In our inaugural episode, we chat with Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas about the history of both Daily Kos and Daily Kos Elections, and why we do the work that we do. Enjoy!
Beard:
Hello and welcome, I'm David Beard, Contributing Editor for Daily Kos Elections, here with my co-host, Daily Kos Political Director, David Nir. How are you, Nir?
Nir:
I am really good and I am really excited to be launching our new podcast, The Downballot. And I'm looking forward to telling all of you, our new listeners, about the origin story, both of Daily Kos and Daily Kos Elections, which is really a very special site within a site, focused like a laser on downballot elections. Daily Kos itself takes a broad look at all of US politics, but we love to discuss all of the other races out there that don't get quite enough attention, whether that's for the Senate or the house or local races at home, like for mayor and district attorney. So, we're going to take a little walk down memory lane with Daily Kos, founder, Markos Moulitsas, who will talk with us about how Daily Kos came to be and we'll also discuss how Daily Kos Elections came to be a part of this larger progressive activist mothership.
Beard:
Joining us to discuss is Daily Kos Founder, Markos Moulitsas. Thanks for joining us, Markos.
Markos:
Hey, pleasure to be here. Congrats on the new podcast.
Beard:
Thank you. Yeah, we're very excited. So, just to kick us off, do you want to just take us through how Daily Kos first came to be, how it developed from just an idea to where we are today?
Markos:
I don't even know if there was an idea, to be honest. I mean, this was very early on in the creation of the blogosphere, these just individuals pontificating on politics on their crappy little blogspot sites. I mean, those early days, they were early. So, I was just frustrated at the political climate at the time, this was a run up to the Iraq War, there was this notion that you were unpatriotic if you criticized the George Bush's saber-rattling on Iraq, so I was just frustrated and I needed a place to lash out, because I think my friends were getting really sick and tired of me yelling at them about what was going on, or yelling at the TV about what was going on. I mean, there was no liberals anywhere.
Markos:
I mean, our liberals were Alan Colmes on Hannity and Colmes on Fox News, that was our liberal. We had so-called liberals like Joe Klein on Time Magazine saying that every reasonable person knows that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction and I thought I was just living in this alternate world. And so, Daily Kos was just my place to vent. And I always like to say that it turns out that there was a market need for liberals, strong unapologetic liberals, to analyze and talk about the issues of the day. So, I started off on just this blogspot site, which back in the day, it was very rudimentary blogging, and I wanted something a little fancier, so I eventually upgraded to this new platform and it was called Scoop. Part of the out of the package features of Scoop, was community user generated, what they call, diaries.
Markos:
And I remember going live and going, "Oh crap, I forgot to take that off." People think that I was really genius who knew to bring people in and engage them. No, it was actually a total accident. I love the comments, but I never really thought beyond interacting outside of the comments of a post. And suddenly, within 30 minutes, there was 15 diaries. And of course the first ones were like, "What's this? What is this thing? How does this thing work?" But people caught on really fast and it just took off. And suddenly I was like, "Yeah, I'm not taking this off. This thing is sticking around." And that became the differentiator between the vast world of progressive blogging and Daily Kos and it's what really set this site apart and it's what allowed it to survive when all these other small bloggers, most of them faded away, disappeared or got absorbed into other larger media operations.
Markos:
But beyond that, Daily Kos has this great activism section and really, my big talent beyond just starting Daily Kos because I needed a place to rant, was just recognizing that there are some people who are really fricking smart, like a guy named Nir and a guy named Beard and giving them the ability to build cool stuff as well. And so, it wasn't like I'm some kind of master genius that master minded the rise of Daily Kos, a lot of it was just stumbling into good ideas and good people with good ideas and that's why we are here today.
Beard:
So, let me turn now to my co-host, David Nir, to talk a little bit about a parallel website that built up in the very early days that would one day become Daily Kos Elections. Nir, why don't you tell us how Swing State Project came to be, and then eventually, how you decided to focus it on downballot races, which is what we're going to be talking about?
Nir:
So, what Markos said is the perfect introduction, because it was in those diary features, what we would call today, just blog posts, where in 2003, I started writing about the swing states that were going to be on the docket for the 2004 election. And at the time, the reason why I was drawn to the topic was because at Daily Kos, we were in the thick of the first of what would become many primary wars. And I was a big Howard Dean supporter, but more than Howard Dean, I really, really wanted to beat George Bush. And I thought, "No matter who the nominee is, we just have to laser focus on these swing states." And so, I started writing about them with a diaries feature and it got a really good reception early on.
Nir:
So, I went and started my own blog, called it the Swing State Project and I covered all of the swing states, especially the polling and taught myself a lot over the next year or so. And after the election, which of course didn't go our way, I thought, "Well, probably time to shutter this thing." Except, I met a fantastic fellow along the way, a guy by the name of Tim Tagaris, who today plays a major role in the progressive digital world. And Tim convinced me and said, "There are going to be a lot of these downballot races, races for the house, races for the Senate, and someone needs to focus on them, so why not us?"
Markos:
David, before you go on, did you predict Democrats were going to win in 2002, because I totally thought we were going to win everything in 2002.
Nir:
In 2002? So, to dial back to 2002, that was when I first discovered Daily Kos. And yes, I knew it was a guy named Kos, this mysterious guy who was writing about all these polls from these various competitive Senate races. And I thought, "Oh yeah, we're finally going to take this back and really stick it to George Bush." And, of course, Republicans managed to have one of the only good midterm elections for the party in the White House in 2002. And that was disappointing, but despite that failure, I still kept coming back to Daily Kos, and Markos, I'll explain why I kept coming back in a moment, but just to move back to the SSP origin story that Beard wanted to know about, in 2004, I thought that John Kerry would win. Obviously, that didn't happen and like I said, with Tim Tagaris, we kept it going, covering downballot elections and that's all that I've ever written about ever since.
Nir:
So, from really 2005 on the name Swing State Project became rather a misnomer and we only covered really house, Senate governors at the time and expanded a lot since then. And a key reason why, I learned from Markos. Markos was one of the first guys in the blogosphere who really lifted up the importance of these races, that no matter who holds the presidency, who holds congress is also incredibly, incredibly important, we've seen over and over again. That's why I decided to focus on those races and have been doing so for really close to two decades now. And Markos, to say why I stuck around at Daily Kos, you had another insight which was key, which was you were going to be extremely reality based, and really only tell the facts, but you also wanted to make a safe space for progressives online, because I had been on a lot of other political boards and they were just endless infighting between conservatives and liberals and I was just tired of the right wing trolls.
Nir:
And you said, "You know what? You can be a conservative in the comments in Daily Kos, but we're not going to put up with your BS. This is a space for liberals to rant and complain and for us to engage in nascent activism." And you really allowed it to be a place where a community could thrive.
Markos:
Yeah, and it's funny that you bring up Tim Tagaris, because he has an interesting role in the rise of Daily Kos, because there was a point in the 2004 presidential cycle where I said some things, nowadays it'd be nothing, but back then, because the world was different, the political world, the left, the democratic world freaked out. And so, I had these nascent advertisers on Daily Kos and they all dropped me and John Kerry, who was running for president had to verbally distance himself from me.
Markos:
And so, things were caving in. And this was really early, I didn't know how to take this and how to deal with it and Tim Tagaris was running the campaign of some hapless, poor candidate in Ohio and he came in and used that opportunity to advertise on Daily Kos and say, "I got your back, Daily Kos." But again, it didn't go anywhere, but it was Tim Tagaris creating that vote of confidence, gave space to other more credible candidates to come back in and reengage with Daily Kos. And it became just a mere blip in my history, as opposed to something that could have ended the career really early on. So, it's funny you bring Tim Tagaris, he actually had a pretty important role in both our sites.
Nir:
Yeah, Tim absolutely did. And also, like Markos, Tim is a veteran, a Marine, and he understood the importance of sticking by your team. That really made all the difference.
Beard:
And so, a few years later, tell me if you can tell me the exact year, Swing State Project became Daily Kos Elections and became the broader umbrella of what Daily Kos does. So, Markos, why don't you tell us how that came to be, and then, Nir, you can tell us your perspective on it.
Markos:
I bet David remembers the details a lot better than I do, I have a notoriously bad memory, but what I do remember, like I just mentioned earlier, that the traditional blogosphere, the independent blogger was an endangered species and either they faded away or they were absorbed by other sites. And so, there was, early on, there as a consolidation in the progressive blogosphere and David and I, I mean, we knew each other from almost the very beginning and he was doing some cool work.
Markos:
And David, you might remember the motivation. I think I just liked you and I liked your work and that was the end of it. I didn't need to dig into things a lot deeper and it wasn't like I had spreadsheets of looking at a cost benefit analysis or whatever. I was like, "No, it just made sense. Let's join forces." You may remember it differently though.
Nir:
My memory actually squares exactly with yours.
Markos:
Okay.
Nir:
I had kept close ties with Daily Kos. I still wrote there in addition to writing at the Swing State Project and Markos and I also continued to work together on candidate endorsements, which was something else that Daily Kos stepped into quite early on. And this was such a pioneering kind of Wild West time, Markos, like he was saying, was able to just do stuff because it was cool and hire people because it was cool. And I was an attorney at the time, I would write the Swing State Project on nights and weekends and Daily Kos at this time kept growing and growing. And it grew from a one person site into a real business with real revenue and Markos was able to hire people. And he told me, "I'd like to hire you full time to come do this at Daily Kos full time." And I was thrilled, because-
Markos:
You were a fancy schmancy lawyer with probably the big paycheck and all the perks and prestige of...
Nir:
Yeah, I was a big shot lawyer who also didn't have any control of his life, because you never knew when you would get a call from the partner at 11 o'clock at night on a Saturday night telling you there was an emergency and you had to come into the office to work on some client's brief. It was a terrible life and it wasn't particularly enjoyable. And my passion was politics and particularly the elections. And so, Markos gave me this opportunity, first by creating Daily Kos and then by hiring me. And so, this was in 2011 and I said, "See you," to the legal world and I became a full-time writer.
Nir:
And essentially, it was sort of a merger or maybe a buyout of SSP in a way. The awesome thing was that the whole community that I built up at SSP, this very election nerd focused community also came along to DKE, so it wasn't just me and it wasn't just the other contributors at SSP who became DKE, it was also this whole big community of enthusiasts.
Markos:
Yeah, I think it's important for everybody to realize just how much of an accomplishment it is to build that kind of loyalty with the community that they'll actually follow you to a new place. That doesn't happen very often.
Nir:
Yeah, I was immensely gratified by that.
Beard:
Yeah, and I was one of those people at the time, along with many, many others. So, I want to turn a little bit away from the history now, and think a little bit more about the philosophy of Daily Kos and Daily Kos Elections. And I think one of the places where it holds a really unique role, both in the broader Democratic politics and in online journalism, is it really hits at this crossroads of advocacy and journalism that was really rare at the time and remains relatively rare. It's still not exactly Daily Kos, but you see it a little more commonly in other countries, where there are newspapers or sites that are very partisan, but also do a lot of journalism.
Beard:
But what's so interesting about Daily Kos to me is that it breaks news, sometimes it does a lot of reporting, it does a lot of analysis, but also, like we talked about, it endorses candidates, it pushes its readership to donate money to candidates, to donate their time, donate money to other causes sometimes. And so, you really don't see that, because there's this big neutral journalism ethics that so pervades a lot of American journalism. Why do you think the website and Daily Kos Elections developed into that niche and how that helped it succeed by growing into that?
Markos:
I mean, our nation was founded on the principle of partisan media, right? I mean the founding fathers fought out the very national debate with not just their own partisan press, but pseudonymously as well. This is really hearkened to very much our tradition. Of course, you see that in Britain and in other places, highly partisanized media, and I think it's more fun, right? This is the difference between Breitbart, which is actually just lies or Fox News, but a healthy, partisan... I loved reading The Weekly Standard and the National Review. I didn't need to agree with them, but at least they were reality based once upon a time. Weekly Standard of course got destroyed by the Trump movement, because they refused to engage in Trumpian fantasy bubble making.
Markos:
But there was never any real conscious decision. I was just, I was in the right and I had an opinion and F you if you had a problem with it, and there was an early joke in those early days of the blogosphere that went around the lines of, "Well, we got to convene a blogger ethics panel." Because traditional journalists were really like, "Oh, no, those bloggers." And they were very threatened by the medium and it took them way too long to realize that blogging really wasn't... Blogging was just a platform. And now a lot of reporters blog and Twitter is a micro blogging platform. And so, it's just spur of the moment unedited writing. And so, that was exciting to me, that was fun. It's let's have a debate, let's argue. And now, like David said, I don't want to argue with right wing trolls, but we're liberals, we have plenty to argue about within our own ranks.
Markos:
And like you said, presidential primary season, it's raw knuckle time, because things get heated. But that, to me, made it exciting. And I took that whole mentality and I actually founded another company called SB Nation, which is now Vox Media, on that same principle, because I thought, "Where are the places where partisanship really gets people revved up and engaged?" And I was like, "Politics for sure. Sports, yeah like Red Sox versus Yankee fans, partisanship reign supreme. Bears and Packers, love that." And I was like, "Religion. Yeah, but religion, people kill each other for that stuff, so I think I'll step away from religion and I'll stick with politics and sports." And it's that corner bar atmosphere. You're going in there, you have a few beers, you're going to argue about your favorite sports team, you're going to argue about Elizabeth Warren versus Bernie Sanders versus Joe Biden.
Markos:
It has energy behind it. So, to me, that was always foundationally important to Daily Kos. And of course now the idea that you can have an opinion is normal. It's been normalized and I think Twitter finally put an end to any notion that even traditional reporters like Maggie Haberman from The New York Times can have an opinion, it's allowed, it's okay, you can have an opinion. Oftentimes it's wrong, but you can have an opinion. And so, now it seems almost boring, but at the time people were really hot and bothered by it. And the idea that journalism, any kind of writing had to be impartial, even though foundationally our nation was built on partisan press.
Nir:
Let me add to that. One really important choice that I think Daily Kos and the Swing State Project and Daily Kos Elections made was to say, "You can be a partisan and still be a truth teller and still be honest," because I think in the traditional media, the view is that if you're a partisan, you're automatically a hack. You're a cheerleader, you're only going to say stuff that benefits your own side, you're going to conceal the truth about negative things about your own side and that turned out not to be true at all. And Markos was really a leader in this. He was unafraid to say, "Democrats are screwing up here." Or, "The polls look bad," or, "we might not win this race." And I really took that lesson to heart. And especially once I started focusing on downballot races and especially once Daily Kos and SSP and other progressive blogs really started endorsing Democratic candidates in serious numbers, it became really important to know what actually is going on, which races can we win?
Nir:
This is foundational to me. If all we're doing is telling our audience to clap harder, we'll never win. We'll invest in the wrong races, we'll tell people to donate to candidates that don't have a shot or even don't even have a chance to at least make the other side sweat. And so, being reality based in our activism was super, super important. And, I think, to this day, many folks in other fields, especially the traditional media, don't grasp that you can both be a partisan and be a real sharp analyst. Now, that said, I think that over the years, as Markos was saying, we have changed a lot of minds and have won a lot of people over, because you see all these mainstream journalists and academics citing, for instance, compiled by Daily Kos Elections. And they'll often caveat it and say, "Well, it's a left leaning site, but their data is good." Well, hell yeah, it's good. We need that data in order to be successful. So that, like I said, is really central to our ethos.
Markos:
And I do want to add that it's actually not as easy as it sounds either, because we're seeing it right now, with how the right wing media, including Fox News, has been swept away by Trumpism and alternate reality. We had a similar situation in 2004 after John Kerry lost, and he lost in Ohio by 100,000 votes, and there was a proliferation of conspiracy theories on the left saying that the Republicans had stolen the election, that there was this black box with Diebold machines that Republicans had programmatically hacked the machines and changed the vote. And they were taking over Daily Kos and I had to make a decision that after carefully examining the evidence and finding out that there was none, that we weren't going to put up with that kind of conspiracy theories.
Markos:
And we banned those people and Daily Kos lost a significant chunk of its readership. And I was just reading today about how Fox News, they were facing pressure from OAN and Newsmax and so, they doubled down on the pro Trump big lie, because they didn't want to lose audience. Deciding to stick to the truth, if it costs you an audience, can be difficult. I mean, it hurt to lose that kind of audience, but it was the right thing to do. I never doubted it. It wasn't hard to decision to make. It was hard to actually carry out. It was hard to suffer through the consequences, because people don't just even leave, they leave and then they have a crusade and then they try to dox you and they try to attack you, and it's bad enough you're dealing with Republicans, now I got to deal with people supposedly on my own side.
Markos:
So, we saw it with Hillary Clinton supporters in 2008 when Barack Obama had already clinched the nomination and she refused to drop out of the race, because she thought the super delegates want to put her over. And same thing, we said, "Barack Obama is the nominee, we're not going to debate this anymore." And so, a bunch of them stormed off and created trouble. And of course, that was bad karma for Hillary Clinton, because then she had to deal with that with Bernie Sanders and the same thing plays out. So, being partisan and being truthful is possible, but there is always this current of people that want to push you to the place where you can't criticize, that you have to cheer lead, that you have to root for your team, that you have to bend reality, and it's fighting against that and pushing against that can sometimes be a lot harder than it should be.
Markos:
I'm proud that we did it at Daily Kos and the broader progressive movement, because the next John Kerry could have latched onto that stuff like Donald Trump did, right? Now we're finding out that's a lucrative place to be. There's a whole class of grifters that are making a lot of money on the right playing to that big lie. Our side didn't play that game. And so, I'm proud of us for not doing it. And so, when everybody says, "Well, it's inevitable that the right wing media has to do that, has to cater to the crazy base." No, it's not inevitable. Didn't have to happen.
Nir:
I was there for that time period after the 2004 election and it sucked and I was so glad that you stood on the side of reality and evidence. And I think had you not at that time, Daily Kos probably would have been relegated to the fringes, because you know the movement as yes, there are grifty conspiracy theorists on the left, but by no means do they have a fraction of a fraction of the influence that they do on the right.
Markos:
Like Alex Jones and Steve Bannon and yeah.
Nir:
Exactly, they're mostly confined to sort of the shallow cesspools of Twitter and Daily Kos could have gone there, but for that decision. And I think that was a really important one and relatedly, you're talking about how it can often be hard to be both partisan and clear eyed, and we find ourselves in that situation sometimes at Daily Kos Elections, because we're both as an organization, Daily Kos endorsing candidates, but we're also writing about those races every day in our newsletter, The Morning Digest, that goes out every morning. And I should throw in a plug, you can sign up for it, if you're not already reading it at dailykos.com/morningdigest.
Nir:
And it kind of sucks when you've endorsed a candidate and then you get a series of bad polls back, but you have to force yourself to be honest. And I often write posts announcing our endorsements and I try to be really candid with our audience and our readers, that we're asking them to part with their hard earned dollars and I will say, "This is a difficult race, this is a long shot race." And I've read many, many endorsement announcements from many, many other organizations and that's not the kind of language.
Markos:
They never do, I think we're the only ones.
Nir:
Right, and you know what? Our community respects us and rewards us for that, because we have lost a lot of races and we haven't lost a lot of races because we're bad at making endorsements. We've lost a lot of races because we deliberately pick a lot of races that are longer shots, where you get bigger bang for your buck in an attempt to expand the playing field and our community has never punished us for that. They understand our mission, that we're not going to play in all of the biggest, most expensive races, that we really do, like I said, want to expand the playing field and it worked.
Markos:
And we have some incredible successes using that strategy, because we see it with Jon Ossoff.
Nir:
Yep.
Markos:
This is a district that Republicans consistently won by over 20 points. You guys, at elections, looked at the presidential results, you looked at the demographic trends and you said, "You know what? There's a special election coming up, we can contest this." And people laughed at us. People thought it was fricking hilarious, but we went to our community, we gave them the notice. This was after Donald Trump was elected, so there was a need for people to do something to fight back and Daily Kos raised what? The first one and a half million that Jon Ossoff ever raised, came from Daily Kos.
Markos:
And he lost by a sliver, but we picked up that seat using infrastructure that Ossoff and the Daily Kos investment made. Lucy McBath won that seat two years later. And, of course, Jon Ossoff parlayed that experience and that exposure and that list that we helped rebuild, which I'm sure is like majority Daily Kos readers, into being a US Senator and control the Senate today, so this is the investment that if we follow the conventional wisdom and what everybody else was doing, we never would've made and that race would've probably sat there in obscurity, like a lot of special elections do, because they're not competitive. And on paper should not have been competitive.
Beard:
And there are a lot of those races over the years and not all of those candidates that Daily Kos has endorsed has turned into Jon Ossoff, but you got to play the smart bets to find the ones that work and that's what I think Daily Kos is really good at. So, I want to turn to one phrase that started at the Daily Kos pretty early on. I don't remember exactly when, but I remember it back when I first started following it, that really stuck with me both in terms of my philosophy and how Daily Kos works and how to think about the Democratic Party, because there's been a lot of intra Democratic Party fighting over the years that Daily Kos has existed and what Daily Kos has always stuck to is the idea of more and better Democrats.
Beard:
And so, more obviously, the idea is that you want to elect Democrats who won majorities, you want the presidency, governorships, but also better Democrats, in that the way to move the party to the left in a more progressive direction was through primaries, was through getting better Democrats, not through third parties, not through independent candidates, not really through radical election reform. Obviously, we've done a lot of work with voting rights and things like that, but not trying to change the system, but more Democrats and better Democrats. So, where did that first come from to the degree you remember and why is that a leading philosophy for Daily Kos?
Nir:
So, I think it was the blogger, Atrios, Duncan Black who popularized the phrase more and better Democrats. If Republicans did something lousy, he wanted more Democrats and if Democrats did something lousy he wanted better Democrats and it just made instant sense the second you read it. And I think it became easy to adopt at Daily Kos. And also, I think the order of those two phrases is important. Markos's theory of change was very simple and made all the sense in the world to me. And it was, you got to get rid of Republicans and elect more Democrats in office if you want to take power and actually affect any change.
Nir:
And then, where you could, where it made sense to do so, you would try to get rid of lousy Democrats where you wouldn't be jeopardizing, say, a conservative seat, like Joe Manchin's Senate seat, but Joe Lieberman representing blue state of Connecticut, it made all the sense in the world to run a primary against him. And yeah, it just sort of fit this theory of change perfectly and it's worked for, really, decades.
Markos:
I mean, Kyrsten Sinema's a perfect example. There hadn't been a democratic senator in Arizona in bazillion years, 30, 40 years or something and so, it got us one step closer to the majority. And in fact, there is no majority and there's no Democratic majority replacing Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court, if she doesn't have a seat there. But we ain't going to let her stick around any longer than her term is and we're going to primary her, because we have more, now we can upgrade. And so, for sure, the early blogosphere was always incredibly pragmatic, just far and wide, and it really contrasted with conservatives that kept pushing their party to the right. And so, there's always been this false equivalency in the media. They can't fathom, they don't understand how the left can be different than the right.
Markos:
And maybe now they're starting to get it, because the right has just so gone off the rails, they've just fallen off the edge. So maybe now they're like, "Okay. Yeah, maybe the left isn't like that." But for the longest time, there was always this equivalency where conservatives, they're the tea party, so therefore, the liberal bloggers are like the tea party of the left. And it's like, "What are you talking about? We don't particularly celebrate Joe Manchin, but we're glad he's around." That doesn't happen on the right. And as frustrating as he is, we would be in a much different place if Mitch McConnell was Senate majority leader today, so pragmatism has always been a part of it.
Markos:
And in some ways, it allowed us to push out people who were pragmatic, people who might have been under fringe. Again, it's a way to sort of, self-regulate what we built as a movement, keeping the cranks out. And a lot of blogs try to rally around that uncompromising radical left, and remember Firedoglake was one of those and they all died and they just petered out, because it's pushing a strategy that is patently ineffective in always being outraged and always being mad and always being disappointed. It's just exhausting and people get tired of it.
Beard:
Yeah, absolutely. And you see that more and more as Twitter has grown and to a degree substituted a lot of what the blogosphere used to do in terms of that interaction, that constant outrage makes it hard to get things done sometimes.
Nir:
Yeah.
Beard:
Thanks for joining us, Markos, this was enlightening and we'll be excited to see where Daily Kos goes for the next 20 years.
Markos:
Thank you so much, been a pleasure.
Nir:
This is The Downballot and we were just talking with Daily Kos Founder, Markos Moulitsas about the origin story of both Daily Kos and Daily Kos Elections. And so, now I want to ask my co-host David Beard, Beard, how did you get involved with DKE and how did you become a contributing editor?
Beard:
Sure, it's only fair that you have my history after hearing from the two of you. So, I found Daily Kos, I think, in 2003 or 2004, so very early on. I was a senior in high school or something like that, so it was just as I was getting interested in politics. Again, similarly, the Bush administration, the Bush, Kerry race, I volunteered then, by that point I was a freshman in college and volunteered with the Young Dems and we did canvassing and stuff, but I was very interested in the analysis and the competitiveness. As a sports fan, it was very similar in that way, following races and rooting for Democrats both out of wanting to elect Democrats, because I felt like they would make the world better and you get that partisan juices flowing.
Beard:
Part of you just wants to win. That got me involved in politics, that set off my career in campaigns and politics and that stuff, but I never strayed too far from Daily Kos. It was still some place that I regularly read, I regularly checked in on, whenever there was interesting election news or retirement, an interesting candidate announcement. As that developed over the years and I grew my career, at one point as I was reading someone, it might have been you, it might have been another Daily Kos Elections staffer, but they basically put out a call that was, "Does anyone want to write up this British election that's taking place in a couple of months?" Because I believe someone had just done it for Canada or another country and this UK election was coming up and it was basically a free call. And I just replied and was like, "Sure, I'll write it up. I'd been following it." I'd certainly expanded my interests into some other elections in other countries.
Beard:
So, I spent a lot more time than probably, I think, you or anyone at Daily Kos Elections was expecting, because it got really long. And I wrote this very long write up of the upcoming British election. It was the 2015 election where, if you'll remember, David Cameron was facing off against Ed Miliband, there had been a coalition government with the liberal Democrats and Cameron ended up winning a big conservative majority, which would last him exactly a year until the Brexit referendum ended his career. But at the time, I wrote this up and you all were fans, you liked what I'd done and you ended up inviting me to do some more stuff for international elections. And then bringing me on as, as what we call, a contributing editor for Daily Kos Elections, which is a crew of folks who don't actually work full time for Daily Kos Elections, but do a lot of side work and help out with the live blogs and shoot interesting things, all stuff of that nature.
Beard:
And so, I've been doing that for now, it feels like just yesterday, but it's actually been coming up on, I think, seven years, because I think it was 2015 when I first started writing stuff. And so, after a number of years and I wrote a lot of stuff about international elections early on and I continue to have that be a focus of mine, all of us have our niche, and so, I write a lot about some of international elections. But one of the things that we had talked about and thrown around a lot was the idea of a podcast for Daily Kos Elections. And the more I thought about it, the more that I thought that it was something that I was really interested in pursuing. And so, I approached you with it. And so there was a lot of back and forth to get this off the ground, but here we are.
Nir:
Your story for how you got involved with DKE reflects so many others, including mine. I started off as just a commenter and Markos liked my stuff and he eventually beamed me up to work for Daily Kos and kind of the same thing has happened with many of our contributors including people who are now full-time staff. That's the beauty of the Daily Kos community, that because it makes it so easy to share ideas and to write for an audience, it's had a very democratizing effect and brought in a lot of people to this combo journalism activism world who didn't necessarily have experience, particularly with writing online at all. And I've truly loved that journey and it's been incredibly serendipitous for me and for a lot of other people.
Beard:
Yeah, and one of the great things is that obviously for you and for a number of people, it's become a staff role, your full time job, but for me and for a lot of other folks, it's been able to be something we do beyond. We have full time jobs, but we're able to do this thing that we really love outside of that and contribute in ways that we probably couldn't if the only option was, you have to find a job, people to do this, that wouldn't be possible for a lot of the contributing editors. And so, it's been a very fortunate thing for me as well. So, I want to dive a little bit deeply now that it's just the two of us into the workings of Daily Kos Elections.
Beard:
So, it started out as very much like a news aggregator in the early days of collecting stories about Senate house races, governors races, et cetera. And then more analysis, as it grew and as you were able to do more work, and then really became, like we talked a little bit about, like a data resource to where the Washington Post, The New York Times, sites Daily Kos data about presidential election results and other things. And so, how did Daily Kos Election build that infrastructure and how does it do that work that is so rare that you see journalists across the country citing it?
Nir:
So, again, that was really a serendipitous development, because the Swing State Project and then Daily Kos Elections was this real haven for election nerds and election junkies of all stripes, it brought in people who were interested, not just in qualitative analysis, but quantitative analysis as well. There was a fellow who went by the username of Jeff MD, he was from Maryland and he was a spreadsheet wizard and a genius with calculating election results. And the single data set, both that we use the most often and is by far the most cited of anything we do, our presidential election results broken down for all 435 congressional districts. And these are incredibly important pieces of data, because how people vote for their member of the house is very, very closely correlated with how they vote at the top of the ticket for president. And this data has been published by others for years, but following the 2008 election, we wondered if we could do it faster and better.
Nir:
And it turned out the answer was yes. With this volunteer team led by Jeff MD, we calculated these results for every single congressional district, we also went one step further than prior data sets, which is, we took this sort of blogosphere ethos of transparency and made it real. We put all of our spreadsheets online, so that anyone could see our numbers, see our raw data and if we had gotten anything wrong, they could flag it and point it out and we were extremely open to any corrections. No one really found any though, the work was that good. And we've kept doing that ever since.
Nir:
That project is now run by Jeff Singer, a different Jeff, who is a full-time staffer for Daily Kos Elections, and we'll have him on in an upcoming episode, and that data set really just led to other data sets. And I think we had developed a keen sense of what was out there and what wasn't out there. And also, there is a lot of data that exists out there, just not in a great format. It's not really that accessible. It's not all consolidated or it's kind of formatted in a messy way. And we just kind of started to fill these gaps and people began to realize, "Wow, their data's trustworthy. Yeah, sure, they may be a bunch of partisans, but they really take this stuff seriously." And like I said, anyone who doubted it could always double check our spreadsheets and it's been a long, slow growth, but I think that we really just did become respected just by putting our heads down and doing the work and not really looking for the accolades and more and more reporters and academics began to use us and rely on us and cite us.
Nir:
And also, a lot of the data sets we were producing were unique. They couldn't be found anywhere else, and that has complemented, and in no way replaced the day to day work we do of just capturing the news about all of the key races in all of the states across the nation. The two really go hand in hand, because I don't think you can have a good qualitative understanding of a race without good data, but data alone never tells the full story.
Beard:
Yeah, and you can look to that Ossoff race in 2017 as a really good example of a match of quantitative and qualitative, because the movement in the presidential numbers that we saw in 2016, because it was the Suburban Atlanta seat that really was not Trump friendly in the way that more rural areas were, showed you quantitatively that there was real movement here and a real opportunity in a seat that was historically Republican. But you also saw that, oh, there's a feeling of people want to do something, because Trump had just been elected. We felt like Ossoff was a promising candidate and it seemed like a good opportunity in terms of the qualitative analysis and the quantitative back that up as a place to go. So, it's both, it's never one or the other, you have to have both of those to succeed.
Beard:
To wrap us up here, I want to talk a little bit about The Downballot itself, not to get too Meta on us, but this is obviously a new podcast. It's an outgrowth of Daily Kos Elections, so let's talk a little bit about what we want listeners to gain from this, why we're doing a podcast. So, I'll go first, because I'm the one who pitched it to you, so I'll do the first run through, and then you can add on where I've missed, but I think the goal here is to take all of the great work that the Daily Kos and the Daily Kos Elections staff do and the Daily Kos contributing editors do and build on that in a way that is not as able to be done in the written word. Obviously, we produce an enormous amount of written content. You do these very long pieces, every weekday The Morning Digest runs through and it's a lot of content, those of you who have read it.
Beard:
And again, if you haven't and you're not subscribed, you can go to dailykos.com/morningdigest. And so, we have this enormous written content that we use, but there's so much that you don't get from the written content in terms of discussing a race or discussing politics that you can do in a more audio discussion based format. And we see that a lot. There's obviously a Daily Kos Slack, and we have a lot of really fun, interesting discussions in the elections channel, that's stuff that you wouldn't publish on the site. It's not something you would put in The Morning Digest, but people make really interesting, good points. And that's what this sprung out of was, was the idea that we could take that casual analysis to shooting out a theory that seems really interesting and take it to a podcast form and share it with readers and beyond, who would really want to hear more from us.
Beard:
And so, that takes all the value that Daily Kos Elections provides and puts it into this new format, in a new more expressive, expansive way. And then we're also going to have the ability to bring in outside folks, as you'll see, as we go along, to build on that knowledge where we find something that's really interesting, but maybe we don't have that expertise. We can bring in new expertise in a way that wouldn't really work in The Morning Digest, but would be great to do a long form interview with somebody over how their job in politics or a reporter for a state or any number of things where we can really do a deep dive that wouldn't be as easy to do in the written format, so that's where I really want to see The Downballot go and thrive as we go into 2022 and beyond.
Nir:
Yeah, the deep dive is exactly it. We are covering, like I said, every competitive Senate race, every competitive house race, every competitive race for governor and more, attorneys general, secretaries of state, key legislative races, key mayoral races, DAs, sheriffs and more. And when you're doing that, it's hard to devote more than a paragraph or a few paragraphs to a particular race, so this gives us a chance to really do a deep dive in a conversational way that we simply couldn't do on this site, though I will also add that we will have transcripts for every episode, so those of you who are more interested in the written word, or if you just simply aren't able to listen one week, you'll be able to catch up with us and we'll be posting those on the site as well.
Beard:
Yeah, so hopefully that's sparked your interest. If you're new to The Downballot, welcome, as most of you will be, but if you're somebody who's only found this episode later on, hopefully you've learned some more about how we came to be and how Daily Kos came to be and I hope you'll join us or continue to join us as we keep doing episodes. We'll have episodes every Thursday that come out wherever you listen to your podcast, we'll be there. And that is all for us this week, thanks to Markos Moulitsas for joining us.
Beard:
The Downballot comes out every Thursday, everywhere. If you haven't already, please like and subscribe to The Downballot and leave us a five star rating and review. Thanks also to our producer, Cara Zelaya and editor, Tim Einenkel. We'll be back next week with a new episode.
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