You know about the DSCC and DCCC, but have you heard of DASS? You'll want to! We're talking with Kim Rogers, the executive director of the not-especially-well-known but crucially important Democratic Association of Secretaries of State on this week's edition of The Downballot. Rogers explains how her organization helps recruit candidates, deploy resources, and win races for secretary of state across the country—and why these elections operate so differently from many others. She also tells us about what Democratic secretaries are doing to fight disinformation and expand voting rights, and the most bonkers thing she heard come out of the mouth of a 2022 election denier.
Meanwhile, co-hosts David Nir and David Beard recap an exciting series of elections on Tuesday, starting with the race for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, where progressives ran up the score and landed their preferred opponent for the April 4 general election. There were also big Democratic overperformances in New Hampshire, Virginia, and Kentucky that augur well for the party. Finally, Daily Kos Elections editor Jeff Singer joins us to preview next week's first-round faceoff in the race for mayor of Chicago—a true tossup that could see any number of winners.
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. Please subscribe to The Downballot on Apple Podcasts and we'd be grateful if you could leave us a five-star rating and review.
David Beard:
We've got some exciting election results to cover, don't we, David?
David Nir:
We do indeed. We are going to start off talking about elections in Wisconsin, in New Hampshire, in Virginia and in Kentucky, all of which absolutely rocked for the blue team. Then we are going to discuss another welcome piece of news out of the Montana Senate race. We will be bringing on Daily Kos Elections editor, Jeff Singer, to preview another election coming up next week. That is the first round in Chicago's race for mayor. And then we are going to be talking with Kim Rogers, who is the executive director of an organization that you will definitely want to learn more about, the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State. It is a fantastic episode. So let's buckle in.
Beard, I am just loving 2023. We had another freaking awesome election night on Tuesday.
David Beard:
Yeah. Let's just keep it going. Let's do this all the time.
David Nir:
Yeah, all the time. So here's the deal. Wisconsin Supreme Court, we've talked about this race endlessly. We are going to talk about it even more endlessly-er for the rest of the time until the April 4th general election. Here's what went down in the primary. So progressive Judge Janet Protasiewicz absolutely dominated the four-candidate field. It's an officially nonpartisan race. Top two candidates move on, two progressives were running, two conservatives were running. And there was really no doubt that Protasiewicz was going to be the progressive standard-bearer advancing to April 4th. She had just out-raised the entire field combined. She had a ton of support from elected officials and labor all across the state, and she won more than 46% of the vote statewide.
Among conservatives, the two conservative candidates, former Supreme Court Justice, Dan Kelly, and Judge Jennifer Dorow, they really split the right-leaning vote. But Kelly came out ahead 24 to 22, and that was fantastic news for progressives. Progressive groups spent heavily to help boost Kelly past Dorow because they view him as the weaker candidate. And it's almost certain that conservatives also agree that he is the weaker candidate, and there's a lot of reasons for that. He lost his bid for a full term. He had been appointed to the court by former Governor Scott Walker. He lost a bid in 2020, very badly, by 10 points. He is definitely far more extreme, much further to the right than Dorow, who is already quite conservative.
And also Dorow, as we've mentioned before, she presided over this very high profile trial of the Waukesha Christmas parade killer. And that earned her a lot of positive attention, which is very rare for a essentially random trial court judge. And it's probably why she decided to run for the Supreme Court in the first place. But she had only a very small base of support in the Milwaukee suburbs, whereas Kelly did very, very well in the more rural, redder parts of the state. And now progressives get to face him. It's exactly the matchup they wanted. And here's the top line number, Beard, that you just really have to love. If you add the total vote for the two progressive candidates, and compare that to the total vote for the two conservatives, there was a huge spread of 54 for progressives and 46% for conservatives. And this is in a state where statewide elections are often decided by like one or two points.
David Beard:
Yeah, 54-46 is a blowout in Wisconsin. You don't see that too often. Now obviously you can have a couple of caveats. A ton of money is going to be spent between now and April 4th. Millions of dollars are going to go after Protasiewicz attacking her on a whole litany of things from Republican dark money groups. And turn out, there's a good chance that turnout is going to go up as we hit the general election from the primary. But all that said, I would definitely rather be her than Kelly at this point given these primary results. So initially, great, great starting place to be as we hit this six-week sprint.
David Nir:
Yeah. And while, like you mentioned, the electorate could change between now and April 4, turnout was a massive. It's close to one million voters, which exceeds all past records. And also, the county that provided the most votes was Dane County, the most liberal in the state. That's the home of Madison. That's a really, really strong sign. Milwaukee County, the other Democratic stronghold in the state had the second most votes. That's not unusual except the two counties combined for a much greater share of the total statewide vote than they typically have. In fact, really the last time we saw a statewide race in Wisconsin that was any sort of blowout was that Kelly race in 2020 that I mentioned that he lost by 10 points. Look, we can't get cocky about this one, but I wouldn't really feel very good if I were the conservatives. And let's not forget what this is all about. This is about control of the court. Progressives win, the court becomes a progressive majority and everything, absolutely everything could change, from gerrymandering to abortion, which is currently illegal in the state of Wisconsin.
David Beard:
Absolutely. And one of the things that we see here that I think we've seen pretty consistently now, that we can say is a pretty clear trend, is as Democrats have gotten better and better among college-educated voters who tend to pay more attention to sort of the weekly, daily, events in their community tend to vote more often. They've gotten better at these sort of off-off-year type of elections, whereas it used to be that Republicans had somewhat of an advantage in these sort of oddly-timed elections. Obviously Wisconsin does this almost every year, but it's an oddly-timed election for anybody who's not in Wisconsin. So if you move there, you're not used to a spring election, but as Democrats have come to win majorities among college educated voters, we've seen these better results pop up pretty consistently now in special elections like we're going to talk about and this primary here. So it's hopefully good news for April 4th.
David Nir:
So before we get to those special elections, there is another Wisconsin race that we need to mention, also a special election, for the 8th State Senate District. This is a race for a GOP-held seat that we've talked about before. If Democrats can flip it, it would block Republicans from achieving a supermajority in the State Senate. They could use that super majority to impeach any Democratic official and remove them from office that they like. There, Democrats had tried to influence the GOP primary to elect the far weaker candidate, similarly to what they successfully pulled off in the Supreme Court race. It didn't work out.
State Representative Dan Knodl won that primary over his colleague Janel Brandtjen. Knodl will now face Democratic attorney Jodi Habush Sinykin. Again, that race is also on April 4. This is Republican-leaning territory, but it is an area that includes a lot of those kinds of voters that you were just mentioning, Beard. Those college educated suburbanites who've been moving in our direction. So can't rule out the possibility of an upset to flip that seat.
David Beard:
Yeah. And this is also an area where Dorow did really well. And so it is possible that some of her supporters vote for the Democrat, or possibly stay home, and that could potentially help increase the Democrats' chances there.
David Nir:
So let's move on past Wisconsin, because we had some exciting results elsewhere, and I’ve got to start with New Hampshire. So we've talked about this race for a State House seat in New Hampshire that ended in a dead, flat tie in November, and Democrats in the do-over of that race won in resounding fashion. Democrat Chuck Grassie—not Chuck Grassley, Chuck Grassie—won that race over his Republican opponent by a 56 to 44 margin. So this is a race that was a tie in November and went to a 12-point Democratic margin just a few months later. That is an amazing change in fortunes and also Grassie's performance represented a big improvement over what Joe Biden got in the district. Joe Biden won the district by about 51 to 47, around four or five points. Grassie, like I just said, won by 12 points. So that means that Grassie beat out the performance at the top of the ticket by seven points, and that is a really good number.
But believe it or not, it wasn't even close to being the best of the over performances that we saw on Tuesday night. There was a special election for Virginia's 4th Congressional District, and this was a safely blue seat. It was won by Democrat Jennifer McClellan, making her the first Black woman ever to represent the state in Congress. This is a district that Biden won by 36 points. McClellan's margin right now stands at 49 points, an unbelievable blowout. That means she beat the presidential top line by 13 points. And guess what? That still wasn't the best over performance we saw on Tuesday night.
We have to go down to Kentucky for that. In the Louisville area, Democrat Cassie Chambers Armstrong won a special election to hold a Democratic seat in the State Senate. This is a district, a blue district that Joe Biden won by 31 points. Cassie Chambers Armstrong won it by 54 points. That means that she ran 23 points ahead of the top of the ticket, that is just absolutely monstrous. And Beard, there is a detail about this race that is so juicy, that I love so freaking much, and it's absolutely 100% true. We triple checked it. This district, you know who lives there, Beard?
David Beard:
Who lives there?
David Nir:
Senate minority—and I emphasize “minority”—leader, Mitch McConnell. He just got his ass kicked by a Democrat in his own backyard.
David Beard:
Well, I'm sure if you ask the newly-elected senator that she would say that she would represent all of her constituents to the best of her ability, including Senator McConnell. But I get the feeling they may not agree on too many things.
David Nir:
Well, the nice thing is we don't have to be anywhere near as politic as the new senator from Kentucky, but really, it was a great night from top to bottom. And also want to just go back to New Hampshire for a second. So now the chamber is 201 Republicans to 198 Democrats with one safely blue Democratic seat that's vacant. So soon enough it'll be 201-199. And as we have always seen in the 400-member New Hampshire House, there are always special elections. Democrats could very well flip another couple of seats that are held by Republicans and take a numerical majority in the chamber this session, before 2024. Now, we can't say whether or not that would result in a new vote for a speaker, party loyalty is never a 100% sure thing in swingy New Hampshire, but I think the Democrats are in really good shape to try to take back that chamber next year despite the fact that it was gerrymandered by the GOP.
David Beard:
Yeah, and I think taking a look at the 2023 special elections as a whole, obviously we're still in February, but we've got these from this week. We've got the Pennsylvania special elections that took place recently. We had the Virginia State Senate special election that took place earlier this year. We've seen pretty consistently Democrats matching or over performing their results compared to Biden, and that's a really good sign. Obviously, we talked some about the college-educated difference and how that's probably helping Democrats in these less commonly scheduled elections, and that's certainly a factor. But still to see Democrats who hold the presidency either match or over perform so consistently is a really good sign right now as we look towards 2024. Obviously, November 2024 is still a long ways away, but if Democrats keep performing at these really good rates in special elections, that's a good sign for Democrats going into 2024. If folks can remember back in the second Obama presidency, some of those special election results were just terrible. Some of these Obama +20, +30 seats were very competitive because things were so down for Democrats around that period. And so to see these sorts of results where Democrats are outperforming Biden is just a great place to be right now.
David Nir:
And I want to emphasize we're not cherry picking. For many years we have collected data on every congressional and legislative special election with one Democrat running against one Republican. And so far, we are up to 11 races in 2023. And averaging all of these together, Democrats are outperforming Biden's numbers by seven points, and that is really, really big. That of course could change. There's going to be a lot of races between now and November of 2024, but we've also tested out this data to see whether it's predictive or not. And it turns out, yeah, that if you look at a large enough sample of special election data across the country, across an election cycle, you will see a pattern that gets replicated in the November general election. So, if this holds, Republicans are going to be in for a really rough year in '24.
David Beard:
And that would be incredible because we really need 2024 to go right. We need to hold onto the Senate, we need to reelect Biden, assuming Biden is the nominee, and win back the House. All of which is possible, but it's all tough. But if we could do that, there's some real opportunities, obviously, in 2025 to do a lot of the stuff we weren't able to do, thanks to a couple of senators who were not very helpful at times. So, it's a goal. It's obviously a big goal, but it's something to work towards.
David Nir:
Well, we got one other really nice piece of news on that front from one of the good guy senators this week.
David Beard:
Yes. There are some really, really tough Democratic seats up in 2024, and with Democrats at 51 Senate seats right now, they can only afford to lose one seat and hold onto the majority. And obviously, they'd love to stay or even gain, but they can afford to lose one seat and keep the majority. But with Ohio, Montana, and West Virginia all up, that's still a tough ask to only lose zero or one of those seats. But one thing that will help enormously is the fact that Montana Senator Jon Tester, the incumbent in that seat, announced that he was going to run for election. He's going to seek a fourth term. Montana, of course, is a state that Trump carried 57,241 in 2020. So, not as big as some of the reddest seats, but not a small margin by any means.
Tester is the only Democrat who holds state-wide office in Montana right now. Tester won 50 to 47, so just three points in 2018, which was, of course, a good Democratic year, but also a year where we saw other red state Democrats lose in states like Missouri and Indiana. So he's proving he's got some real staying power even in a state like Montana when Republicans are going to be throwing the book at him.
Now, a key question here, of course, is who is going to end up running against Tester? Because as we've seen, a bad Republican nominee goes a long way towards getting Democratic senators reelected. We've seen that enough times at this point that we love to make that part of the stew of winning Democratic Senate seat. A few Republicans have already made noises, of course, about running for this seat. Most of the talk has been Senator Round.
The state's two-House members, Matt Rosendale won a seat in the House two years after losing to Tester back in 2018. Rerunning him is probably not their strongest bet. I think Tester would be pretty comfortable to do a rematch against the candidate that he's already beat. And then Ryan Zinke, who was Trump's first secretary of Interior. There was a lot of scandals during that time. There was a lot of chaos. He just won the newly created second Montana Congressional seat, so he's the other representative there.
Now, the National Journal has reported that Attorney General Austin Knudsen is considering running for the Republican nomination as well. And even Governor Greg Gianforte's team didn't rule the idea back in November, but I don't think that's currently seen as particularly likely. So, hopefully, the Republicans will have a really messy, long primary between a few of these candidates, and somebody really damaged will come out of that primary and make Tester's job a little bit easier.
Now joining us to preview the first round of the Chicago mayoral election is Daily Kos Elections Editor Jeff Singer. Welcome back, Jeff.
Jeff Singer:
Thanks. It's great to be back.
David Beard:
Now, obviously, we've got Lori Lightfoot who's the incumbent there, but it has really turned into a bit of a mess. We've talked about it a little bit, but why don't you run us through the state of play and the key candidates here?
Jeff Singer:
Right. So in Chicago, it's one nonpartisan ballot, but everyone identifies as a Democrat. If someone wins the majority of the vote, they avoid a second round, but that's not going to happen. So the question is, which two candidates make it to the April 4th runoff? And at the moment, it looks like of the eight people on the ballot, four, maybe five of them, have a chance. There's Lori Lightfoot, the incumbent. She's dealt with a lot since she got elected mayor four years ago, COVID, crime. She's been criticized for having bad relationships with the city's power brokers, although a lot of her supporters say that, as the first Black woman to lead the city, she's being held to a double standard.
Another one of her opponents is Paul Vallas. He's the former Chicago Public Schools CEO. He was Pat Quinn's running mate when Quinn unsuccessfully ran for reelection as governor in 2014. There's Congressman Chuy Garcia. He'd be the city's first Latino mayor. He ran back in 2015 against then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Lost, but used that as a good springboard to Congress. There's Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson. He's supported by the Teachers Union. They have been spending a lot for him. Those are the four who probably have the best chance.
The fifth one is Willie Wilson. He's a perennial candidate. He's run for president, for Senate, for mayor several times. A Democrat, as an independent, he's a Democrat again. He doesn't really have a good base of support, but he has a lot of money, and he's spending it. So we'll be surprised if he made it to runoff, but it's possible. But it's probably between the other four, Lightfoot, Vallas, Garcia, and Johnson.
David Nir:
So, municipal politics don't often break down along obvious left-right dimensions. And like you said, every candidate running in this officially nonpartisan race still identifies as a Democrat. But how might you bucket this top four ideologically? And if you can, at all, sort them from left to right?
Jeff Singer:
Yeah, so from left to right, probably, on the left most spectrum, it's Johnson and Garcia. They've both are trying to appeal to the progressives in the race. Garcia, he was an early Bernie Sanders supporter. Johnson, he's been a big influential progressive. If neither of them make it to the runoff, there's probably going to be a lot of hand ringing out there.
Lightfoot probably is more in the middle. Wouldn't call her a centrist by any means, but she's the incumbent, kind of puts you in the middle, whether you want to be or not. Then there's Vallas. He's run for office as a Democrat. He identifies as a Democrat strongly. But back in 2009, there's an interview he gave to a conservative host where he said, "I'm more of a Republican right now," and he said he's opposes abortion. He said now, he meant personally. He identifies as pro-choice. But Lightfoot and Garcia, they've been using that clip very heavily to make him be the de facto Republican in the race. Vallas also has an endorsement from the Chicago Police Union, which is run by an ardent Trump supporter, and recently had Ron DeSantis speak at its gathering, which was not something Vallas wanted. Then there's Wilson, who's just kind of his own thing, but he often does support Republicans.
David Beard:
One of the things I've seen is a lot of hand ringing among progressives about whether to vote for Garcia or vote for Johnson because of the fear of a Lightfoot-Vallas top-two runoff, where they see they have two bad choices because they weren't able to align on one progressive choice. But the polling has really been all over the place in terms of which candidate has a better shot, who's first, who second. What's the evidence for one of the other who might be stronger at this point? Is there any way to tell who might be consolidating the progressive vote?
Jeff Singer:
Like you said, the polling is just all over the place. Some of the more recent polls show Johnson, who was kind of an afterthought at the start of the year, gaining a lot of ground, but not all of them. Some of them do show him as far back as fourth or fifth. So it's really anyone's guess. I will say while they are both campaigning as progressives, their bases aren't identical. Garcia, like I said, would be the first Latino mayor, and he's counting on a really strong performance among Latino voters. Johnson, like Lightfoot and Wilson, is Black. So it's a bit complicated. I don't know which of them is more likely to advance. I don't think anyone does. There's a perception that Garcia has lost altitude as Lightfoot has gone after him, but it's hard to say.
David Beard:
Yeah. Well, with those four really up in the air, two of them are going to advance next week to an April 4th runoff. And we'll just have to see who comes out of it and then cover that and see how the race develops from there. But thanks for joining us and updating us on the Chicago mayor's race, Jeff.
Jeff Singer:
Great. And as they say in Chicago, vote early, vote often.
David Nir:
That does it for our weekly hits. Coming up, we are going to be talking with the executive director of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, Kim Rogers, about the work her organization did to support Democrats running for the all-important post of election administrator across the country. It's a really interesting interview, so please join us for it.
Joining us today on The Downballot is Kim Rogers, who is executive director of an organization you may not know about, but absolutely should, and that is the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, also known as DASS, which is dedicated to electing and protecting Democratic secretaries of state across the country. Kim, thank you so much for joining us today.
Kim Rogers:
Thanks for having me, guys.
David Nir:
So, like I just said, DASS is probably not as well known as some of its counterpart organizations in the Democratic landscape groups like the DSCC or the DCCC. So, I would love it if you could give our listeners an overview of what DASS' mission is, how it came to be, and also, how you came to manage the organization.
Kim Rogers:
Yeah. Well, I think you kind of nailed it. It's fairly straightforward. We elect and protect Democratic secretaries of state. And we're the only organization that has that as our sole mission. I think in the past few years, this historically sleepy role has really been thrust into the spotlight, which is part of the reason how I came to come here. I think like a lot of folks in this business, I was horrified by the lies that former president was spreading that lead up to the 2020 elections, and the attack on our Capitol on January 6th was unlike anything I'd seen in my 20-plus years doing this work.
Basically, the other side was telling us they'd stop at nothing to change the election results. And I knew that we had to protect the folks that run our elections. So, DASS was a natural fit. With 27 races on the ballot in 2022, including several battlegrounds, I knew we had a work cut out for us. And who doesn't love a challenge, especially involving an existential threat to our democracy?
David Nir:
Got to love those existential threats.
Kim Rogers:
I feel like I'm back in college talking about philosophies.
David Nir:
It really does have that gravity in all seriousness. So one thing that we'd love to do on this show is we'd love to get deep into the weeds. And for the sake of everyone listening, we would love to hear about the details of exactly what DASS does, from really soup to nuts, from the very, very start of an election cycle right up until November. How are you working with campaigns? How are you helping them to win? How are you pushing back against GOP lies? What are you doing on the money front? Sort of every last aspect of this, we would love to have you lay it out for us.
Kim Rogers:
Wow, that is a very big question and so much. We're really lucky to have a great group of secretaries who were running as incumbents in 2022 and an incredible caliber of candidates that we're running. But honestly... so I'm the first full-time staffer that DASS has ever had. It's always been kind of part-time staff historically. And then, in reaction to 2020, when Secretary Griswold became chair she really wanted to build it out because we knew what the threat was like. And one of my first orders of business was to help people understand the role that secretaries of state played. So we spent a lot of time talking to folks about secretaries of state, who they are, what the role is, how they do it. From there, we got to recruit some candidates. We got to do a lot of candidate trainings. A lot of folks, this is their first time running statewide. These are small races with small staffs, so we wanted to make sure that we could provide support to those folks, and frankly, we needed to build paths to victory in each state. So it involved doing a lot of polling. We did a ton of opposition research on some of the bad actors in the field, and as you can imagine, some of the folks running gave us a lot of material to work with as we were doing that.
David Nir:
Oh, yeah.
Kim Rogers:
We built out a small-dollar fundraising program, which was crucial to getting the word out, talking to voters, but also we were incredibly impressed at how donors at every level stepped up because of the threats to our democracy. And we had a fairly simple plan when it came down to it. We knew that we had to focus, there were 27 races in 2022, but we wanted to make sure we kept our map narrow so we really could drill down on the states where we knew there would be close elections, with an active threat to democracy; Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, Minnesota, and we would build a path to victory.
We wanted to make sure that we had the time to introduce our candidates. At this level of the ballot, even our incumbents don't have the name recognition of senators or governors. And we were able to roll out incredibly diverse candidates, compelling personal stories, and frankly, a record of competence. Which was an amazing contrast to the chaos that the other side was spewing with the conspiracy theories in re-litigating 2020.
And then I think we had a real opportunity to separate ourselves from the top of the ticket. Secretaries of State weren't caught up in inflation or gas prices. We got to focus on free and fair elections, and that gave us a little bit of room to appeal to those pro-democracy Republicans and Independents, which I think particularly in the cycle we thought we would have in 2022, a tough midterm, was really key.
And then these races have historically been fairly inexpensive. For perspective, in 2018, Secretary Benson won Michigan with about $2.5 million. We knew it was going to be more than that, but we also knew that with the right resources we could win these races because we'd have the ability to communicate. And so we had that early goal of being on air before people started voting and talking to folks, both digitally on TV and via mail, before people were voting, so we could really define our opponents and introduce our candidates.
David Nir:
You mentioned that figure in Michigan from four years ago. Where did things wind up this year by comparison, this most recent cycle?
Kim Rogers:
Well, Secretary Benson is a killer fundraiser, so she raised almost $5 million and between different outside expenditures, including our DAs, backed, i.e. Safe, EMILY's List, ECU, and I Vote, there was probably an additional $5 million spent on the Secretary of State race on the Dem side.
David Beard:
Wow. I want to drill down on a couple of specific races where there were open seats in these really, really competitive western states. Arizona and Nevada, both of which had open seat races and both which had some really good democratic candidates; Adrian Fontes in Arizona and Cisco Aguilar in Nevada against some real crazies on the Republican side.
So talk about how those races went out. There was a ton of money being spent higher up the ballot, so that was obviously something that their candidates had to work around to get their name out there. But both of those candidates really performed really well, and particularly Nevada almost surpassed the expectations with how much better they ran than the top of the ticket.
Kim Rogers:
Yeah, it was a great year for democracy and the electoral system overall, but I think one of the biggest takeaways is how much candidates matter. I think one of the things we had, particularly in Arizona and Nevada as well as Michigan and Minnesota and Colorado where we had some incumbents, is again that contrast of competence versus chaos in most of our races.
And really it turns out if your platform is running on the fact that voters shouldn't decide elections, I think it's really hard for voters to get behind that. Most voters care deeply about democracy and understand that it's foundational into everything else we care about. And I think both Cisco and Adrian were able to connect democracy to all of our other fundamental rights that were being attacked right now.
Look, representation matters. These are both the first Latino secretaries of state in their respective states. These are guys that could connect to voters, connect democracy, and they were exciting and brought people out.
And then we did a lot of work, your words, not mine, "these crazies,” but these folks who were spreading these conspiracy theories. We were able to use their own words against them, their own actions against them. And we didn't have to tell voters that they were extremists because they told voters they were extremists in their words. When Jim Marchant promised that if he were elected Secretary of State, Donald Trump would be reinstated as President. When Mark Finchem was at the Capitol on January 6th, then a member of the Oath Keepers, using those connections. Voters are smart. They were able to connect the dots as long as we gave them the information and made sure it got out there.
David Nir:
I was going to ask, what was the most bonkers election denier lie that you heard in 2022? But I don't know, the one you just mentioned from Nevada, that's pretty high up there.
Kim Rogers:
I think there's that. Kristina Karamo, Mark Finchem and Jim Marchant have all yet to concede their elections. I do think that the most out there statement may not necessarily be about the election, but Kristina Karamo did say that demonic possession was real and it's sexually transmitted.
David Nir:
And she's now chair of the Michigan Republican Party. She was just elected.
Kim Rogers:
Mazel tov.
David Beard:
Crazy how in her mind, she's going to be Secretary of State as soon as the secrets come out there. But she's in the meantime, I guess, going to be the chair of the party.
Kim Rogers:
Yeah. It is very hard to take serious sometimes the things that they say when they are so outlandish, yet these folks are a hundred percent bought into what they're saying.
David Nir:
Yeah.
Kim Rogers:
And that was a big part of our job is just getting out what they were saying to people because they weren't communicating in traditional ways. When you don't believe in voters, when you don't believe in mainstream media, you communicate in different places. So they were communicating on Steve Bannon's War Room, on Rumble. They were communicating inside the Truth Social network and only to their folks. So they were riling up their base, getting people fired up, but not communicating to the broader population of voters, because they didn't believe in media and they didn't believe that voters should decide elections. And they made that really clear in their statements that were out there.
David Beard:
Now, we talked in Citizens United a few weeks ago, and obviously they did a lot of work on democracy in 2022. And one of the things we talked with them about was the cynical nature of Washington, D.C., and particularly before the 2022 election, a lot of poo-pooing the idea that voters were going to prioritize democracy as an issue they cared about, and were going to go out and actually vote based on these types of issues.
Did you find any of those obstacles when you were advocating on behalf of these candidates, either in D.C. or out in the states where you either struggled to convince folks to really take this seriously or had people sort of doubting the importance of these races? And it probably felt good, obviously in 2022, when all your candidates won on the back of this.
Kim Rogers:
Winning is so much better than losing. And I can say that as someone who's worked in democratic politics for more than 20 years. I think in order to do this work, you have to have a little bit of optimism. And for me, telling people that they matter and their voice matters is actually a pretty important part of mobilization and turnout. Our opponents were literally running on that opposite message, that they didn't matter and that they wanted to pick and choose winners.
When you and I say democracy, we have ideas of what that means. And I don't know that every single person in America has the same definition of what democracy means to them, but they do understand representation, and being heard and feeling empowered to have folks who represent them. And that is what we did by communicating to them what the stakes were in these elections, what these extreme Republicans were saying about who should be able to vote in elections. I think people heard that and felt that and understood, all the other attacks that they were feeling, whether it was access to abortion, economic security, student debt relief, that all fundamentally comes down to whether or not they're represented.
David Nir:
You mentioned something interesting earlier that at this level of the ballot, the kinds of attacks leveled against Democrats in other races were pretty much absent, whether it was inflation or BS attacks on crime. What kind of attacks did you see? Because it's so easy to imagine what the attacks on these extremist elections deniers are. But how do you go after a good, solid, normal Democrat running for Secretary of State?
Kim Rogers:
It's funny because in a lot of our research, some of the biggest attacks were just tying them to partisanship. Honestly, the Republicans attack were, "they didn't administer fair elections and that's why Trump didn't win," which is not an attack that worked.
David Nir:
Yeah. That's not something that's really going to rope in people who exist outside of the Fox News cinematic universe.
Kim Rogers:
Thankfully.
David Beard:
Well, I guess if you believe that Trump won, then in theory you just have to convince all those imaginary people who voted for Trump to vote again in 2022, and then you'll imaginary win again, which is what happened. So it was very consistent.
David Nir:
I think we'll go nuts if we try to get too deep into the minds of these folks, but-
Kim Rogers:
I was like, "I'm going to need another drink if we're going to go down that."
David Nir:
I didn't realize we were already starting, but it is after five o'clock. So on a serious note though, these secretaries of state have bully pulpits really to fight back against the kinds of misinformation that are so rampant and that we saw really in extreme form heading into 2022. So I'm really curious to know what some of these secretaries have done, the steps that they have taken, both before the election and after the election, to combat these lies and these false claims of fraud and these attempts to undermine our voting system that are totally baseless.
Kim Rogers:
Totally baseless, and still so prevalent. Even earlier this year, two years after the election, going into... You saw a guy in New Mexico shooting up people's homes and offices because of these lies. You still see people like Wendy Rogers in Arizona pushing ridiculous restrictions on voting, based all around fraudulent claims, that as more and more comes out. You keep seeing at every point they realized it wasn't true, whether it's the AG's report from Arizona, whether it's Trump's own campaign, who paid for analysis to find out it was false.
But our secretaries who were elected prior to 2020, particularly the folks that came on in 2018, these folks were really at the forefront of the fight, personally being named and called out and attacked by Donald Trump, like Secretary Griswold and Secretary Benson, and they were on the receiving end of violent threats because of it. Secretary Hobbs in Arizona, Secretary Toulouse Oliver in New Mexico, that did not keep these women from going on air, from talking directly to voters and serving as trusted messengers in the media. They put their own security at risk to ensure that the truth got out there. Their offices created content to correct the record. And since then, they have championed legislation to keep voting safe, secure, accessible, while also prioritizing protecting election workers.
These threats weren't just at secretaries of state, they were at county clerks and they were at the folks who volunteer to work the polls. I mean, even at the height of the threats against them, they didn't back down and they have continued to fight to stop this misinformation. And as we turn into another presidential election with Trump on the ballot, with Kari Lake parading around Iowa saying that election denial needs to be the focal point of the caucuses, they're going to be more important than ever at explaining to folks how our elections work, what the checks and balances that already exist are, and why we can trust our elections.
David Nir:
You mentioned a number of prominent secretaries in battleground states by name, and a lot of them are women. And I'm wondering if you think that there is also an undercurrent of sexism in some of this barrage of attacks that they have faced in their capacity as secretaries of state?
Kim Rogers:
Yes. I mean, it's flippant to say that, but of course you have seen that they are women, they're younger than your average elected. I will say that men have also faced attacks, but I think the tenor and some of the language used in these attacks is particularly misogynistic, sexual in nature and very much directed towards women.
David Beard:
And I think we saw that, I think most clearly, it was happening many places, but in Michigan, obviously, where Governor Whitmer, the Attorney General and the Secretary of State were all women and you saw a lot of that get wrapped up into a whole very sexist take from a lot of the far right [inaudible].
Kim Rogers:
Those women from Michigan?
David Beard:
Yeah. Yeah.
David Nir:
Yeah. Well, they certainly got the last laugh. And I want to move things in a slightly more positive direction to ask about the work that these secretaries have done to actually expand voting rights. Because these are powerful offices and they have great abilities to do very many things to make voting easier and to expand our franchise. So I'd love for you to share some details on what's been happening in some of these states.
Kim Rogers:
Not only are these women refusing to back down, their badassery continues into what they continue to fight for. And it started in the lead up to 2020. Again, we're talking how sleepy this position has been historically, but in the midst of a pandemic with Donald Trump spreading misinformation, attacking them personally, these secretaries ensured that through the whole thing voting was safe, secure, and accessible. And in Michigan, Jocelyn Benson sent vote by mail applications to every voter in Michigan. In Colorado, Jena Griswold increased drop boxes and early vote centers, the way that automatic voter registration and vote by mail happened in Arizona. These secretaries used their power to protect access to ballot even in places with Republican legislatures.
And I think since then, this work has continued. Even this cycle, now there's a trifecta in Michigan. Secretary Benson is advocating for a $50 million anti-misinformation campaign, as well as to do some of the implementations of Proposal 2 that codifies the early voting, permanent absentee ballot list, as well as the Michigan Voting Rights Act. In Minnesota there is an omnibus pro-voter bill that includes everything from automatic voter registration, re-enfranchisement, pre-registration for 16 to 17 year olds and protections for election workers. In Arizona, Secretary Fontes is already working across party lines to combat misinformation and bring some civility back. In Nevada, Cisco Aguilar's first piece of legislation would make it a felony to harass or intimidate election workers and is upgrading the voter registration system. There's also an omnibus bill in New Mexico that Maggie Toulouse Oliver is doing. AVR, rights restoration, voluntary permanent absentee voter. So many places, Oregon, Maine, Connecticut is bringing early voting back. It has been amazing to see all of the work and all of the relentlessness with which they have continued to fight to expand access while keeping our elections secure.
David Beard:
And I know it's only February of an odd numbered year, but of course the next cycle has already gotten started. So I just wanted to see what are the races DASS is looking to focus on as we move into the 2023, 2024 cycle? Not as many states obviously have secretary of state elections in a presidential cycle, but there are still a couple.
Kim Rogers:
Democracy doesn't sleep, David. It is a smaller rap in '23 and '24 as far as races go. I think I mentioned earlier that we had 27 races on the ballot in '22. In '23, we have Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi. In '24, we've got to hold North Carolina, Oregon, Washington, and Vermont, and then look at our opportunities to pick up in Missouri, Montana, and West Virginia.
I keep talking about how much candidates matter, but our candidates tend to be younger and more representative of a broader demographic. And I think that kind of real impact helping the top of the ticket too, especially in some of these states that will have incredibly close senate or governor's races. I know we've touched on this a bit, but as we move into the presidential, we fully expect that the misinformation noise machine to ramp up. We already got to talk about Kristina Karamo being elected to the Republican State Party chair in Michigan, but she is not alone in that. And I think more election deniers will also be happening in the presidential races. Our secretaries are uniquely positioned to kind of push back and explain how elections actually work, all the checks and balances built into the system. We've got the election experts and we're going to deploy them to continue the fight. And I think that is also a role that is uniquely situated for DASS as we go into 2024.
David Nir:
Well, I am excited to see what this cycle holds. I will say that last cycle, Daily Kos endorsed a number of candidates for Secretary of State and that proved to be just about our most popular slate of endorsements the entire cycle. And we know this because we ask for our readers to donate to all the candidates we endorse, and they came through in a big way for secretary of state candidates, which I think is awesome because, like you were saying, these are folks who just don't have the name recognition that most other candidates for statewide office do, and so they need the help the most. But also these races, like you also said, the budgets are always going to be smaller than for a governor's race or a Senate race. And so if you're a small dollar grassroots donor, you really get tremendous bang for the buck by giving to these kinds of races.
Kim Rogers:
I mean, it's huge. Because we start out with such a lower name ID, the impact you can make with a contribution to a Secretary of State race is just so huge because we actually get to watch the needle move because these folks are undefined. And we really saw that.
And I think one of the reasons we were so successful, and one of the reasons we outperformed the top of the ticket in some of these states is because again, we started communicating before voters voted. We defined our opponents, we introduced our candidates, and we saw kind of that line go up as more and more people started to understand the stakes of the election and how stark the contrast was between the candidates. And by one of our trackers in late October, you could really see the difference of the favorabilities and we had solidified a positive affinity with a lot of our candidates and just defined our opponents as the election deniers they were. And when you ask people what the associations were of our opponents, they lumped them in with Trump, they lumped them in with the extreme, they lumped them in with election deniers, not trusting voters. And that was kind of the moment where it kind of clicked for me and was it like, "I think that we may actually be able to do this."
David Nir:
That's amazing. So how can our listeners learn more about DASS and get involved in your work?
Kim Rogers:
We'd invite everybody to follow us. We are @DemsOfState on every single social media outlet, and our website is also demsofstate.org. Please sign up and hear from us. And we are rebuilding, it took a lot of resources in 2022. We spent it all down because we wanted to make sure we saved democracy. It worked. But feel free to log on to demsofstate.org, and hit that donate button and help us rebuild so we can ensure that fight continues through 2024.
David Nir:
Kim Rogers, executive director of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, thank you so much for spending time with us.
Kim Rogers:
Thanks for having me, guys. And honestly, thanks for supporting all the secretaries of state. And to everyone listening who gave to any of the candidates, a huge thank you because democracy is a team sport and we couldn't have done this alone.
David Nir:
I love that, democracy is a team sport. Thanks again.
Kim Rogers:
All right, take good care.
David Beard:
That's all from us this week. Thanks to Kim Rogers for joining us. The Downballot comes out every Thursday everywhere you listen to podcasts. You can reach out to us by emailing thedownballot@dailykos.com. If you haven't already, please subscribe to The Downballot on Apple Podcast and leave us a five-star rating and review. Thanks to our producer, Cara Zelaya and editor, Trever Jones. We'll be back next week with a new episode.