disgusting, and untoward, and unwanted, and undesirable? Also, why is he asking this question out loud as though he thinks that there are voters like this? At least talk to some people before you come to this conclusion. But it's also so wildly off base.
David Nir:
There are so many people who have served in public office with all kinds of disability, whether you're talking about FDR or much more recently, several members of the Senate who suffered strokes, including just this year, Ben Ray Lujan from New Mexico and Chris Van Hollen from Maryland a few years ago. They're both Democrats. A few years ago, Republican Mark Kirk from Illinois suffered a stroke. A number of years before that, Senator Tim Johnson from South Dakota also suffered a stroke.
David Nir:
All of these people served in the Senate. As other folks have noted, all kinds of people with all kinds of disabilities serve in so many other capacities. I mean, does Ed O'Keefe have a problem with Stephen Hawking? Where does this end? I just thought that this response was super, super appalling. O'Keefe was by no means the only reporter who thought that there was something untoward about what Fetterman was doing.
David Nir:
But what's really happening here, what's really happening here is that there are people out there including reporters and certainly including the Oz campaign who want to conflate auditory processing issues with cognitive decline. That is certainly Oz's goal. He wants voters to think that John Fetterman is not capable cognitively of performing the tasks of a United States senator.
David Nir:
And there are a lot of reporters who are eager to see a horse race happen. They want to see this race tighten up, and they are carrying water for Oz and conflating these two issues. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Fetterman has suffered any kind of cognitive decline. And to suggest that someone who requests a perfectly reasonable and common accommodation cannot serve in the Senate and that voters should be turned off by that is completely appalling. And that is why I am so angry.
David Beard:
And to pick up on your point about the media, the thing strangely that it reminded me of more than anything, and not to re-traumatize everyone listening, but was the 2016 coverage of Hillary Clinton's emails, because it was the fact that it was going on during the campaign and the fact that in most circumstances, these stories would be so small and sort of uninteresting or not take such a highlight. But because Fetterman had a stroke in May, it becomes this narrative engine that the media is excited to cover.
David Beard:
So it then feeds into the idea that they need to continue. They need this to be the interesting thing about this race because otherwise without it, it's just Fetterman who's a really great candidate against Oz, who's a really terrible candidate. And that's not interesting. But what's interesting is if Oz who's had all these problems and has all these terrible issues with now the puppies and everything faces up against this opponent who might be in cognitive decline. That's interesting. That sells papers, if you will, or views.
David Beard:
So that's what they want out of this. Just to be like, "Oh, he did an interview." He stumbled over his words a time or two. Anyone would. He had to use closed captioning, which changes the actual conversation. Not at all. It doesn't mean anything. It's not an interesting story. So they have to frame it in a way that's like, "Can Pennsylvanians really vote for someone like this? Will he totally embarrass himself October 25th when he debates Oz? Stay tuned, watch our coverage."
David Beard:
So that need for the attention to the race to focus has caused this absolutely awful coverage. When there is zero evidence that there's anything wrong, there's zero evidence that Fetterman couldn't responsibly represent all of the people of Pennsylvania, and there's no reason to think otherwise. So it's just terrible, terrible framing, and it's really the worst instincts of the media that are causing this.
David Nir:
I have to add on something else. You made an interesting point, Beard. Reporters feel like they're somehow allowed to opine on this particular issue, whereas of course, they can't actually have any opinions about abortion that they're allowed to say publicly. But even that opinion is very probably wrong. Putting aside Ed O'Keefe's disgusting ableism, this idea that Fetterman's infirmity might somehow be a turnoff to voters could be totally wrong.
David Nir:
I'm not just speculating. Folks who've been listening to this show heard several weeks ago when we had Michigan Supreme Court Justice Richard Bernstein on the show. He was an amazing guest. And as I'm sure you'll remember, he has been blind since birth. One thing that he said on our show that left a huge impression on me was that when he first campaigned for the office in 2014, he said he was able to connect with voters because they saw their struggles reflected in him that his disability made voters realize that he could understand their difficulties, whatever they might be, and they probably are not as grave or difficult as being blind from birth. But everybody faces struggles.
David Nir:
When you see someone who has faced a serious struggle and has worked hard and is working hard every day to overcome it, that might make you more popular. It certainly worked for Richard Bernstein, who by the way, won as a Democrat in 2014, a terrible year for Democrats nationwide. So for all we know, look, I haven't seen polling on this, but for all we know John Fetterman struggles have made him able to connect better with voters.
David Nir:
So this is bad on the politics, awful on the ableism, and I really hope Fetterman wins and serves with distinction as a United States Senator because I just want these reporters to shut the hell up.
David Beard:
And what probably would've led our weekly hits had the Fetterman interview not happened on Tuesday, is the wild story out of Los Angeles, where L.A. City Council president just recently finally resigned her seat, Nury Martinez, after this tape came out from 2021 where she and two other council members, Gil Cedillo and Kevin de León, and Los Angeles County Federation of Labor president Ron Herrera, had this really awful conversation that managed to insult so many groups in such a short period of time. It was wild.
David Beard:
She said that the Black child of a white colleague was like a little monkey … that was Martinez. She also said that about Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon: "Fuck that guy. He's with the Blacks." Later excerpts also revealed derogatory comments about Koreans, about the Jewish community, about the Armenian community. It was really just an absolutely insane series of comments to have a conversation about, and then to be publicly released. So in the wake of this, Ron Herrera has stepped down as the president of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. Martinez initially stepped down as council president and resisted resigning altogether, though she's just recently announced that she would resign.
David Beard:
Cedillo already lost a primary earlier this year, and so he's on his way out and will probably just lame duck himself until his terms ends. There's no word yet on if de León is going to try to make it all the way to 2024 when his seat is next up, but there's an enormous amount of pressure, understandably for him to resign as well in the wake of this conversation and all of these comments coming out. It is truly one of the wildest recordings that's probably in American political history.
David Nir:
It's also really important to explain what the background of this recording is. We certainly don't know who is responsible for the recording, but it was about an hour long and it involved this quartet complaining about the redistricting process for the L.A. City Council.
David Nir:
And in particular, Martinez was attacking all of these other groups and all of these other people because she wanted good districts for her and her allies. It was this disgustingly transactional conversation where they wanted this thing in that district and not having this neighborhood in some other district, precisely just to maximize their power. And then it was sprinkled with incredible amounts of hatred to the point that even Joe Biden called on these people to resign. So, I think de León would be an absolute lunatic if he thinks he could hang on in the face of this unrelenting pressure. The city council had a meeting this week that was just filled with intense, passionate, and very justified anger from regular voters who are calling on these people to resign. There is now going to be an investigation by the California attorney general into the redistricting process because it seems that there was just such ugly corruption surrounding it. So the fallout has by no means ended, I think this story is going to continue to explode. And Beard, like you said, it's just totally, totally nuts.
David Beard:
In less dramatic news, I do want to take us to Oklahoma where Governor Kevin Stitt is facing a surprisingly tough challenge from Superintendent of Public Instruction Joy Hofmeister. Now, Hofmeister was a Republican until last year when she switched parties and announced a run for governor as a Democrat. Now you think this wouldn't be a particularly competitive race; it's generally shaping up to be a pretty neutral year. There doesn't seem like there's a big red wave or blue wave developing, which means in a state like Oklahoma, which is extremely red, you would expect any Republican running statewide to sort of comfortably coast, particularly an incumbent. But Stitt has managed to offend a long list of people in his first term, including the five largest Native American tribes in Oklahoma, who united to announce a joint endorsement of Hofmeister in really what was billed as a first-of-its-kind endorsement. And one of those native leaders called Stitt the most anti-Native American governor in state history. Which if you know about the history of Oklahoma, that's really saying something.
David Beard:
It also came out this week that the Stitts had been secretly fundraising for a new governor's mansion where the old governor's mansion still sits on that property at a cost of $6.5 million, all of which they were fundraising privately and secretly. From the Oklahoma News 4 report that broke this story, they interviewed Republican State Representative Logan Phillips, and he said, “Who's donating? What are they getting kickbacks on? I guarantee they are. We have no-bid contracts here, and the Governor's using this as a way to garner funds for himself or garner funds for his bank system. This is self enrichment and self dealing at its very core.” This is somebody from his own party saying these things. So you can only imagine what people outside the Republican Party think.
David Beard:
Now, the Oklahoma Project has been running ads for a number of months, portraying Stitt as a corrupt ally of special interests, as well as abortion [which] has also been an issue in Oklahoma where they passed a near-total abortion ban before Dobbs happened, which of course came into effect in the wake of Dobbs. Now, two media polls have shown a pretty close race between Stitt and Hofmeister, with Stitt up by three in one and Hofmeister up four in another. Stitt recently released a poll with him up 15 points, but below 50%, which is not really where you want to be as an incumbent.
David Beard:
Now, all that being said, and I'm absolutely confident that Stitt is going to way underperform the typical Republican performance in Oklahoma, the state is still extremely, extremely red, and it's still extremely, extremely tough. Trump won it 65% to 32% in 2020. Stitt has started running ads about Joe Biden and the radical left, which of course is going to work on some Republicans. That's just the reality. So Stitt should still be seen as the strong favorite. But if you're ever going to win a race like this, being a governor's race where people are a little more flexible is good. You need really, really bad hits on the incumbent. You need Republicans to break within. You're getting a lot of the things you need to go right to go right. So it's definitely at least worth keeping an eye on.
David Nir:
And of course, we have seen Democrats win some governorships in states like Kentucky and Louisiana that are extremely red. It's important to remember that even in our polarized political climate, that voters seem to still be more willing to split their tickets when it comes to state races compared to federal races. We're actually going to be talking about Oklahoma a bit more with our guest, Kelly Gibson, later on this show. And we're also going to be talking about advertising with her, which gives us the perfect opportunity to talk about a great new database that Daily Kos Elections just released this week. It was created by contributing editor David Jarman, and it shows the overlaps between media markets and congressional districts.
David Nir:
The reason why this data is so valuable is that broadcast television ads are bought by media market. These are markets that are defined by the FCC, and Nielsen, the media research company, makes big use of what they call DMAs or designated market areas. And these are regions where essentially everyone in that region is likely to get just about the same broadcast TV channels. These can be enormous markets like the New York City market, which goes far beyond the city itself and extends into several other states, or they can be much, much smaller, cheaper local markets. The thing is that media markets and congressional districts, they look totally, totally different from one another. Congressional districts are of course drawn by each state, and no one is drawing them with media markets in mind.
David Nir:
So when you hear that, for instance, a super PAC is reserving a million dollars in the Detroit media market, because again, that's how ads are bought, that could apply to any number of congressional districts. But the Daily Kos Elections' database will show you exactly which districts are in the Detroit media market and what proportion of them is in that market. Some districts might be wholly within the Detroit market, or others might be split between the Detroit market and other nearby markets such as Lansing, Michigan, which is the state capital.
David Nir:
This data also gives grassroots donors some important insights into the kinds of races where fewer advertising dollars are likely to be wasted. If you're running for a congressional seat in New York City and you air ads on TV, the vast majority of people watching those ads on broadcast TV simply aren't going to be able to vote for you because they just don't live in your district. But if, for instance, you're in Eugene, Oregon, almost everyone in the Eugene media market lives in a single congressional district, that's Oregon's 4th, which happens to be an open Democratic-held seat that is seeing a competitive race this year. So donations to the Democrat running there probably are going to get you better bang for your buck because, again, fewer ad dollars are going to be wasted on voters who can't actually vote for you, even if they want to when they see your ads.
David Nir:
You can find this data on our Twitter account, we have it as our pinned tweet. Go to @DKElections, or you can go to DailyKosElections.com and find it there, just search for the term media markets. That is a very rich data set and very, very interesting to dive into. So if you are a data nerd at all, we encourage you to give it a look.
David Beard:
And one of the really interesting things that media markets do is that in statewide races, there are a lot of media markets that overlap just a little bit into a state. We see this in a state like Georgia or a state like Iowa, where some of the edge counties are in other media markets, and we've actually seen in past races, particularly in primaries where advertising is really important and there's less of a partisan factor, that in the markets you can see where someone has decided to advertise or not advertise in these sort of edge markets that only cover a small part of the corner of the state. And you can see that sometimes they do much worse, or if they have advertised and no one else did much better in those specific markets, than they do in the rest of the state. So it's a really, really interesting tool to look at.
David Nir:
Well, that does it for our weekly hits. Coming up, as I said, we are going to be talking with Kelly Grace Gibson, who is the founder of Stronger Than Comms, about her work as a political strategist and ad creator. So please stay with us because we have a lot more interesting stuff to talk about.
David Beard:
Everything is on the line this year: abortion, climate change, even our democracy. But this election will come down to voter turnout. Daily Kos has made a comprehensive guide of ways you can get involved. Whether it's knocking on doors, making phone calls, sending postcards, or even driving voters to the polls, we have an activity for you and we need you today. Go to DailyKos.com/gotv, as in get out the vote. That's DailyKos.com/gotv, and scroll down to find the best campaign and the best activity for you.
David Nir:
Joining us today is Kelly Grace Gibson, a progressive political strategist and the founder of Stronger Than Comms. Kelly, thank you so much.
Kelly Grace Gibson:
Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.
David Nir:
People take so many varied routes into politics and into their specialties in politics, so we'd love to ask you about your journey specifically into political advertising, how you started out and how you got there.
Kelly Grace Gibson:
Sure. I did it a little bit differently than sort of what has come to be known as the path to being a political media consultant. I moved to Washington, D.C., in the 2004 election cycle. I was working for Planned Parenthood of Northwestern Pennsylvania, thinking I would move to D.C. and they'd hire me at Planned Parenthood National. I'd ride off into the sunset and the job of my dreams, but there wasn't a job available there. So then I just started answering sort of wanted posts. At the time, it was through something called Women's Information Network, the WIN Network, and there was a job open answering the phones at the front desk of a media firm. At the time, the firm was called Laguens Hamburger Stone, when Marty Stone was a media consultant and Dawn Laguens before her time back at Planned Parenthood.
Kelly Grace Gibson:
I was excited. I was just sort of fresh out of college and I filled my days answering the phone, making bank deposits, and ordering lunch from Takeout Taxi. That was my whole job. And then at the end of the ‘04 cycle, they interviewed a handful of us, sort of like cycle hires, and they said to me, how do you feel about learning the production business? And that was sort of the end. So since my whole career, I've been in political media and it's obviously changed a ton over the last 18 years, but I really learned it from the inside out, which feel I feel lucky to know it the way I do.
David Nir:
And so from that firm, where did you head next and where have you wound up now?
Kelly Grace Gibson:
Yeah. Everybody knows, you all know, most people know that these firms iterate almost cyclically. So after a cycle ends and people decide to leave the business at large to move to other partners. So that firm went through lots of changes. Dan Colley became a partner. There was another guy named Chris Close. And then Martin spun off, Martin Hamburger spun off after the sixth cycle. So I went there and sort of worked with him for the following decade, becoming a VP, becoming a managing partner, and then finally an equity partner, and then sold my shares in that firm after the ‘20 cycle and hung my own shingle, which is Stronger Than Communications. We are political comms shop. It's a bit different because it's not a traditional media firm. There's not a traditional consulting firm, meaning partners at the top, and then staff hires below. We're built on a collective model. So I have about, at any time between eight and 10 women, we’re all women committed to women-owned women-led, that work in political communications, don't exactly do what I do, but do complimentary things, have different kinds of networks that come from different corners.
Kelly Grace Gibson:
And I build basically different kinds of networks that come from different corners. And I build, basically, custom teams for each of the races I'm on. And it's been a real gift to work with so many really talented, hardworking, outstanding women this cycle.
David Beard:
One of the things you mentioned was moving up through the consulting firm and you mentioned a few different levels. Could you go through, for our listeners, what those different levels do and how that sort of differentiates itself from production to partner?
Kelly Grace Gibson:
Sure. In the ‘06 cycle, I managed the East Coast production department. At the time we had three Senate races. We had Stabenow, Cardin. And then out of the West Coast shop, they did Tester. And then we had sort of lots of House races, and ballot measures were less of a big deal back then, but we had ballot measures on down. I didn't have any idea what I was doing, but luckily the woman that led the production team on the west coast came to learn me up.
Kelly Grace Gibson:
And I remember we were on a film shoot for Peter Welch ... from Vermont, and she flew out there and she taught me all how to do it. And then the morning of the shoot she said, "You got this." We went the whole day, at the time you filmed on tapes. So we filmed on tapes, got the whole day, got the tapes back to our production department, put them in the player, and there was zero audio. Not one lick of audio the entire day. So I packed up my little banker's box, I went to the partners and said, "So there's no audio. I'm going to go ahead and leave." And they said, "Of course, everyone makes mistakes." We had to redo the whole shoot day. So that was definitely deep end kind of stuff.
Kelly Grace Gibson:
So my job was to set up shoots, to book crews, to manage post production, which means book editors or manage the editors we have, get approvals from clients, partner client relations, and then eventually ship the ads, which of course was quite different in 2006. Also, you had to print, you had to put it off on a tape, then send the tape to a place where they uploaded it into a system, and sent it to stations. Now it's a lot different now. Production can sort of happen anywhere.
Kelly Grace Gibson:
So that was my sixth cycle and then I went with Martin. Then it became sort of what people know is the consulting hustle. Building networks, chasing leads, pitching clients, And then once you get all the clients, it's client management. So in our strategy, work with consultants, write scripts, film ads, make ads, ship ads, that sort of stuff. This sort of traditional stuff. So your responsibility when you go up through those positions, from VP to SVP or depending on the size of your firm, is how much you work you can bring in. And if you yourself can manage those client relations and produce the product, and to execute on the product, which is eventually some kind of advertising.
Kelly Grace Gibson:
We do cross-media persuasion advertising. That just means everything from like $50 social posts to million-dollar broadcast buys, and everything in between. Streaming, connected, satellite radio, all that sort of stuff.
David Beard:
One of the things that you mentioned is that there's been so much increase in diversity of the types of advertising that's been going on since you started in the industry till now. One of the interesting things that my dad actually was saying, he lives in North Carolina. He uses one of the new... YouTube TV instead of traditional cable now, and he's been complaining about just getting constant ads for Ted Budd, and seeing almost nothing for Cheri Beasley. And so how do firms work on covering all these different platforms to make sure that they're reaching people, when you can't just now place an ad on broadcast TV and make sure you're capturing everyone?
Kelly Grace Gibson:
So not all inventory providers are created equal. The platforms that have the biggest audiences, namely Meta and Google, have really restricted how we can find people. So in the case of your dad, you're no longer able to use any voter file information in a Google program. You can just do ... it's gender, ZIP code, and household income. So you're making pretty distinct assumptions about people. Facebook changes their rules every six days, so it's hard to tell. But as of now, when you boost a targeted voter file, data is no longer native in the platform.
Kelly Grace Gibson:
So it's basically gotten where everybody wants it to be anyway, which is 100% people are reliant on data. Models, ad tests, tracker polls, baseline polls, in these big statewide races that are close. And I have unfortunately made myself a niche in hard-to-win states. So when there's a budget behind it, people are really unlikely to make a decision without some sort of data or model. Some sort of feedback that's from a research perspective. And so you take that research, you figure out where your voters are, you figure out what their budget is, and then how do you get the largest amount of your audience at the lowest cost per eyeball, and then you launch. And it could be just news via broadcast, or it could be over 10 platforms and tactics. It really just depends on your data and your budget.
David Nir:
I'm actually glad to hear that the Ted Budd campaign is wasting all this money trying to target your dad.
David Beard:
Anyway, it's not going to work, FYI.
David Nir:
Kelly, I love getting into the nitty-gritty, the details of how all this stuff happens because most people, they just see ads on TV. Obviously we don't really have any good sense of how they come to appear on our TV screens. And obviously, you just talked about the whole process of getting them there. But I'm really curious about the process of making the ads themselves. What's the best way to describe that whole process? Because obviously there's so many different types of ads and so many different ways that they come together. And in particular, I'm super interested to know how you find the people to star in these ads, because sometimes obviously you have people who are just standing in as kind of a regular voter, and other times you have people with really interesting compelling stories that are obviously genuine. So how does the whole process work and where do you get these people?
Kelly Grace Gibson:
Yeah, I mean, the really hard part about, I think, advertising at large, and it's not untrue about political advertising, is it's a very subjective medium. You write a poll and people, they wordsmith, and you grammar check, and you put it in the field, but you use all your senses when consuming advertising. You used your sight, you use your sound. So some people will be like, "That piece of music is terrible. Would it really compel somebody else?" So I think the way you build an ad that works for the purposes of moving voters, but also getting approval of your boss — it's a candidate, it's a coalition, it's a committee, it's a manager, whatever it is, you spend a lot of time, before you ever think about writing a script, getting to know whoever it is. Getting to know the issue, getting to know their risk tolerances, understanding that if you want to take a risk with an ad, if there's a budget to ad test it, or sort of kick the tires a little bit, then maybe you can push the limits.
Kelly Grace Gibson:
I have never met two ad makers that would approach the same task with the same script. There's a million ways to write every ad. You say there's a million ways to write it. And different clients give you... There could be nine versions of a script or somebody could be, that's great right away. So understanding who your client is and all that sort of stuff is a big piece of it.
Kelly Grace Gibson:
As far as who stars in it. It's really as successful as your team on the ground. So if you're working a race, and the manager is from the place and they've been working in the political space in that place a long time, then you can say, what I really want is a Latina mom of two, who's a Christian, who sends her kids to public school, and is married to a white guy. You can be super specific and they'll go find it. It's all just to say that you need to meet your task with your ad. And if you can find the talent on the ground that can serve the purpose of delivering your persuadable message in a compelling way, then you definitely go that direction. But at the end of the day, you can always sort of fall back on a VO studio spot that really clearly hits those top-testing messages.
Kelly Grace Gibson:
And in all these things, both in buys and in creative, I find diversity and layering is what works. Because when you think about how Americans consume advertising, as consumers, as purchasers of goods, they're receiving little short snippets and longer stories, and the different builds of the same product over time. And that's what compels somebody to make a purchase. The same is true for politics.
David Nir:
So let's dive in a little bit more to what's going on out there on the airwaves today. And one of the big topics, really the biggest topic of 2022, has obviously been abortion. It's something that we talk about pretty much every single week in one way or another on this show, and it makes up the bulk of the ads that Democrats have been running across the country. What approaches have you personally seen that you think have been the most effective?
Kelly Grace Gibson:
Well, I'd like to start by saying I'm pretty proud of the Democrats message discipline around this. Democrats have sort of a bad rap of being bad at messaging. I don't agree with it, but it's something that people talk about all the time. And being able to stick to this real assault on women's health, because it's such a significant existential crisis about women's autonomy of their own body. So I think that's great.
Kelly Grace Gibson:
What we've seen is how you approach it. And what I've seen personally, both from working on a measure specifically around access to abortion and other candidate races in red places about how you talk about abortion, is all these states, the states with trigger laws, the states with ballot access issues, or with reproductive health access ballot measures, the laws are different. And they're subtly different, but they're just different enough that people respond to them really differently.
Kelly Grace Gibson:
Like I'm working in Oklahoma. I've unfortunately gotten an expertise in Oklahoma. They're lovely people. It's just very hard to win there. And the governor there passed the most restrictive abortion ban in the country before the Dobbs decision. And so it fell, the access was stopped, and then they had a trigger law as well. So even there, you're not really talking about abortion, you're talking about extremism because abortion is something people think you should have access to, but they don't really want to talk about it out loud. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just don't take it away, and now can we just talk about something else? They'd rather talk about education. They'd rather talk about the economy, voters. So even in a place where it feels like leaning into the details of that law feels like it would in fact be quite compelling, it's a little off putting just because it's so extreme.
Kelly Grace Gibson:
And when you look at the states that are running these abortion ballot measures, Kansas passed. So we've all sort of now seen in Kansas [that] they beat it. The bad guys lost. Their messaging was so much about changing the Constitution, it was about the permanency of that. The one I'm working on, Kentucky, is much more personal. What we've learned about voters is they have a deep empathy for their neighbors. They think Kentucky is the place you should be able to live and be supported. And so we have a real chance in our persuasion to tell real stories with real women. And I went there for a two-day film shoot and I met really just the most amazing women, who were willing to sit in front of a camera and talk to us about the worst days of their lives, and do it because they're in this fight for their health, their survival, their survival of their children and their friends. That's really heavy. And if you're watching these ads that are happening in Michigan, there's nothing personal about those ads. They're just simply about the ins and outs of the law itself.
Kelly Grace Gibson:
So all of that is a long way to say that, yes, we're all talking about abortion, but it really feels like everyone's talking about it so differently, which is maybe why the strength of all these different angles is what's keeping it in the face of voters.
David Nir:
That's really interesting because you made the point at the outset about how strong Democrats' message discipline has been on this. But the way that discipline actually takes shape is by understanding that you need a different message in different parts of the country or even different parts of the same state, which is something that we saw in Kansas, in particular, that different ads being run in the eastern half of the state, which is more liberal versus the western half of the state, which is more conservative.
Kelly Grace Gibson:
I think that people have felt for a while, the Democrats sort of ran out of things to connect with Republicans about. That the divide between the parties had gotten pretty wide. And what we've seen in practice and in polling is that access to reproductive health, mostly for all those exceptions, rape, incest, and life of the mother.
Kelly Grace Gibson:
It sort of doesn't know partisanship boundaries, it knows ideology, right? It's hard to break through to evangelicals and very, very religious people, but it's not a Democratic issue to think women should have access to reproductive health for their own health. So it's built this weird bridge where Democrats can now have reasonable conversations with Republicans and connect for, I think, for the first time in a while.
David Nir:
In terms of taking that sort of diverse approach to messaging, one thing that we have also seen that strikes me as quite unusual and notable is abortion-related messaging targeted toward men. Can you talk a little bit about that and what you have found works there and why it's actually working now?
Kelly Grace Gibson:
Yeah. In what I've seen and what I've been a part of is I think that men haven't spent as much of their life thinking about abortion. I mean, men probably think about abortion in very particular moments of their life, whether or not they've supported somebody going through one or whether or not they've had a scare. But this sort of constant understanding about if I end up pregnant and for one reason or another I cannot or do not wish to carry this pregnancy to term, how would I deal with that? That is on the mind of women from the time they become sexually active until they're through menopause, right? Until they can no longer conceive.
Kelly Grace Gibson:
And so when you start to talk to men about these nuances, about what these laws mean in places, like if you have a partner or a wife who is miscarrying and this law passes and they can't get the right prescription medicine to help them expedite and finish a miscarriage, then that could be critical to their health. What do you think about that? It's like light bulb moments. These are not things that men have spent their time thinking about. And so what we're seeing in Kentucky and what I've seen in other places through qualitative research is sort of this road to discovery around understanding the issue.
Kelly Grace Gibson:
At first, it's like, oh, right, abortion people are, okay. And then you start to explain some things. What if your neighbor was experiencing this? Or what if your niece's college roommate needed an abortion? You move it once removed in these conversations so people can think about other people and not themselves. And then at the end of it, they're sort of like, "Well, it should be the decision of the woman." They come to that come that sort of on their own. And then when you take it a step farther and say, "Well, what do you think about politicians or the government sort of deciding instead of doctors and instead of the woman and her priest or the woman and her mother," that's fully a bridge too far.
Kelly Grace Gibson:
So I think the messaging is that we've realized in politics in America in 2022 where you can't really deliver new information in a way that you can get positive persuadable change that men, sort of probably weak Republicans across up to strong Democrats, really take that journey with you. And men are more dependable voters than women. Men turn out more. When a male voter makes up their mind, they usually don't change it. There are gender-based trends that we've understood over the years in voting habits. So I think that pro-reproductive health ... advocates, campaigns or candidate campaigns, are recognizing the opportunity to sort of gender-cross in an issue that has always been a "woman's issue."
David Beard:
So it's coming up to the middle of October. Of course the election is right around the corner. So we have to ask you about the current state of play in the 2022 elections. It definitely seems like in the past few weeks there's been a hint of GOP movement from where we were maybe earlier in September. The media certainly seems sort of interested in that and in sort of some of these races, where Democrats have had a more comfortable lead, closing and getting very tight; the media does love a tight race. What's your view on how things are right now and how they seem to be leading up to November 8?
Kelly Grace Gibson:
It's such a rollercoaster, huh? So I would say in modern campaigns it would be, it's very hard to predict what's going to happen even four weeks out in races that were not sort of determined in July, that movable races move right up to the end. And I think what we've seen is that a lot of the Republican messaging, while effective—inflation, Biden's terrible, that sort of stuff— t's just not holding up to things like reproductive health. A lot of places, people are still talking about marijuana, namely the states that haven't legalized.
Kelly Grace Gibson:
I've been doing a lot of work in Iowa this election cycle, and voters bring it up on their own accord. And so usually in tight races, the side that communicates louder wins. I'm an eternal optimist, which is why I've been a media consultant for 17 years. So what I'm going to say will probably get the eye roll of all the proper cynics in the space. But I have to imagine that we are sort of at it feels very much like a tipping point. And that voters, while they don't love the Biden administration, they don't love Democrats … they don't really want to see personal rights erode. And so they'll vote for the thing and not the person. God, I hope, fingers crossed.
David Nir:
I think that's not an unreasonable argument to make, given what we saw in Kansas that obviously where voters took the liberal position by a far, far greater margin than that state votes for the Democratic candidate in presidential elections or any other election, really. I'm very interested about something you flagged though in your last answer. You mentioned marijuana. Have you seen an uptick in interest? And do you think you'll even see candidates run any ads about this since Biden's action to pardon some federal offenders and start the process of rescheduling marijuana as a drug?
Kelly Grace Gibson:
Gosh, that was awesome.
David Nir:
Right?
Kelly Grace Gibson:
At my last job, marijuana reform was sort of our bread and butter. We legalized in, I don't know, seven states, over three or four cycles. And so sort of had been waiting for it to tip to a federal reality. If as many states as legalized, you have to, it became just more trouble than it was worth for it to be illegal federally and legal in all these places, which is of course what the President said as part of his reason. No one's ever going to make a better marijuana ad than that candidate, was it in North Carolina, who was just sitting in the wingback chair with the doobie. You remember, it was just what, a couple months ago, over the summer. But I do think that candidates are indeed running on it, and as much for just the very sort of simple reality of legalizing makes sense.
Kelly Grace Gibson:
But for just what I said, for the problems that are building up, fair banking problems and unfair arrests, and especially in a time where we're talking about equality and access and that sort of stuff. So I do think where people can, in Iowa, the House caucus made marijuana legalization one of a three-point sort of platform for if they pick up seats because it's not recreationally legal there yet. So I do think it is a real low-hanging fruit. Voters just really, they go for it. And again, back to Oklahoma, Oklahoma's just a really brutal place, that they signed enough petitions for rec marijuana to be on the ballot this election cycle, and the governor didn't want it. And so we sent it to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court said it couldn't be on the ballot, even though they had been confirmed by sort of a third party that all the signatures were legal. So they just shut it down because they could. But I do think in some of those places where it's not legal yet, it's a real incentive.
David Beard:
Now you mentioned you have a soft spot for hard-to-win states. So I'm going to see, are there any races that have caught your eye outside of the top-tier competitive ones that people are pretty typically looking at this point, something you think that might surprise for Democrats? And then also if there's one that you maybe are worried about that a Democrat might be in trouble?
Kelly Grace Gibson:
Well, one, I'm doing Medicaid expansion in South Dakota this election cycle, which is on the ballot. South Dakota, I've worked there a handful of times over the years but those voters are remarkably independent. I don't mean politically, I just mean they just really are, [and] don't care much about the people around them. I don't know how to say that in a nice way. Sorry for all your listeners from South Dakota, and I'm not just saying this because today's Daily Kos covered that governor's race, but Kristi Noem is weirdly tight. The Democratic candidate, Jamie Smith, seems like a perfectly lovely person. He just seemingly does not have a very strong group of consultants around him because his ads could use a little bit of work, but I don't know what could possibly change in that state. But that one seems like something, if the world tips on its axis.
Kelly Grace Gibson:
I mean, the other one is, I've said Oklahoma now a bunch of times, but there's a lot of polling out of Oklahoma about that governor's race. And it seems like the Democrat Jena Nelson is going to beat this guy Ryan Walters for state superintendent. So the position that's in charge of all the public schools in the state. I mean, he is bananas. He's off. He's only getting more off his rocker. He put out a video yesterday about porn in schools, and I happened to be watching it while my kids were eating dinner. And my 9-year-old who's in third grade was like, "Hey, what are you watching?" And I was like, "Come look at it." He was like, "What's porn?" I was like, "Let's talk about that."
Kelly Grace Gibson:
So I think that, and there's a lot of third-party activity in that state. People ... strike when the iron's hot in that state; sort of the iron has never been hotter, it doesn't seem. So there's a world in which some of those pass. I'm working for former congresswoman Kendra Horn, who's running against Markwayne Mullen. He hasn't spent much, which is great. Neither have we. He's a very extreme person, a very sort of MAGA extreme person. So I don't know, I'm sort of holding out hope for the Sooner State. And then I would really like to see Val Demings beat Marco Rubio. We tried to take him down in '16 unsuccessfully. But I mean, if anyone can do it, Val can do it, it seems to me.
David Nir:
Well, so say we all. We have been talking with Kelly Grace Gibson, who is the founder of Stronger Than Comms. Kelly, where can people find out more about your work and where can they follow you?
Kelly Grace Gibson:
Oh, thanks David. Well, there's a website strongerthancomms.com. I mean, you could probably ... LinkedIn might be the best place. Same thing, Kelly Grace Gibson. I love to help folks or just chat with folks who maybe are running for races that don't have a team. I talked to a woman who is running for state Rep. in Connecticut yesterday, just because she's preparing for debates and doesn't have a team around her. So here and available for anybody who needs a little message advice over the next ... what are we at, 27 days?
David Nir:
Just about. Well, Kelly, thank you so much for joining us.
Kelly Grace Gibson:
Thank you for having me.
David Beard:
That's all from us this week. Thanks to Kelly Gibson for joining us. The Downballot comes out every Thursday everywhere you listen to podcasts. You can reach out to us by emailing the downballot@dailykos.com. If you haven't already, please subscribe to The Downballot on Apple Podcasts and leave us a five-star rating and review. Thanks to our producer, Cara Zelaya, and editor Tim Einenkel. We'll be back next week with a new episode.