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. The best way to make sure you never miss an episode is to subscribe to The Downballot on Apple Podcasts and leave us a five-star rating and review.
David Beard:
What are we going to be covering on this week's episode, Nir?
David Nir:
We are going to be discussing a new effort to get an amendment on the ballot in Ohio that would protect abortion rights. We are also going to discuss the unbelievable lack of spending from the conservative candidate in the April 4 election for the Wisconsin Supreme Court. We're also going to take a dive into another election taking place later this year—that is the race for Louisiana governor—and we are also going to talk about a new dataset that Daily Kos Elections has released that you will love to play around with. After the break, we are going to talk with Jane Hughes and Joshua Karp, who are the founders of a new democratic firm called Liftoff Campaigns that is aimed at making the fundraising experience both for campaigns and donors on the Democratic side a much improved one. We have a lot to discuss. So let's get to it. We'll start off this week with some big news on the abortion front in the Midwest. Beard, what have we got?
David Beard:
Yeah. Off the back of six victories for abortion rights in various states in 2022, we've got another state that's going to tackle, hopefully, abortion rights by trying to get an initiative on the ballot. That's Ohio, where earlier this week election officials gave a group the go-ahead to start collecting signatures to put a proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot that would protect abortion rights through what's termed fetal viability, which is essentially the Roe standard of usually around the 23rd or 24th week for the state of Ohio. Now, this is going to be a tough lift because they need 413,000 ballot signatures. That's 10% of the votes cast in the last governor's race, and they have to collect that by July 5. Now, that's a lot of signatures, but of course there're some big cities in Ohio—Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus—of course. But the problem is they have to collect a significant number of these signatures from half of the state's 88 counties, which is tough again because so many of the Democratic-leaning voters, progressive voters, are in those big cities.
So they have to go to these smaller counties where Trump won in many cases, big landslides, and they have to get enough signatures to reach 5% of the gubernatorial turnout from the last cycle in half of these counties in Ohio in order for this to make the ballot. So there're a lot of different levels that you have to reach to make sure this amendment is eligible for the ballot this November.
And the reason why they want to make sure and get this on the ballot for this November is because the GOP is working on an amendment for this November to increase the percentage of the vote that an amendment would have to get to pass. They want to make it so that an amendment would need 60% of votes cast to be enacted, whereas right now it's just 50% plus one. So obviously if that happens and the abortion rights amendment doesn't get on the ballot this November and has to wait until 2024 or something, that's going to make it that much tougher to be able to pass it.
And what's probably going to happen, if this doesn't get put on the ballot and passed, is a law that would restrict abortion to just the first six weeks of pregnancy, which has already been put on the books in Ohio and is on hold by a court. There's a very good chance that that would go into effect because the state Supreme Court is going to rule on this six-week law that's currently on hold. And there's a very good chance they're going to let it go forward as the new Ohio state Supreme Court has turned more conservative as a more moderate-leaning conservative retired and was replaced with a more conservative justice as that fourth conservative vote. So if this amendment doesn't make the ballot this November and doesn't get passed, there's a good chance abortion rights in Ohio could be very, very restricted soon.
David Nir:
And in fact, anti-abortion groups are trying to kill this initiative off before it even has a chance of qualifying for the ballot. Already this week they started spending $5 million on an ad campaign trying to attack this amendment, and the ads are, of course, total crap. They're the usual fearmongering, basically saying, "Your daughters are being pushed to have sex changes, and if this passes, then you won't even be able to talk with them about it."
Total nonsense. The amendment doesn't say anything at all about gender-affirming care whatsoever. It simply refers to reproductive health decisions and would not in any way impact parental consent and notification laws, but they're hoping that by preventing organizers from getting those signatures by that July 5 deadline that they'll completely have to avoid fighting it on the ballot in November. And Beard, like you were saying, the pro-abortion side had so much success last year that even in a red state like Ohio, conservatives should be pretty worried about this passing if it does in fact make the ballot.
David Beard:
And this advertising push really reeks of fear to me because it seems like a bit of a long shot to actually be effective because all of this signature-gathering is done in person, and people often have a chance to explain. And as you know, a lot of people who are maybe up in the air about a ballot initiative will sign something anyway, because it just gives it a chance to get on the ballot. So the idea that someone's going to remember an ad that they saw like a week ago and be like, "Oh, wait, I'm not going to sign this anymore because I saw something on Wheel of Fortune that I barely remember" seems pretty unlikely to me. I think the logistical hurdles that we went through are a lot more likely to stop this than this crazy ad campaign they're trying to pitch.
David Nir:
One thing I also want to note—we talked about this last week with Stephen Wolf on the show—but these measures to make ballot initiatives harder to pass, like increasing the vote needed from 50% to 60%, have generally been very unpopular, and they have to go before voters. So voters will have a chance in November regardless of what the GOP does to try to stop this measure, and there's a strong chance that they will.
David Beard:
Yeah, voters like the idea of democracy. They like the idea of being able to vote on something and have the majority of the population decide who wins. And these sorts of ballot measures haven't done well historically, so I wouldn't be surprised to see it pushed back against by Democratic groups and ultimately defeated.
David Nir:
So it's almost time for the start of baseball season. And you know how early on in the season, like after one or two games, player statistics can be just totally out of whack because of a small sample size?
David Beard:
Sure, sure. That's why they play so many games.
David Nir:
There's always a situation that amuses me deeply, and it's when a reliever in his first game of the season has a miserable outing. He fails to record a single out while giving up a whole bunch of runs. And so his earned run average is literally listed as infinity because it's a divide by zero error. Well, we have the exact same divide by zero problem in something of much, much greater consequence, and that is the Wisconsin Supreme Court race.
We are now more than halfway through the six-week general election campaign. Here is how much progressive Judge Janet Protasiewicz has spent on TV ads so far: She has spent $9.1 million. How much has conservative Dan Kelly, former state Supreme Court justice spent? His campaign has spent zero. Zero bucks. So the ratio by which his campaign is getting outspent by the Protasiewicz campaign is infinity, and I just absolutely cannot believe that that's where we are with less than three weeks left in the game.
Now, outside conservative groups have spent several million dollars to help Kelly. Some progressive groups have spent to help Protasiewicz, except the difference in the number of ads that Protasiewicz and her allies have been able to run is enormous. According to a new report that just came out on Wednesday by The New York Times' Reid Epstein, Protasiewicz has aired more than three times as many ads as her opponents.
This is something we've talked about before on the show plenty of times, and why donations to campaigns are so much more effective than donations to third-party groups: because campaigns get much more favorable advertising rates than outside groups. In fact, Protasiewicz is paying maybe one-third as much as these outside groups according to Epstein's report. Now, Dan Kelly said, "I'm told the cavalry is on the way, but man, that is starting to look like the charge of the Light Brigade." There is almost no time left. It really feels like loser speak. I mean, what are they doing? Have they just kind of given up on this race?
David Beard:
Yeah, it's been very strange, but I do expect Dan Kelly to say any day now that the only poll that matters is Election Day. So given that's where we are in the race, it's pretty bad. I think obviously they didn't get the candidate they wanted out of the primary on the conservative side. Our candidate has just been a stellar fundraiser and I think ran a really, really good campaign. And then you do get into a situation where maybe conservative groups don't want to throw good money in after bad. So I don't know. You never know. Obviously, there could always be a billionaire who's like, "Hey, I'll cut a check for $10 million to run every single ad in the state of Wisconsin for two weeks." So you don't want to count any chickens before they're hatched, but it does feel like we're in a good shape.
David Nir:
That's one other thing: We haven't seen any polls of this race except we do know that progressives are starting off in a much better position than conservatives, because as we've mentioned on the show before that in the primary, 54% of the vote went to the two progressive candidates and just 46% to the two conservative candidates. And as Nathaniel Rakich at FiveThirtyEight recently wrote, in four of the last five races for the State Supreme Court in Wisconsin, progressives have actually done better in the general election than in the primary. So conservatives are already starting off in an 8-point hole. Look, I don't want to get cocky about this. I mean, we're Democrats, we are always going to worry, but at this point, you would much rather be Protasiewicz than Kelly.
David Beard:
Yeah, absolutely. Now, I want to take us from the election that's happening very, very soon to an election that's going to happen very much at the end of 2023, and that's the Louisiana governor's race. Now, of course, Louisiana has to do things a little bit differently, as they like to do. They have an all-party primary for the governor's race on October 14, and then the top-two candidates, assuming no one gets a majority, will go to a general election on November 18 after the regular general election happens, obviously the first Tuesday in November.
Now big conservative donors have been desperately searching for an alternative to Attorney General Jeff Landry who's in the race. He's got a reputation as a bully and just a real right-wing nut job. He's been focused on banning library books, all things like that, but they haven't really been impressed by any of the other Republicans running, so there've been donors. That's the talk, is that donors have been looking for somebody else.
Well, they think they finally got that person as Stephen Waguespack, who just stepped down as the head of Louisiana's Chamber of Commerce, has announced that he's going to run. He has never held office before, so he is probably pretty unknown outside of political circles, but he's very well known inside those conservative political circles. He helped successfully oppose Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards' drive to increase the minimum wage from $7.25, which it's been at since 2008. So he's very conservative, obviously in doing terrible work like that, but he doesn't have Landry's far-right crazy image.
One issue for Waguespack is that he served as chief of staff during Bobby Jindal's tenure, which was disastrous. Jindal left as one of the most unpopular governors in the country, did an absolutely terrible job, and helped lead to Gov. Edwards taking the governor's mansion for Democrats.
And so these donors have obviously helped recruit Waguespack into the race, but there's talk that they're still so afraid of retribution from Landry because Landry is still probably seen as the favorite, that they might be funding a dark money group to put all their money into so it's not associated with their names, to help fund Waguespack and hopefully, improve his chances without getting on the bad side of Landry. So we'll have to see how that develops as this race takes shape over the summer and into the fall.
Now on the Democratic side, there's one prominent candidate, former state Transportation Secretary Shawn Wilson. He's likely to be sort of the standard-bearer that Democrats rally around. And so he is expected to make it through that first round on October 14 and be joined either by Landry, or if the anti-Landry forces can really get their act together for Waguespack or somebody else, maybe somebody else sneaks through. But if I had to bet, I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up being Democrat Wilson versus crazy Republican Landry for that November 18 general election.
David Nir:
And that obviously is going to be an extremely hard seat to hold. But you got to like Wilson's chances better against Landry than against Waguespack. That's pretty much the model that John Bel Edwards filed, particularly in 2015, when he wound up running against David Vitter, who was despised by many Republicans and wound up winning over the votes of lots of actual Republican voters, who didn't want anything to do with Vitter.
David Beard:
Obviously in Louisiana, if you can just get people who vote for Republicans, generally, to be okay with you, you are going to win the election. And that's something that's probably going to be true for a candidate like Waguespack. So Democrats probably need Landry to advance to the general to have any sort of shot, and even then you'd still be an underdog.
David Nir:
So lastly, I want to talk about a new data release from Daily Kos Elections. This is one of my absolute favorite datasets. It was compiled by our contributor, David Jarman, and we will drop a link into the show notes. We will also pin it to the top of our Twitter profile, @DKElections. And this dataset shows exactly how every single county in the country overlaps with every congressional district. How every congressional district overlaps with every legislative district and even more down the line. Basically, every combination you can imagine between districts and counties, we show you exactly how many people live in every overlapping segment.
And I'm going to giveyou a specific example, one that Jarman walks us through in his post explaining this. I should note that we've released this data before, but now this new dataset is updated to reflect all of the new maps that were created as a result of the most recent round of redistricting. And what I love about this dataset, it gives you a really rigorous way of analyzing who potential candidates are. Now, of course, not every candidate for office is someone who already holds office, but many of the top contenders always are. And the example that Jarman uses is particularly apt.
We're going to talk about George Santos because the odds that George Santos actually makes it to a full term in Congress are pretty darn low. And that means the odds of a special election to fill a vacancy are pretty high. So if we take a look at New York's 3rd District, it's generally described as being a seat that's on Long Island, but part of it is actually in New York City. Our data lets us know exactly the proportion between those two areas. So we know that 76% of the district lives in Nassau County and 24% live in Queens.
And what that tells you right off the bat is that any current county elected official in Nassau probably starts with a leg up, especially over anyone from Queens. And in fact, a few Nassau officials have been mentioned as possible candidates for a special election, or if somehow Santos hangs on to run in 2024, he's claimed he's not going to run again. But then he just recently filed paperwork to allow him to continue fundraising for a future campaign. So who knows? Obviously you can't trust anything that that guy says.
But our data lets us go even deeper, and this is just awesome. So we not only know how counties are split up across New York's 3rd District, but we can know how state senate districts are split up across the 3rd Congressional District. And state legislatures are often the farm team for Congress. Many members of Congress previously served in their respective state legislatures. And we know that in this particular case, there's one state Senate district that overlaps with the 3rd Congressional District more than any other, and that is the 7th state Senate district. Forty-two percent of the congressional district is already represented by the Republican senator, who represents the 7th Senate District. That's Jack Martins. And guess what? He's also been mentioned as a possible contender. Now, he's claimed that he's not necessarily interested in running for Congress. We'll see if that's true or not.
But let's say he were to run and let's say he were to win. Obviously, we certainly hope that Democrats wind up flipping this seat back, but it's possible Martins could run and if he does run, he definitely could win. Our data—let's just go even a step further because there would then be a special election for his district in the state Senate. And so we know that 42% of his district is already represented by a Democratic assemblywoman named Gina Sillitti. So that would give her an obvious advantage if she were to run in what's known as special election musical chairs. The special elections that get set off when someone like a Jack Martins winds up running for a higher office.
Anyway, you can spend hours with this data. It is all in very clear, easily accessible spreadsheets. And again, look for the link on our Twitter account or in the show notes. It is a lot of fun to look through and answers a lot of arguments in a very clear and rigorous mathematical, quantitative way.
David Beard:
Like you said, there's just so much you can do with it. So if you get an opportunity, I encourage everyone to check it out.
David Nir:
Well, that does it for our weekly hits. Coming up, we are going to be talking with two co-founders of a new Democratic firm that is hoping to break down the silo between communications and digital fundraising, and to make the fundraising experience better, both for campaigns and for donors. So stick with us. We are going to have a great conversation coming right at you.
Welcome back. On today's episode of The Downballot, we are going to be talking about an issue that people feel really passionate about, and that is: Why does so much Democratic fundraising seem to suck? Why do you get so many annoying emails? Why do you get texts that you haven't signed up for and is there anything we can do about it?
Well, we are going to be talking with two veteran Democratic consultants who think there is an answer. Joshua Karp and Jane Hughes are co-founders of Liftoff Campaigns, a new digital and communications firm that is committed to improving how Democrats communicate online. Joshua and Jane, thank you so much for joining us today.
Joshua:
Thanks for having us.
Jane:
Yeah, thanks for having us.
David Nir:
So tell us about Liftoff Campaigns, how it came to be, Joshua, and how you hope to separate it from the myriad other Democratic firms that are out there, perhaps doing similar work?
Joshua:
Of course. So Liftoff Campaigns is the first Democratic consulting firm that combines digital fundraising with political communication strategy. And these are two disciplines that traditionally have actually been siloed off from each other. Campaigns will have communication staff and messaging experts on the consulting team, and then they'll have digital fundraisers, who are expected to—maybe those folks are shown the press releases after they're out the door, but they're never included in the core messaging strategy of a campaign.
And we want to break those silos down because today in 2023, when you're communicating online, you're communicating to an audience of people that is nationwide. And we believe that at Liftoff, we're going to try to scoop up as much of that audience as possible on behalf of campaigns, build bigger winning campaigns that are more inclusive of that online audience.
Jane:
I think to add to it, it's something that we think about a lot, or a refrain I come back to pretty often, is that people are people; they're not just data points. And I think that this approach really takes that to heart and says, hey, the same person who's donating to your email is also the person who is reading the newspaper, or the same person who is watching the nightly news. And we want to make sure that we treat them that way. That we treat them as a whole person, and that we're addressing that in our fundraising strategy.
David Beard:
So speaking of how you treat the people who sign up for your email lists, one of the issues that was flagged in the Politico article that announced this new group was your co-founder Zack Carroll saying that email lists shouldn't be treated like piggy banks. And I think that's something that we've seen a lot, ever since email came to the forefront as a way for particularly Democrats to raise money. And then since the Trump era, raise a lot of money, and it's become a really common complaint among people who get all these emails, who feel like they're just constantly looking at requests for money. So how are you looking to actually improve this and make this a better experience for all of these people who do care so much about electing Democrats but don't want to feel this way all the time?
Jane:
Look, there's no doubt about it that email, SMS, all of your online tools are extremely valuable for fundraising. As you pointed out, that's why people use them, and that's why you are seeing an increase in interest in them. I think to address the piece about a piggy bank: Look, something that is really important to us at Liftoff is building relationships with people. Something we like to say a lot too is if we don't have anything to say, then we probably shouldn't be saying it.
And so like Joshua was saying earlier, our goal is to build a relationship with folks, to build a brand, to build trust, really. So that when you have big moments, big events in your campaign or big events for your organization, people are already trusting you. People are already bought in. People already know a little bit about the candidate that they're donating to. They know what gets that candidate out of bed in the morning. They know why they're interested in public service. They know some of the struggles that they faced as a child. They know what their dog's name is. So getting people to a place where they feel like they know the candidate or the cause is extremely important, because it creates familiarity and trust and ultimately it strengthens your bottom line. I think really what it comes down to is the stronger your brand, the stronger your bottom line and vice versa.
Joshua:
And to add on to what Jane was saying, one of our core philosophies is that the email or the text message that you get is at the end of a value chain. It's the hard ask from a candidate at the end of a conversation that begins with that candidate's brand, their bio, the competitiveness of their race, whether there's been any interesting media coverage about that person recently. And unless you're viewing things holistically like that, what you're going to do is you're going to wind up annoying people with an email or a text that seems like it's out of nowhere.
No one is upset if they're a fan of, say, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, to get a new email from Elizabeth Warren. In fact, people probably read them because they really care about her. And what we're doing at Liftoff is we think everyone can build a brand and a loyal following might not be as big as Elizabeth Warren’s, but everyone can build that warm, engaged following of people who are genuinely interested to hear from you.
David Beard:
Now, I want to go back to the point you made about hard asks, because I think that's actually a really good point and something you can compare to traditional fundraising. Because before email exploded and digital fundraising exploded, the main way that candidates raised money was they sat on the phone, and they still do this of course, and they called people who could give large amounts of money and they would ask them for that money. And obviously an important part of that was the hard ask, what you had said, which is saying, "Can you give me X amount of money?"
But a big part of fundraising in that area is also setting up the hard ask, which is not call somebody up and immediately ask them for X amount of money. It's to do that sort of relationship-building and prep work to get to the point where you can make that ask and actually maybe get a yes, which is something I think that has been missing, like you all have said, from a lot of email work where you build that relationship before you make the hard ask as opposed to constantly doing 100 hard asks.
I'm thinking if I just do 100 hard asks, then I'll get a yes as opposed to doing 10 that actually work.
Jane:
I think that's exactly right. Again, people are people, they're not just data points and they're not a piggy bank. They're people that you have to work hard to build a relationship with.
David Beard:
Now, the other big complaint that you hear a lot about in terms of emails and text messages and all of that is the “Democrats are doomed” emails, or all the sort of broad email area, which is basically trying to convey how bad something is going as a way to inspire people to give money or give more money.
Now, obviously, they test well. All campaigns do a lot of testings of these types of messaging, and the reason why we get so many is because people are more likely to give money when you get one of these emails than when you get something more positive or more neutral in terms of its tone. But taking one into hundreds or even thousands over the course of years seems like it would present some real risks to the donor base, which is finite. There's not an infinite number of people donating to Democrats, right?
Jane:
Yeah. So I mean, I think here, look, the doomsday emails, you're right. You see them because it's true that they can work. It is also true that they don't always work. I think the other piece of the conversation that you hear alongside the doomsday emails are the churn and burn, so the people who you haven't really taken the time to cultivate relationships with.
Look, I think as I said, there is a space for them because sometimes it can be true that your fundraising is behind or that your campaign is making budget cuts because you're not quite hitting your projections or an opponent is spending millions of dollars on TV that you have to respond to. Those are all great tactics that you can and should use, and sometimes they do present in a doomsday-type scenario. But the flip side is, as we've kind of said before, those work when people trust you. I think it's the kind of thing that you don't want to deploy all the time. You do it when you have a reason and people will respond to it when they trust you or when they have a reason to.
So again, I think it really boils down to curating trust with your donor base so that when you tell them that you need their $5 or else you might not get this ad on TV or that you need people across the state to give $5 or else you might not be able to respond, it should be true and people should believe you when you say it.
Joshua:
Yeah, I think to piggyback on what Jane is saying, I think what it comes down to really is trust. That's the most important word. And I think that when you are building communities of true believers in a candidate, you have to lead with trust. You can't immediately tell people that the sky is falling when they just met you.
And I think a lot of the time, what is most frustrating about a lot of online fundraising practices is that people don't even know who's sending the email that tells them that the sky is falling. It's just all of a sudden they're getting these emails. And that's never the right approach. Although in the short-term, it can definitely get you some contributions. In the long-term, it doesn't build a base or an audience of people who actually care about your issue or your campaign, so ...
David Nir:
Joshua, you were just talking about the importance of building trust with the people that you're communicating with digitally. And one of the efforts you're currently working on right now is something that we discussed at the top of the show, which is the constitutional amendment in Ohio that is designed to guarantee abortion rights there. Maybe you could talk about your efforts there and how exactly you are working to build that trust in your communications with potential supporters of this effort.
Joshua:
Well, first I should lead with the fact that we're honored to be helping this incredible coalition of reproductive rights advocates who are doing the hard work on the ground in Ohio right now. And the work there is actually going incredibly well. The ballot petitions are being printed as we speak, and the movement there in Ohio is actually going to be collecting signatures for the ballot, maybe as early as this weekend.
They were actually hit with a $5 million ad buy from conservative groups just today trying to stop their momentum because the truth is that when reproductive rights are on the ballot, they win. Abortion rights went, I think, 5-0 last year on the ballot in different states.
Our role in this is really interesting. We're working to build an online audience around supporting this initiative. Jane can speak to this in even more detail than I can, but what's so exciting is that this is the exact place where our unique approach, we think yields really unique work, because this is not an issue where it's a D versus R fight. This is not an issue where people already have a lot of preexisting notions of a particular candidate. This is an issue where being nuanced, building trust with an audience about what you're communicating really matters because the nuances matter here and winning has really high stakes.
Jane:
Yeah, I think to build on that, our role is really critical here for a number of reasons, but one of which is that a ballot initiative is very different for your average voter than voting for a candidate, right? There is a different way of thinking about it. And there's an additional layer here where we know that a lot of people are frankly confused about the status of abortion today, right? Roe v. Wade was overturned last year. In a lot of people's minds that means, "Oh, we can't get abortions anymore. That's fully illegal." But that's not the case. And now that we are looking at this at a state level, there're actually a lot of people in Ohio or any other state where we have to educate about what the status of abortion actually is in the state and what's on the line with the ballot initiative.
So there is a lot of information that we have to share with people, one, but two, we have to share it and then motivate them to get involved, whether that's volunteering, donating, so we can combat the ad buy that Joshua mentioned. So there's a lot to do here. And something that has been nice to see is that getting abortion on the ballot has been, knock on wood, but more successful I think, than any one of us thought. For the average person or any one of us, that's really great news. However, when it comes to email or raising money online, usually what's good for America is bad for fundraising.
We've actually seen though really, really strong results initially here, extremely strong fundraising, lots of people who are very engaged and tuning in really quickly to donate. So we're really excited about where this is going, what growth opportunities lie ahead. And again, to just echo what Joshua said, we're just really honored to be supporting the work that the folks on the ground are doing in Ohio.
David Nir:
Changing gears just a little bit: Joshua, you alluded to this sort of issue earlier when you mentioned Elizabeth Warren. Now, you worked for someone quite recently who is very near and dear to Daily Kos' heart, Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, who of course our community played a huge role in launching. And then of course, in the most astounding of ways, he wound up becoming a member of the United States Senate, which I have to pinch myself every time I actually state that aloud.
But Ossoff, rather like someone like Elizabeth Warren, was almost running a dual track campaign of having this huge national attention focused on him, especially in the runoff, while also having to compete in state to actually win the votes and support of Georgia voters. So I would love to hear more about how the campaign or how any campaign in general really deals with this kind of two-track issue. I mean, it seems to me like it's a great problem to have when your campaign blows up so big that you become a focus of national attention. But it is indeed perhaps an obstacle that campaigns face.
Joshua:
It's an old saying in politics that you never want your campaign to get too nationalized. And what we always have meant by that is that you never want your campaign to be defined by the national media where you're constantly responding to whatever crisis CNN has made up for the day. What you want to be focused on is the bread-and-butter issues that matter to people in your state or your district.
And I think these days, that's a false dichotomy because you have to talk to a national audience of people who are interested in politics to fund your campaign, while at the same time using the support those people give you, both in volunteer—everything from volunteer phone banking, or $2. You have to use that energy and momentum from those supporters out of your district or state in order to communicate a message that's right for the folks back home. And people who understand that have done really well in recent years and campaigns still, not going to name names, that give themselves a lot of unnecessary heartburn by trying to micromanage online energy in a way that I don't think has any practical impact on the ground. You know what Jon Ossoff, who you say you have to pinch yourself—believe me, nothing makes me happier in the world than that Jon Ossoff is in the U.S. Senate. Easily one of the most important things I have ever done with my career, maybe my life, but what I think is so special about that campaign is that even before the runoff, which in many ways was going to be this big, crazy energetic animal no matter what we did about it on the campaign side, just because of how big the stakes were—although I think there were things we did that were important—but before the runoff, one of the things that we understood as really important was that the online audience was something that we could cultivate.
There were a lot of people who were interested in electing someone young to the U.S. Senate, and Jon never shied away from that. He was always enthusiastic about welcoming young people into the campaign and welcoming people who were online to the campaign. I mean, this was a campaign during COVID, and a lot of us I think now that much of the world has moved totally beyond COVID, it's easy to forget that much of that campaign was conducted over Zoom, and we never stopped working to make sure that people were really engaged. And it showed dividends online, but it also showed dividends at the ballot box.
David Beard:
Now, digital communications is, of course, an area that's changing quickly, and we saw campaigns really move really at the speed of light around COVID when they had to move from a primarily interpersonal, television-advertising base campaign to really embrace digital communications in a variety of forms. And we've seen an explosion of that in the past few years, but I don't expect that to slow down at all. So, Jane, do you have any new tools that we might be seeing in campaigns in the next few years that are going to grow in importance?
Jane:
So you're absolutely right that online fundraising is taking up a larger and larger slice of the whole fundraising pie every cycle, and you are also right that that's not changing or going anywhere anytime soon. I think that what you will start to see more of and what our goal really is, is to be smarter about how we do it. For too long, there has been a silo or a divide between your traditional communication strategy and your fundraising strategy, which means that at least on the fundraising side, that, that piece can really suffer. If you plan for both of those things together, it will certainly help grow your fundraising bottom line.
I think the other piece to take here as well is that you're also right that a lot of the growth in online fundraising was probably stimulated and sped up a bit by COVID and by people conducting a lot of their day-to-day life online. And so I think what that has taught everyone too is that those in-person fundraisers, those events, those can actually be accessible to more people and your donor pool can become much larger because you can access so many more people through a screen. And so I think that you will start to see people take those lessons from COVID and not just expand their small-dollar programs online, but also tap into an audience that is willing to give a little bit more online as well.
Joshua:
And just to add on to what Jane was saying, it's an attention economy these days and campaigns have to play inside of that. And one of the things that's so exciting about breaking down these silos that have traditionally existed between communications and digital is that a lot of tools that digital might not have had access to in the past are actually really powerful. Most online news stories these days are just another piece of content that can be used to motivate people to donate or volunteer or take an action. And, likewise, a lot of digital content is of extreme interest to political reporters who may be really interested in covering how campaigns are innovating, how campaigns are expanding and reaching people.
A quick example, when Val Demings, who ran a really incredible campaign for Senate in Florida last year, was featured with a huge glossy photo spread in Vanity Fair on her motorcycle, that story about the way about her life and all the things she's overcome and these amazing photos by Annie Leibovitz in Vanity Fair, that was a shot of energy for the campaign as big as any advertisement. And that's not to say that the reporter wasn't fair or gave us an ad, the reporter was absolutely fair, but that profile story and the quality of those photographs and the virality of Val Demings' candidacy absolutely played a big difference in the race. And I think that by breaking down these silos, I don't know this is a new digital tool necessarily, but I think it's seeing the media ecosystem in a more whole connected way.
Jane:
Maybe it's not a new tool, but I think at some point it's a new line item on your finance plan. It's the my candidate was just on MSNBC for this great moment and said the website, and look at our ActBlue donations now.
Joshua:
And I think what's really important about that is it almost has become a cliche, you go on MSNBC, you say your website, and encourage people to donate. But I think a lot of people don't consider, what's the thing I'm saying when I'm going on national TV? I don't want to say anything risky. I don't want to say anything that's going to upset my voters. That'd be terrible. But at the same time, what can we say that's going to be on message but land with a punch so that it's not just one television hit, but it's the thing that comes next; it's the thing that's going to generate news stories tomorrow and the day after and keep your momentum going and keep people excited?
David Nir:
I'm curious if you have an example of the reverse, because you mentioned that it can go both ways.
Joshua:
We talk a lot about this in terms of the process narrative and what we mean by that is the story of how you're running your campaign. And I think a lot of campaigns do this really well, but even more should be doing this. You should always have a story of why your campaign isn't just right for the voters, but why your campaign is campaigning in the correct way. How are you engaging grassroots supporters? How are you campaigning online? That's really important and it's another way of reaching a broad audience of people who don't just care about the issues, but they want to get to know the texture and the feel of your campaign.
Jane:
I was going to say, I think that maybe I was going to take it somewhere a little bit different, but just to speak a little bit more to the impact or the power that the news or communications can have on fundraising from the opposite side. I think a really good example to point to is when the queen died last year, everyone saw a massive dip in their fundraising, which was really interesting and surprising to me, to be totally honest with you. I thought some folks were using it as an excuse, but it turns out actually this was a real effect that an item in the news cycle had. So I think to just provide a counterbalance to the boost that campaign momentum can have, so too can a negative news story or a distracting news story detract from your ability to raise.
Joshua:
That's such a great point because what I think a lot of campaigns see is that their momentum, their fundraising, the attention they're getting has peaks and valleys, and riding those peaks is really powerful. You can raise a lot of money, you can get a lot of attention, you can connect with a lot of voters. But then you hit those valleys and because communications and digital have so long been kept separate, there's often no plan for what happens when you hit those valleys when it feels like there's no momentum, you're in the doldrums of maybe the middle of the summer, and attention just isn't with you. How do you plan for that? How do you keep the excitement going? How do you keep energy up and interest up in your race? That's really important, and I think that's what we're building.
David Nir:
We have been talking with Joshua Karp and Jane Hughes, the co-founders of Liftoff Campaigns, a new Democratic digital and communications firm that is trying to break down the silos between those two traditional wings of Democratic work and to try to make digital fundraising a better experience for campaigns and donors alike. We want to know before we let you go: Where can folks learn more about Liftoff online and follow your work?
Jane:
You can find us at liftoffcampaigns.com and on Twitter at @LiftoffCrew.
David Nir:
Well, thank you so much for joining us.
Jane:
Thanks so much for having us.
Joshua:
Yeah, thanks for having us.
David Beard:
That's all from us this week. Thanks to Joshua Karp and Jane Hughes for joining us. The Downballot comes out every Thursday everywhere you listen to podcasts. You can reach out to us by emailing the downballot@dailykos.com. If you haven't already, please subscribe to The Downballot on Apple Podcasts and leave us a five-star rating and review. Thanks to our producer, Cara Zelaya, and editor, Trever Jones. We'll be back next week with a new episode.