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Democrats ran great campaigns, actually, with Josh Wolf (transcript) [1]

['Daily Kos Staff', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags']

Date: 2022-12-01  

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

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. Just as a reminder, you can subscribe to The Downballot wherever you listen to podcasts. And please leave us a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

David Beard:

It's been a few weeks; we're starting to come down off these election highs. What are we going to be talking about this week?

David Nir:

Yes. We are still looking back at the 2022 midterms and we want to talk about the turnout between Democrats versus Republicans. We're also going to be talking about the fragile majority that Republicans will have in the House. There is an absolutely wild story out of Arizona where Republicans are refusing to certify elections in a dark red county, and the results could be completely bonkers if they actually stick with it.

And then, we're going to be looking ahead toward an important special election for the Wisconsin State Senate that should be coming up this spring. After that, we are going to be talking with one of my favorite people in Democratic politics, longtime strategist Josh Wolf, of AL Media. He worked very closely on the Arizona Governor's race, which Democrat Katie Hobbs won in spectacular fashion earlier this month. We have a lot to discuss with him and we have a terrific episode in store for you.

David Beard:

Great. Let's get started.

David Nir:

With the midterms starting to recede in the rear view, we are reaching a point where we have more and better data to analyze exactly what happened. And there's been some interesting analysis about turnout. Beard, what did you want to discuss here?

David Beard:

One of the pretty surprising aspects of 2022 was the diversity of results within states and congressional districts. We saw really a Democratic bloodbath in Florida, we saw some pretty bad losses in New York, and we saw some surprisingly good results for Democrats in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, really up and down the ballot. You expect in a typical midterm or any election across the country to be a little bit more straightforward where one party does well or one party does poorly or it's very narrow across the board. And that wasn't really what we got. And so the question there is why did that happen? And there's a few different explanations.

Obviously, campaigns matter a lot, candidates matter a lot. But one factor that we can see now is that there was a big case of differential turnout across the country, among particularly Democrats. And Republicans seem to have turned out good across the board pretty much. And a big difference was in some places Democrats did not turn out very highly and in other places Democrats turned out really, really well. And that definitely made the difference in some places.

Will Jordan, he's a Democratic pollster, put out a tweet that showed turnout by congressional district broken into partisan chunks. Basically, it took all of the congressional districts where Trump won by 40 or more in 2020, and then all of the congressional districts where Trump won by 20 to 40 points, and then five to 20 points, and then five to even for Trump, and then even to five for Biden and so on down for Biden as well. That breaks down the congressional districts into these eight different categories.

And what you can see when you then match that to turnout compared to 2020 is that the highest turnout congressional district was the even-to-Biden-plus-five districts. The highest turnouts were in districts between a tie, and Biden plus five. These are the districts where a lot of congressional incumbent Democrats were facing really tough races; they were the districts where Republicans were going after Democrats and hoping to make a majority and a big majority out of it. And this resulted in the highest turnout, which means that everyone there was voting in really high numbers, including Democrats, which we'll see wasn't always the case.

The second highest chunk among these eight chunks was in the Trump-plus-five to Trump-plus-20 districts. They had nearly as high a turnout as the narrow Biden districts. And these are much more Republican districts, largely not competitive. A few of them would've been somewhat competitive, but by and large, these aren't competitive districts. But they still had really high turnout. And the other heavily Trump districts also had pretty high turnout, not quite as high as those first two chunks I talked about, but still pretty high turnout.

And the lowest turnout among these eight chunks by a considerable margin was the Biden-plus-40-or-more districts. And these are predominantly either college towns or really urban big cities. Those are the places where you get these really heavily pro-Biden districts and they didn't have good turnout. They were probably 10 percentage points lower than the even-to-Biden-plus-five districts, which is a big chunk. And when you add that up in a state where there was a lot of those districts, and you think of a state like New York that has a lot of Biden-plus-40 districts, the crater in turnout in those heavily Democratic districts contributed to why there was such a narrow margin statewide in those states.

Florida has some of those districts as well, and really across the country in places where we had these really heavily-Biden districts, turnout was poor. And as a result, that really affected both some of these congressional districts and the overall margins in some of these races where we saw Florida and New York just really crater for Democrats. Whereas a state like Pennsylvania and a state like Michigan, they had really competitive races. They have a lot of these narrow Biden districts where there was a ton of money poured in, a ton of tough campaigning going on. And those states have really high turnout across the board. And that allowed the persuasion aspects of the election to probably make the difference and allowed Democrats to win.

Obviously, it's never just turnout, but the turnout being high in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania in these narrow Biden districts were key to allowing the persuasion to get us big victories more across the board in those states.

David Nir:

I thought this was a fascinating tweet by Will Jordan, and I'm curious, Beard, for your take on what this might mean for 2024. Because my initial reaction is that, if Republicans are turning out pretty well in their districts and both sides are turning out well in the competitive districts, but Democrats turned out poorly in the bluest districts in a midterm year, I tend to feel that actually might be a very difficult sign for Republicans come 2024 because you would expect higher turnout in those dark blue districts where turnout was weaker this year.

David Beard:

Exactly. And you can look to 2010 and 2012 as a situation where Democratic turnout wasn't that great in 2010 because of Obama's unpopularity and the ACA and stuff like that. And so people thought, "Oh, that's bad news for 2012." But turnout for the incumbent president's party rebounded in 2012 and turnout was again really good when the president was on the ballot.

I think it's fair to expect, in the places where Democratic turnout was bad in 2022, for that to rebound in 2024 with a presidential election with at this point probably Biden on the ballot potentially facing Trump again. That seems like a situation where you would expect Democratic turnout in places that it was bad in these heavily blue districts to rebound. And that can go to the presidential candidates' benefit, that can also go to senate candidates' benefits. If the Wisconsin Senate race, which was lost by a very narrow margin where Milwaukee turnout was not great, had been done under presidential turnout where Milwaukee had turnout closer to 2020, that could have been a race that Democrats won instead of lost.

David Nir:

There is another set of data that we have much greater clarity on now. All but one House race has been called in the country; that lone race is California's 13th district and Republicans are likely to prevail in that contest. But what we now know for certain, based on data calculated by Daily Kos Elections, is that there will be 18 Republicans who will sit in districts that Joe Biden would've won, when the 118th Congress convenes on January 3rd. By contrast, there will only be five Democrats in districts that Trump would have won. And this spells really, really bad things for the GOP majority.

Now, even assuming that Kevin McCarthy can actually cobble together 218 votes to become the next Speaker of the House, he is going to be dependent on quite a large number of members who are in pretty solidly blue districts. And this actually relates to, Beard, what you were talking about just a moment ago about Democrats doing poorly in New York and also in California. As a result, so many of these GOP held House seats are in blue districts.

And what I want to focus on right now is that 218th district, in other words, the district that makes the majority for the GOP, and we can organize every district in the House by its presidential margin in 2020 from bluest to reddest. And the district that is number 218 for Republicans is New York's 17th district. And there's something of a bitter irony here. This is the seat that the chair of the DCCC, Sean Patrick Maloney, lost in very humiliating fashion to Republican Mike Lawler. This district went for Joe Biden by 10 points.

And just to put that in context, I'm going to compare that number, that Biden +10, in seat 218 with seat 218 for the GOP in the last several times that Republicans held the House of Representatives. In 2016, seat 218 was Pennsylvania's 8th district, Donald Trump won that by one-tenth of a percent. In 2014, it was Virginia's 10th. Mitt Romney won that by 1.1%. And in 2012, it was Minnesota's 2nd district and Barack Obama won that by one-tenth of 1%.

All of these districts, in past congresses where Republicans were in charge, were right around dead-even in the presidential vote. And actually compared to the country as a whole, they actually were to the right of the country as a whole. This district is well to the left of the country as a whole. And someone like Mike Lawler is now the guy who Kevin McCarthy is going to be dependent on. And in comments right after he won, Lawler ... he was a Trump delegate to the RNC in 2016, but immediately after the election, he was already telling CNN, "We need to move on from Trump. I'm not interested in doing investigations and witch hunts. We should focus on inflation. Those are the issues that I ran on."

And this guy is in a caucus now with the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the people who are thirsting to impeach Joe Biden, to investigate Hunter Biden's laptop. And this is not a caucus that is going to be stable. Someone is going to blow stuff up. Either it's going to be folks like Mike Lawler who are from these Biden districts, or it's going to be folks like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, or it's going to be both of them.

It's going to be an incredibly precarious majority no matter who is Speaker for the Republicans, assuming a Republican is Speaker of course. And it's going to make Nancy Pelosi look like an absolute genius. She already does in my book, but the next couple of years are going to make her just look better and better.

David Beard:

And I think, given what we've talked about, if you had to pick a favorite for the House in 2024, I think you would probably pick Democrats at this point, given the narrow margin, given the problems, given how Democratic the 218th seat is right now.

One thing that we're going to have to look out for, and we'll definitely be covering on this podcast as the years go ahead, is if states do redistricting in the middle of the decade. And one of the prime states that we have to look at is North Carolina, who unfortunately had their Supreme Court majority flip from Democratic to Republican. The Supreme Court had been the backstop preventing a lot of aggressive Republican gerrymandering from the state legislature. And so it's very possible that that map gets turned into Republican gerrymandering, and that obviously affects those calculations when those seats change. But that's something we'll continue to keep an eye on as events develop in that state and others.

David Nir:

Speaking of districts changing hands, I know it's really, really unlikely, Beard, but I love this story so much, and I know I just said that all but one House race has been called, but there's another House race down in Arizona that maybe could flip somehow. It's totally, totally nuts.

David Beard:

The weirdness here is not in who got more votes because it's very clear that in Arizona 6th District, Republican Juan Ciscomani got more votes than Democrat Kirsten Engel. But one of the counties that makes up the 6th district is Cochise County in southeastern Arizona. And it's a pretty Republican county and it has a three person board of supervisors that runs the county, two of which are Republicans, one Democrat. And those two Republican county supervisors, Peggy Judd and Tom Crosby, are all in on the Big Lie; they are all in on these election conspiracies that have taken root within the GOP. And so they decided not to certify the election results of their very Republican county by the statutory deadline of this past Monday.

David Nir:

This is the entire county. Their votes are not being added to the statewide total.

David Beard:

Yes, there are about 47,000 votes that were cast in the county for the midterm election. And if they are not certified by the supervisors, they do not get counted, which is just an absolutely wild state of play.

Now, all of that said, the most likely outcome here is that they do get counted because these supervisors have already been sued both by a voter and by the Secretary of State — still Katie Hobbs until she takes the governor's office — so that a court will order these supervisors to certify the vote, which they're obligated to do. This is what's termed a ministerial task. It is not something that they're supposed to have a judgment on. It's something that they're obligated to do unless there is a problem. Assuming that everything was done correctly, they're obligated to certify these results. That is part of their job as public officials, and so the most likely outcome is that a court will order them to do so, and I assume that they will, given a court order. But obviously things are still up in the air in that front. If for some reason these 47,000 votes are not certified and are not sent to the Secretary of State's office and the elections are certified without them, two races would change. One of them is the Arizona 6th District that we already talked about. It could also flip the state superintendent's race, which was narrowly won by Republican Tom Horne over Democrat Kathy Hoffman.

So both of those races in theory would flip if these 47,000 mostly Republican votes aren't counted because of the Republican County supervisors’ paranoia about election machines and conspiracy theories. It's really the ultimate case of shooting yourself in the foot to prove an election conspiracy that no one really believes, that there is no evidence of, that doesn't get you anywhere, but you're just going to do it anyway because you believe so much in this conspiracy theory. It's really wild.

David Nir:

I mean, it feels to me these guys are almost like the Japanese soldiers who are hiding out in the Philippine jungle until 1972 — like ‘war’s over, folks.’ No one's buying this crap anymore. I mean, even Kari Lake's claims about stolen elections seem really, really halfhearted. Are they really going to see this to the bitter end? I did see though, that they hired the Cyber Ninjas lawyer and no one is quite sure who's paying him.

David Beard:

Yeah, I'm sure that'll end well. If you recall, the Cyber Ninjas did a whole bunch of stuff in Arizona during their investigation of 2020. Took a lot of money, proved nothing, got sued in court a bunch of times, ran through a bunch of lawyers. So I'm sure this will go really well for them.

David Nir:

Well, it's already gone so fantastically. So we want to wrap up with actually a look forward at an upcoming election. One of the most unfortunate things that happened on election night on November 8th, is that Wisconsin Republicans managed to take a supermajority in the state Senate. The Senate has 33 members. They had 21 going into the night. They flipped a seat. So now they have 22 members. However, that number's about to go back down to 21, because longtime Republican State Senator Alberta Darling just announced her resignation, and that's going to prompt a special election that Democrats have a shot at winning, and if they win, then that would keep Republicans below that supermajority mark.

The reason why that's so important — there's a lot of reasons for it — at the top of the list, is the fact that if Republicans who control the Assembly also with a very large majority, in fact just short of a super majority, if they impeach any state officials and that could include Democratic Governor Tony Evers, then the Senate could remove them from office without a single Democratic vote, and that is a really scary thought. Even just the threat of impeachment could really bollocks up the state government. Evers would be suspended from office temporarily pending a trial.

So even if Republicans don't actually have the votes to convict him and remove him from office, they could really, really screw up state government. So this is a really, really important seat for Democrats to try to win back. This is the 8th District. The special will almost certainly take place under the new district lines, even though Darling was elected under the old map to a four-year term in 2020. Republicans might have sensed that something like this was coming because under the old lines, the district was very evenly split on a presidential level. The new version is 52-47 for Trump. So that definitely means that it leans red. However, it's in an area of suburbs and exurbs north of Milwaukee that has actually been trending toward Democrats fairly sharply in recent years.

So Democrats will definitely go all out to contest this race. It's just that important. It's likely that the election won't happen until April. That is when Wisconsin will conduct what are known as its spring elections. There will be a lot of state and local races on the ballot. The biggest one is going to be for a conservative held seat on the State Supreme Court. If Progressives can flip it, they could actually take a 4-3 majority on that court so we could have the special election for the 8th Senate District on that same day. It is one we will definitely be keeping close tabs on. Also, we will be previewing that Supreme Court race in an upcoming episode too.

That does it for our weekly hits. Coming up, we have Democratic strategist Josh Wolf, who is on the show to talk with us about what he thinks Democrats did well this year and give us some insight into a race he worked very closely on, the Arizona Governor's race, which was a huge, huge win for Democrats. Really fun discussion coming up. So please stay with us.

I am extremely excited to welcome today's guest, Josh Wolf, a longtime Democratic strategist and partner at AL Media who has worked on some of the most interesting races around the country, especially this election cycle. Josh, thanks for being on the show.

Josh Wolf:

Thank you both so much for having me.

David Nir:

So ever since we started the Downballot earlier this year, we have been asking all of our guests about what would probably be a tough year for Democrats. Obviously we were going into a midterm where the White House is controlled by Democrats. That has almost always meant bad results for the party in power, difficult economy and other issues that were nipping at Democrats' heels, and then holy hell, we just had an amazing midterm. I just want to know, what is your take on what the hell just happened?

Josh Wolf:

As always, I think it was a confluence of things. I think first of all, it has to be said, I think a lot of campaigns, a lot of Democratic campaigns, did a really good job. If you live and work in the Democratic world, one thing that you get used to is a lot of critique, and it's fine and it's healthy and it's high-stakes stuff, and we all benefit from and deserve a little bit of scrutiny. But if you are going to work on a campaign or you're going to advise a campaign everywhere you go, people will have opinions about what you do and how you do it and how well you did it and what was great and what was bad. Sometimes that conventional wisdom and even groupthink can be really far off, and sometimes it can be well deserved. But our campaigns largely did a really good job.

They litigated the case. They held Republicans’ feet to the fire. They raised money; they spent it efficiently. This was not obviously a natural wave because the natural dynamics historically would've told you, would've gone against us, as you just said. But I really do think hats-off to the campaign staff, to the candidates, candidates that are taking on bigger risks than they've ever had to in recent American political history. It truly is a big part of what made a difference.

It has to be said that overturning Roe v. Wade was a really big part of this; it didn't manifest in the same way in every race or every region of the country, or with every demographic. But without a doubt this woke up parts of our base. It helped crystallize the stakes in a lot of races, and it really helped clarify the argument that a lot of these Republican candidates were just wildly extreme way out of the mainstream. That along with so many of their other views, were going to be very, very detrimental for the people they were seeking to represent or were already representing in some cases.

Then third, I would say that part of what we're seeing, and this is maybe not quite as optimistic a take leading into the 2024 election cycle. But part of what we're seeing is something that we have a significant downside for as well, which is that our party has become more dependent on a heavily college-educated coalition, and we've spent a lot of time talking about and assessing what we're doing wrong. That has led to us losing more rural voters, non-college voters. But in a midterm cycle, non-college voters are going to be a little bit less likely to turn out.

I do think that part of what we saw was that the turnout environment just happened to help us in a way that we're not used to because for so many election cycles, midterms have hurt us a little bit because there's a realignment happening and our coalition has evolved in both good ways and bad. I think that is something we should be aware of because, yes, this election was a rebuke of Donald Trump's brand of "conservatism." It was a rebuke of MAGA, of extreme election-denying candidates, candidates that want government control of healthcare decisions.

David Nir:

I want to drill down into your first point about Democrats running a good campaign. I think you were extremely politic just now in talking about the kind of self-flagellation, and media criticism that accompanies the Democrats almost every election, and we just obviously haven't seen that this time. But what in your mind makes for a good campaign? What specifically did Democrats do, right?

Josh Wolf:

I could talk about that for a couple episodes of the podcast.

David Nir:

We have time.

Josh Wolf:

We have time. I think you saw Democrats willing to define Republicans right out of the gate. Across the country, you saw candidates like Doug Mastriano, the day after the primary. He's being defined as an extremist. You saw Kari Lake, which we were involved in, just an extremist right out of the gate. We really did not give them a chance through our paid media strategy to control the narrative, and a lot of campaigns take risks when they do that. Part of that is a financial risk. They start spending not knowing if they're going to be able to fill a gap later, and they just say, "Well, this is a pivotal window. We have to win the next couple of weeks to be alive for the rest of the campaign." They take the calculated risk that they're going to control a conversation right away.

So I think that sort of just relentless discipline definition of your opponent is just a must when you're running against these candidates, because there is a risk with these sort of MAGA Republican candidates that as crazy as their stances are, as crazy as their presentation of their ideas are, they do sometimes convince voters that they're the change candidate. We live in a time where voters are incredibly cynical and they're very unhappy with the state of government. They're unhappy with both parties, and a critical fact of the state of democracy right now is that competitive elections are largely decided by people that hate both parties.

So when you understand that you are largely going to win your race by talking to voters that are cynical and that are rightfully off about the state of things, then you realize, "Okay, we have to make sure the finger’s pointed at our opponent right away." You saw a lot of campaigns across the country do that in effective, hard-hitting, sort of, "No one beat around the bush, let's just call some of these candidates what they are, which is extremely dangerous for the country, states, and districts that they were seeking to represent."

I also, and I know you want to talk a little bit about this, so I'll just dive right into it. I think that Democrats are more efficient in how they use resources largely. There's always bad examples. There's always some candidates and campaigns that will run afoul and run a high burn rate. But in part because we are empowered by small dollar donors in a way that we never have before, it's allowed the candidates to spend the money instead of relying super heavily, as they did five and ten years ago, on independent expenditures. So what that means is that, A, you have a candidate in control of their own message. You've got the team that is living and breathing that race, that has been living and breathing that race for years and years in control of that message. But there is also, particularly as it pertains to broadcast television, there's a built-in efficiency where the stations are going to give candidates a significantly cheaper rate on that television advertising.

So we know that our opponents on the Republican side have gobs and gobs and gobs of money coming from special interests and corporate interests. But they have to spend that money in the best case scenario. It's like they're going to spend $2 for every dollar that a candidate is spending, and as you get closer and closer to the election, it can be 3, 4, 5, sometimes just sort of an unmeasurable amount of scale of higher expense for the same amount of communication. So you're really seeing a lower quality of communication when that happens and you're seeing a dramatically higher cost a lot of the time. We're able to sort of capitalize on that efficiency, again, use that to communicate early because it's less of a financial risk since you have a smaller gap to fill on the candidate side later, and just pinch every penny, make it work as much as possible.

Because even the campaigns that we hear about having huge, historically large budgets, I've been on the inside a lot of these campaigns, in weeks three and two, they are making tough budget decisions and deciding the things that they cannot afford to fund because they're falling slightly short of their projections and things like that. Because smart campaigns choose to spend early when they know those resources will come later, and often by spending early, they're in the strong position that they're in later, and they continue to need those resources. So there's a whole science behind marrying your spending strategy with your projections of what's going to come in. And hitting the nail on the head and embracing the dynamic nature of those calculations is really a big part of being able to win a tough race.

David Nir:

Josh, you used a term that folks may not necessarily be familiar with. You talked about weeks three and two, but political professionals have a very funny way of counting. So why don't you tell us what that's all about?

Josh Wolf:

Yeah, it's a running joke with myself that I'll share with your audience, which I try to line up. So political professionals count down. So week one is the final week of the campaign. Week two is the second to last week of the campaign and so forth. So for a congressional race, you'll often do, let's say, six to eight weeks of television. So you're "going up,” going up on TV in week eight. The joke I play with myself is I try to look at the NFL football schedule, where you count up in weeks, and I try to line up, "Does week four in the campaign schedule hit week four in the football schedule?" Sometimes it hits, sometimes it doesn't. It's just a fun thing to keep an eye out for.

David Beard:

One of the things that I thought was interesting, in retrospect, was sort of the focus of the different ads, and we know Democrats focused a ton, obviously, on abortion, some on democracy, which was controversial at the time, and I think has largely proven itself to be a good topic to focus on, and then some on the economy, and there was a lot of debate about how much to focus on the economy on the Dem side. On the GOP side, it seemed like it was a little bit more all over the place. Obviously, there was a ton about inflation, and there was a lot about the crime, which I think we can see was effective in certain places, but then there was a lot of talk about trans issues, about these really esoteric things, about education, a lot of pandemic issues that seem to really be in the rear view. What did you see from your Republican opponents when they were putting ads up? Did you feel like they were doing the best they could, or were really sort of all over the place with sprayed shots?

Josh Wolf:

I did a briefing for a group of funders for a couple of campaigns about seven weeks before the election, and I said, "You can say they're great, you can say they're bad.” There's always this debate; Republican people kind of like to imagine our opponents as being these super geniuses, and sometimes that can... You don't want to underestimate them, but it can be just as treacherous to overestimate them, but the one thing that they are is predictable, and so if you're in Florida, and obviously, we didn't get great outcomes in Florida, you know they're going to talk, you know they're going to call the Democrat a socialist. If you're in the Southwest, you know they're going to talk about the border. If you're in New York, you know they're going to talk about crime.

And so there's some regional distinctions, but Republicans will beat a message to death over and over and over again, and as far as I can tell, I'm obviously on the outside, but I observe a whole lot of the spending; they are relentlessly willing to just stick to a message, and they don't seem to wait for the next tracking poll to come in, and did it work, and did it not work? And I think sometimes it probably works to their advantage. Sometimes, they have, whether we can hate their message, but it can be effective, particularly in the context of television, and digital, and direct mail advertising. But if they guessed wrong, and in a world where polling is not as reliable as it used to be in helping you sort of scientifically identify those messages, then they can spend a whole campaign running on the wrong message.

Now, Democrats, I think, sometimes, there's a tendency to be on the opposite extreme, and again, there's good and bad sides of that coin, where it's like, "Okay, we talked about choice; now, let's move on to this message," or, "We talked about the economy; now, let's move onto that message," and we try to check a whole lot of boxes, and if you sit in enough focus groups, you start to realize we're really not communicating these long, beautiful, complex narratives and stages to voters, because we're asking too much. We're asking people to pay way too much attention to a campaign, and while the three of us live and breathe this stuff, and follow every play by play, there just has to be almost a moment of humility, where you realize, "Wait a second, I'm talking to people that are busy, that have a lot going on in their life, and they're willing to think three or four things about this campaign."

And I can't ask them to think 20 things about this campaign, even if all the great strategists around us are saying, "Well, you got to talk about this. You got to talk about that issue, and that issue, and that issue, and that issue, and if you miss one issue, then oh, my God, they're going to blame you for failing to talk about that issue.” So I think there's a big distinction there. I do want to gently challenge the premise of one of your questions; I don't think, within the operations of a lot of Democratic campaigns, there was a debate on whether or not to talk about the economy. At least the ones that I was involved in, we all knew to talk about the economy. We talked about the economy. The economy can mean a lot of different things, but I've heard this narrative, and certainly in the last couple weeks when we started to see polls moving against us, and there was a lot of, "Oh, my God, we've been talking about choice so much. Why weren't we talking about the economy?"

And then you look back, and you're like, "Well, we did talk about the economy in this ad, and that ad, and we released an economic plan. We talked about inflation a ton," and so some of that I do feel is part of that culture in our world of we just are a little bit sort of self-loathing about the way our campaigns get executed, and maybe it's the nature of the beast, and it's fine, but I do feel like Democrats did a good job talking about the economy in various phases of the campaign. They just also, in a whole lot of races, absolutely had to talk about Republicans taking away a woman's right to choose, which, by the way, is in an economic message if presented in a certain way.

It's also a crime message if presented in a certain way, and in one race, we put a law enforcement professional to a camera saying, "I can't fight crime. I can't defend the border. I can't do all these things if my officers are focused on criminalizing abortion." And so the campaigns really took a lot of unique ways of threading these messages together to make sure that we were hitting the right points, but at the end of the day, if you try to say too much, you end up saying nothing at all, and there was a lot to say in this election. There's a lot of powerful messages, and when you have opponents like Kari Lake, you have a target-rich environment of negative messages that you can communicate, but you still have to pick the right ones, and you have to challenge yourself to say, "Well, these are the ones we're going to stick to," particularly in a paid media context, because we want to make sure that we're getting proper saturation to voters.

David Beard:

Yeah, I think you often find that there's sort of two different levels of discussions around Democratic campaigns; an external one that seems to primarily take place on Twitter, and in Politico and other websites like that, where there is always this sort of angst, this Dems in disarray narrative that always seems to bubble up with anonymous insiders saying one thing or another. And then, an internal discussion within people who are actually working on campaigns. That is often, I found, a lot less cutthroat, a lot less sort of all over the place, where people are working off of data, or often pretty aligned on what we need to do to win individual elections.

Josh Wolf:

100%. 100%, and it's part of the work that we do, so I hope it doesn't sound like I'm complaining about it, but when you are making decisions in a really, really high leverage campaign, and some of these campaigns, democracy was literally on the line. Look, it's a good thing that there's a whole lot of people that feel an emotional investment in the outcomes of those races, and that even if they are spectators, or not as day to day involved, that they're going to have opinions about the work that's done, but ultimately, campaigns have to make decisions through a healthy dialogue and a healthy process, and before I was consulting campaigns, I was a campaign manager, and I really obsessed over how do we structure the dialogue to get the best outcomes?

You want to make sure that you have the right voices at the table, but sometimes that means not having too many voices at the table. Sometimes that means having the confidence to say, "Hey, we're going to get bad press for this, but it's the right decision strategically, and we're going to deal with a day or two of bad press, because our job is to win the campaign; not to look good winning the campaign," and that's a regular thing that campaigns will do. "This is the right call. We all know it's the right call. We all know we're going to eat a little shit for this, so let's just eat a little shit, make the right decision. Let's go win this race," and when you want me to list the things that Democratic campaigns did well this cycle, there are quite a few that were willing to just keep their eye on the ball, make the right decision, understand that they might be scrutinized on Morning Joe the next morning for it, and just keep moving, and keep running a great campaign, and pray the voters get it right at the end, because there's still a lot that's out of our control when we run these campaigns.

David Beard:

One of the races that you were involved in this cycle, you worked on Katie Hobbs's race for Arizona governor, which she very narrowly won after more than a week of ballots being counted. What was the feeling like on that race, on election night, when the first big drop of ballots came in, and you could see that it was very close, and then in the immediate days after, when ballots were slowly being counted, and it became sort of slowly, increasingly clear that she was going to win, how was that feeling internally?

Josh Wolf:

Well, first let me skip to the end and talk about how that feels, because I've been a part of a lot of competitive races, and we've won some really competitive races, we've lost a lot of competitive races, but the stakes have never been higher than they were in this race, and the outcome that we got, it was part of a really amazing candidate, and a really amazing team, and a lot of the folks that I worked with within my firm, the team on the ground, the manager, they were all just a lot of really excellent people were part of this, and worked really hard, and fought really hard, and we always knew what was on the line. We always understood that this literally could be the last free and fair election in Arizona if we didn't get the outcome that we needed.

So it's almost like there aren't words to describe the amount of anxiety that lifts off of one's shoulders when you're like, "Holy shit, we actually did it," and obviously, going into Election Day, there is a lot of coverage about Kari Lake, the next presidential candidate, Kari Lake, Donald Trump's Vice-President; people were anointing her a winner. People in our own party were publicly anointing her a winner, basically, despite the fact that the system that we all live in and rely on for a fair enough government was on the line, and so it just was incredibly moving. There's just no other way to put it. It gave us all a lot of hope for the work that we do, that we're actually making an impact.

As for how did it feel for each drop, I have to tell you that the refreshing of Twitter, of the Google Docs, of the "Okay, this is when this drop is going to happen," is almost designed for just a lot of heightened anxiety, and there really was a lot of unknown throughout. I mean, I didn't feel like on the morning after Election Day I had a better sense of what the outcome was going to be than before polls closed, to be perfectly candid, and you'd see truly smart people doing interesting data analysis on Twitter, and, "Here's why it looks really good," and other people, even friendlies, were, "Here's why. There's just a ton of Republican voters left, and it really could turn away from us," and days after the election, it still seemed possible that we could win by two, we could lose by two, or it could be super, super close, and be a nail-biter, and potentially even go to a recount.

And what ultimately likely broke our way was Katie Hobbs winning a healthy amount of Republican votes, because those last ballots to be counted did skew Republican. And I don't think you have many Republican listeners, but if you have any, that's a really important message for our opposing party, that they're losing a lot of their own voters when they run candidates like Kari Lake. But I also think that it shows that Katie Hobbs was a really, really strong candidate who ran on a message that mattered a lot to Arizona, and just the campaign stayed focused on what we felt was going to determine the outcome of the election, and we just didn't sweat the scrutiny that came from the outside, and again, that really, a lot of times, proves what the strongest campaigns can be, because you have good days, where everyone thinks you're a genius, and you've got bad days, where everyone wants to say you're really bad at your job, but no one really knows what's going on the inside unless they're there.

And as you were saying earlier, Beard, I mean the narrative that exists amongst people that are watching these campaigns play out because they care about the outcome, and they're kind of interested in the process, and that narrative, it does not always align with what's actually impactful for voters. And if I can just give you two a compliment, I mean, and Nir knows this, but going way back to the early days of my career and my life obsessing over politics, the Swing State Project is the place that I go that actually understands how campaigns work, that actually seems to analyze the stuff through the lens of what truly can impact these races. And if anyone doesn't know, the Swing State Project became Daily Kos Elections, and is, to this day, what I read every single morning to make sure that I know what's going on everywhere in the electoral world for our party, and just does a really great job of distilling the things that actually move votes, things that affect the fundamentals of these races, because there's so much noise out there.

And you can really see the way groupthink, particularly in cable news, and it's for both parties, how cable news... people just have one or two things to say about a campaign, and you saw the way they did it to John Fetterman. You saw the way they did to a lot of these races, where it's like, "Oh, I got a new talking point, and I've got 40 people on every cable news show that are going to say that talking point," and a lot of that stuff never makes its way to voters that aren't reading clips every morning. And anyway, so kudos to you all, because you do a really good job of focusing on the right stuff, but doing it in a way that even if you're not a day-to-day political professional, you still are reading something that's both meaningful, and enjoyable, and helpful.

David Nir:

Well, I appreciate hearing that so much, because I personally have very limited experience working on campaigns. In fact, it's been decades since I was on one, but that is the lens that we try to view things, through what actually matters in an election, and not the chaff, the BS scandals, the nonsense that you see in so many of these political tip sheets, and we really do try to avoid that. And one of the topics that we didn't write about at all, precisely because we didn't think it was going to be a big deal, but it's a thing that, to use your phrase from a few minutes ago, that the Hobbs campaign had to eat some shit for, was the decision not to debate Kari Lake. And I'm wondering if you can tell us why you guys made that decision, because it certainly didn't seem to hurt you in the way that a lot of insiders were certain that it would.

Josh Wolf:

I would first respond to your question with a question which is, which high profile Democratic statewide campaign truly benefited from debating? And I know that's not something that people really want to hear, because it unfortunately does speak to some of the degradation of parts of our discourse. But a lot of these Republican candidates are just held to a dramatically lower standard than our candidates are. And I'm not saying no one should debate; I would never imply something like that. But when you're up against a candidate like Kari Lake, sometimes the courageous decision is to not give her exactly what she wants, which is just more airtime, more opportunity to spread conspiracy theories and lies. And it was not a decision that was heavily debated and we really felt confident about it the entire time. And there's not a great playbook for how to beat candidates like Kari Lake.

It's not something that all the people that had opinions on MSNBC and on tip sheets, et cetera; it's not like they were the ones that had won that race before. This was a unique and historic and unprecedented race. And we made a decision that giving her extremely dangerous ideas more oxygen and airtime, was not going to help the campaign, and the result was vindicating. Does that mean no one should debate moving forward? It doesn't. I would say the biggest takeaway is that campaigns should have the confidence to make the decisions that they think are best and be prepared for the public to not always understand it in the moment and don't be upset about it, but just understand that that's the nature of running a campaign.

And for people who really care about those campaigns, but don't always trust the decisions those campaigns are making, just trust us a little bit more because there are certainly dysfunctional campaigns that make bad decisions, but sometimes campaigns make good decisions that don't always look good yet. And that's one where we just all sat tight and we were comfortable answering the question any time it came up. And it came up a lot, as you know, but didn't really second guess the decision. And if Kari Lake had the opportunity to debate, it would've helped her campaign probably, but more importantly, she would've used it to spew really, really dangerous lies, which normalized those lies, normalized people. The more people hear about it, the more it normalizes it. And that was something we felt was critical to avoid.

David Beard:

So not only do you work in paid media, creating and running ads for campaigns, but you've got another project for Democratic campaigns that's somewhat different. It has a relation; it's about budgets, which is not something that people think about a lot when they think about campaigns. Tell us about it and how it's benefited Democratic campaigns.

Josh Wolf:

Warchest — whether you work in politics or you work in any other industry — Warchest is a very classic story of staring at something that you know is broken and then eventually being like, "What if I, or in this case, me and my co-founder Connor Johnson, what if we tried to fix it?" And so running campaigns as an up-and-coming campaign manager, we had this spreadsheet that we thought was better than everyone else's spreadsheet and campaigns cashflow is really, really complicated. A small business would never spend from $2 million down to $0. It just wouldn't happen. You'd always have a buffer. But campaigns exist to basically self-destruct at the end. But you have to deal with so many moving variables and how much money you're going to raise in the last four or five days of a campaign. That's one of the hardest things to project. And as campaigns have grown, as frankly as digital fundraising has grown, hitting a bullseye in those projections has gotten harder and harder.

And so we found a software designer and we started to figure out how to start the small software company. We did it while, at the time I was managing Patrick Murphy's Senate race, which I'm sure you all remember pretty well. It had some very sharp tacks and turns. And when a campaign takes a sharp turn, the budget takes a sharp turn. And so at midnight we'd get on the phone with a software designer and I'd be like, "Oh, it would be really great if the software could do the following things." And it was just building the dream tool that I needed in that moment because this campaign had just become so volatile. And funny enough, just to bring it all full circle at the same time, someone named Anne Liston, who's now my business partner in my day job and is one of the partners at AL Media, Anne was working on building software that tracked TV spending and also got people off a spreadsheet, a different spreadsheet, but got people off the spreadsheet where they see how much the opponents are spending and what ads are up and so forth.

And so she and I started sidebarring, "How did you find a software designer and how are you going to pitch this to the Democratic committees and the party and to campaign managers?" And just started creating this really good, healthy cross-fertilization, and it's been a ton of progress in our party, but there's so much more room to grow. But our tech infrastructure was really bad and it has gone from really bad to okay, but we need to get a lot better still. And a lot of it is not, again, I keep going back to screw the press narrative, so apologies if I'm going too hard on that, but there's often a press narrative of, this is the thing we have to...

David Nir:

No, you're not going too hard on that. Go harder.

Josh Wolf:

So sometimes it's like, is there a tech solution to misinformation? And maybe there is, and I'm sure there's tech solutions to misinformation, but then you'll see the donor classic, everyone wants to fund that thing and they want to find some really exciting solution to that. But campaigns can be exciting. Campaigns are also mechanical institutions with needs that lots of businesses have, but taken to a whole other level. And so the budget was the thing that I was obsessed with as a campaign manager. And to this day as a consultant, as a ad maker, I still obsess over it because how a campaign plans to spend their money should absolutely be central to every strategic decision that they make. It should be central to your creative strategy when you're concepting an ad, it should be central to when you go up on TV and what is your appetite for risk? Are we willing to be dark later if we don't change the dynamics of the race and funds don't come in the way we want?

And so campaigns, for years and years, have been making decisions like this, "Well, let's go up in week 10 and in week three we'll figure out if we're screwed." That's something that campaigns have to do as they're constantly measuring their appetite for risk and pursuing a victory, a binary outcome that they want to be on the right side of. But they were doing it with really horrible error-prone, worthless data visualization in a way that was just not designed for collaboration. And so you'd see these campaigns make significant budget errors and fail to be running ads for the last 10 days, or sometimes having way too much money in the last 10 days.

And we just felt like this might not be the most exciting thing. No one's going to make a documentary about starting this company, but this is going to solve a problem for campaigns. And a lot of people are like, "Ah, don't do it. No one's going to spend money on that." For reference, when I was a manager, I was just the cheapest asshole anyone had ever met it. Everyone knew that I was going to scrutinize every invoice, every reimbursement request. I treasured every dollar that we had. I wanted it to go to communicating to voters and if I was willing to spend money on this tool, then I knew that a whole lot of other people would be willing to. And so Connor and I set to build it, and we just met with all of our friends and everyone that we knew was running budgets.

What do you wish you could have? What do you wish you could have? And we had this fun experience of designing the thing that we wish we had all along and it's taken off and the lion's share of Democratic campaigns are using it to run their budgets. And we do trainings and we've really... The other thing that we like about it is that there was a dynamic in the Democratic world where people would say, "We can't manage a campaign if you don't know how to run a budget." And so if someone wanted to be a manager for the first time in their career, but they said, "Well, I've never run a budget," and these are multimillion dollar budgets, and it's often people that are just starting to pay rent for the first time in their life and that are running these budgets.

So if you, let's just say, have the humility to be honest and say, "I've not done that before," then a lot of people would say, "Well then you're not qualified for this job." And what we found is that the party is just sorely lacking talent. It's lacking quality and quantity; it's lacking diversity of talent. And if you create this barrier where you tell everyone that, you have to be willing to say, "Yeah, I can do that. I can run that multimillion dollar budget, no sweat." Then you're selecting for the people that are going to bullshit you on that for the highest leverage thing that a campaign manager is going to do. And so we felt like part of why we needed this tool was to invite people into this profession and say, "There is infrastructure to teach you how to do this, to make it less likely that you're going to make a high leverage error that will reflect poorly on you later in your career and we're going to help put your candidate in a position to win."

And it's just been really exciting to see it take off and evolve and we're now on our third generation of the software and we're constantly developing and changing it and trying to make it better. That's as exciting as I can make it sound. But the reality of it is, it's not always the most exciting thing that has the biggest impact, and when folks out there are thinking of the cool tech idea that they wish a campaign had or could invest in, it might not sound that cool, but it might be incredibly high leverage for the functioning of that campaign.

David Nir:

We have been talking with Democratic strategist, Josh Wolf, ad maker, software creator, partner at AL Media. Josh, where can folks find you online and learn more about your work?

Josh Wolf:

Thank you for asking. I don't tweet a ton, but you can find me at _joshwolf on Twitter. You can check out our media firm at almediastrategy.com, and if you want a little learn a little bit more about Warchest, we have a website, mywarchest.com, and a pretty funny Twitter account and a fun little demo video that shows you how Warchest works.

David Nir:

Well, Josh, thank you so much for joining us today.

Josh Wolf:

Thank you both so much for having me. It was a blast.

David Beard:

That's all from us this week. Thanks to Josh Wolf 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.

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