Well, that was an awesome way to finish out the 2022 election cycle! Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard revel in Raphael Warnock's runoff victory on this week's episode of The Downballot and take a deep dive into how it all came together. The Davids dig into the turnout shift between the first and second rounds of voting, what the demographic trends in the metro Atlanta area mean for Republicans, and why Democrats can trace their recent success in Georgia back to a race they lost: the famous Jon Ossoff special election in 2017.
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We're also joined by one of our very favorite people, Daily Kos Elections alum Matt Booker, who shares his thoughts on the midterms and tells us about his work these days as a pollster. Matt explains some of the key ways in which private polling differs from public data; how the client surveys he was privy to did not foretell a red wave; and the mechanics of how researchers put together focus groups. Matt also reminisces about his time at "DKE University" and how his experience with us prepared him for the broader world of politics.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Embedded Content
We're also joined by one of our very favorite people, Daily Kos Elections alum Matt Booker, who shares his thoughts on the midterms and tells us about his work these days as a pollster. Matt explains some of the key ways in which private polling differs from public data; how the client surveys he was privy to did not foretell a red wave; and the mechanics of how researchers put together focus groups. Matt also reminisces about his time at "DKE University" and how his experience with us prepared him for the broader world of politics.
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, please subscribe to The Downballot on Apple Podcasts and leave us a five-star rating and review.
David Beard:
Well, let's send 2022 out with one more win, shall we?
David Nir:
Yes, we shall. We are going to be talking in-depth about Raphael Warnock's massive victory on Tuesday night that will give Democrats a 51-seat majority in the Senate come January. And then we are going to be talking about that and much more with Daily Kos Elections alum Matt Booker, who is now in the world of polling. We have so much to talk about. Let's get rolling.
Well, Tuesday night, that was a hell of way to wrap up the 2022 midterms. I don't even know where to start, what to say. There's so much to say. I'm feeling so many things, all of them. Awesome, Beard. Where do we begin?
David Beard:
Well, let's begin with the result for anybody who somehow missed it, which is that incumbent Democratic Senator Rev. Raphael Warnock defeated in a runoff his Republican opponent, Herschel Walker. Right now it's a margin of 2.8%. Obviously there might be a few provisional ballots, so that may change a little bit. But overall, compared to the results we've seen in Georgia where these Senate races, which have been happening, over and over again, the past two years have just been incredibly close, 2.8% is actually a pretty healthy margin at this point.
And what I want to do is sort of break down the results by region in Georgia to sort of see how we got from the November result where Warnock led by one percentage point to the final, and in the runoff where he ended up winning by almost three percentage points. And I think the easiest way to do that is to break Georgia down into three broad regions: North Georgia, South Georgia, and then the metro Atlanta area.
North Georgia is pretty straightforward. It's connected to Appalachia; it's pretty white; it's pretty conservative. And what we saw there was Walker, who had big victories of course in the November election, continued to have big victories in the runoff, slightly bigger margins in a lot of places. So the Republican vote in North Georgia really did come out for him. Turnout was down a little bit more than average. It wasn't a huge difference, but turnout was down a little bit more there than overall. But mostly I would say if this had been replicated in the rest of the state, what happened specifically in North Georgia, it would've been pretty good for Walker. But of course, that's not the biggest part of the state, which we'll get to.
Then we have South Georgia, which you can just sort of think of as everything south of the metro Atlanta area. And this area is highly racially polarized. You have a ton of rural counties and the margins there depend almost entirely on the racial makeup of these counties. So you have these extremely white counties that Walker would win by as many as 92 to 8 in one of the most extreme cases, and then you have more diverse or more African American counties that Warnock would do much better in.
But what we saw there was an almost exact replication of the November election result. Turnout was pretty stable across the board across most of South Georgia. There are a few cases where it was slightly up or slightly down county to county, but overall, turnout was pretty much the same as the November election results. And the margins were almost the same in many of these places. So what we saw was pretty much everyone coming out again, everyone voting again.
And so that leaves us with the biggest population center of Georgia, the cause for all of these changes in recent years, which is metro Atlanta. And what we saw in metro Atlanta is that, while turnout was down a little bit in sort of the inner and suburban Atlanta, where so much of this core Democratic vote is now, the margins managed to shift even a little bit more to Warnock than they were in November. So even though he was doing these crazy great margins of 50-plus points in Fulton County, in DeKalb County where Atlanta is, he managed to do even slightly better in the runoff than he did in the November election.
North Georgia is reasonably populated, so they get some good vote numbers out of there, but the real big GOP counties that remain in Georgia are these exurban Atlanta counties, like Forsyth and Cherokee. And what we saw there was that the margin was mostly the same, maybe Warnock did a little bit better in some of these counties. But the margin was mostly the same, but turnout was down.
Now none of these turnout results were a huge difference, but in a race this close, these margins matter. And turnout was down by more in these counties than they were almost anywhere else. Coweta County, which is southwest of Atlanta, had the largest turnout decrease of any county in the state. It was down 17%. This is a Republican exurban county. Forsyth and Cherokee were down 13%, which was among the lowest in terms of turnout decreases.
And so we can see here is that these are educated places where Kemp did very well in the general where Walker did not do as well. And what you can imagine is a lot of these educated GOP voters decided that they were not going to bother and go cast their votes for Herschel Walker in a race that wasn't going to decide control of the Senate. It wasn't worth it to them to vote for somebody. They probably had an unfavorable opinion of, they were maybe neutral about Warnock, maybe they even liked Warnock and maybe a few of them voted for him. But largely, you can imagine these voters stayed home. And that's really how you get from that 1% margin in November up to this 2.8% margin now in the runoff.
David Nir:
I think we could talk about metro Atlanta for a really long time. And in fact, that's what I'm going to do. I want to highlight a tweet from Steve Kornacki, who aggregated the numbers for the 10 counties that more or less make up the metro Atlanta area that we're talking about, including the city of Atlanta itself and its suburbs.
So in 2004, this 10-county region gave 49.9% of its vote to John Kerry in the presidential race and 49.3% of its vote to George W. Bush. So Kerry won it by less than a percentage point. Fast forward 18 years later, and this region still provides a pretty similar share of the overall statewide vote in terms of statewide elections in Georgia, but under the hood, wow. Have things changed? Warnock, at least in the preliminary number so far, is beating Herschel Walker 71% to 29% in this 10-county area. That is a move toward Democrats of 42% in the most populous part of the state. And this is a trend that has been going on for some time. It really sort of kicked into gear in earnest with Trump's first race in 2016. But this is so dangerous for Republicans going forward because there are just so many votes in this part of the state, and it's a growing area.
David Beard:
And as we've seen with a lot of states, when a metro area dominates the populace and becomes very Democratic, a state like Illinois, a state like Virginia nowadays with Northern Virginia, is it becomes very hard for Republicans to compete there and they have to really provide candidates who can appeal to these diverse, moderate suburban areas in order to win elections.
David Nir:
And there is a quote from our good buddy, Quinn Yeargain, we've had on the show before. He tweeted something last night that was both really funny and really spot on. He talked specifically about DeKalb County, which includes a small part of the city of Atlanta itself and some very populous suburbs. He said, "DeKalb County is such a nightmare for the GOP; a Black middle class, a shit-ton of young voters and super high propensity college-educated voters." And there really is maybe almost no county quite like DeKalb, maybe even anywhere in the country, but it is just a perfect emblematic example of all of the demographics that are absolutely running away from the GOP. And they've managed to keep it close by running up the score in these outlying rural areas. But man, that is not a strategy for long-term health. I mean, really what's the plan?
David Beard:
And we actually saw there was a GOP strategist who was talking on Twitter last night that basically, this new coalition, this adjusted republican coalition of working-class rural voters that Trump very much sort of consolidated post-2016 is a problem, particularly when you get away from presidential elections where turnout starts to decrease among working-class voters across the board. But then what you see is college-educated voters become more important in any non-presidential election. It obviously varies. The lower down you get, specials are off-years, but in those cases, college-educated voters become more and more important. And as we've seen these diverse college-educated suburban counties explode in growth. That's an ongoing problem for Republicans that as long as they're the party of Trump, which I still doubt that that's going to change anytime soon, it's going to continue to be a problem and specifically, a problem in a state like Georgia,
David Nir:
It really is amazing. I mean, it was as recently as 2014, so we're only talking eight years ago that Democrats were just so anxious about the fact that our base, our electorate seemed to turn out less in midterm years. And things have just completely shifted in a very short amount of time, which speaks both to the huge demographic changes this country's undergoing and frankly, the impact that the Trumpist GOP has had on our politics. But that impact goes way beyond just demographics and elections because it has a huge effect on the kind of candidates that Republicans keep putting forth. There was this incredible quote from Greg Bluestein in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He quoted an advisor to state agriculture commissioner Gary Black, who ran a very desultory campaign against Walker in the GOP primary. He lost very badly. And now this advisor said, "Herschel was like a plane crash into a train wreck that rolled into a dumpster fire, and an orphanage, then an animal shelter. You kind of had to watch it squinting through one eye between your fingers."
Well yeah, that's true. If you were a Republican, if you were Democrat, you were just munching on popcorn. But also think about what it says that Herschel Walker's main primary opponent thinks that the Walker campaign was beyond a dumpster fire, beyond the Titanic, and they couldn't even come close. They couldn't lay a hand on him.
David Beard:
It just goes to show that as long as you let Donald Trump and Peter Thiel pick your Senate candidates, it's not going to go well. So maybe take a little agency back for your party. Yeah.
David Nir:
And there were tons of tweets on Tuesday night. Oh, “standard old boring Republican would've beaten Warnock.” First off, I definitely don't know about that. Second, why haven't you nominated candidates like that? And if that's true in Georgia, well, so would this more typical normie Republican have done better than Blake Masters in Arizona, done better than Don Bolduc in New Hampshire, done better than Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania?
The fact that we keep being able to even ask that question in state after state after state and race after race after race shows you just what a deep problem this is for Republicans. And there are a lot of reasons for it, but we follow GOP primaries really, really closely here at Daily Kos Elections, and they are almost always fought over fealty toward Trump. They aren't ever fought over questions of character. And I think there's a lot of reasons for that. Frankly, I think that so many of these awful Republican candidates don't even have the ability to grasp when their opponents have miserable characters because they also do themselves. So, this is just an ongoing problem. Democrats really object in primaries to electing people, to nominating people with bad characters. And Republicans just... it doesn't bother them. And until it does, they're going to have a lot more Herschels Walker.
David Beard:
Yeah, Rick Scott was not a creation of Donald Trump. Rick Scott was around in the Republican Party well before Donald Trump was. And he is just as much of a charlatan and a scammer as the Trumpist candidates of the past few years. He's just slightly better at hiding it. And inexplicably keeps getting elected in Florida by like 2% every time he is up for election. But it's the same sort of thing.
The Republican Party has been open for this sort of scammer charlatan-esque figure for years, and when—that's why Trump was able to waltz in and take control of the party and why so many of the candidates that he likes that have had this same sort of style do well, both because of their fealty to Trump and because of this charlatan ethos where all they want to do is tell the far-right of the party what they want to hear. The far-right of the party then feels good, because they got told what they want, so they vote, and then they're all in little media bubble telling each other how great they are. And then when the results come through, there's just like this moment of, "Oh, we lost this election," which is the whole point. And then after a few days they'll go right back to this media bubble. And as long as that's true, nothing is going to change.
And like you said, Democrats, they tend to vote for in primaries, or push strong candidates who are, I'm just going to say it, who are smart, well-educated, impressive people who low-information voters see on TV and are like, "Wow, that's a really impressive person. Maybe I'm going to vote for them even if I'm not crazy about Joe Biden." And so Democrats are going to keep doing that. We're going to nominate strong candidates, and if Republicans are unwilling or unable to, this candidate quality difference is going to continue.
David Nir:
Beard, you talked about that media bubble. Man, Sean Hannity had this line on Fox News on Tuesday night; he said, "I think Republicans have been unwilling to vote early and vote by mail for whatever reason." Whatever reason. God, what reason could that be? Who could possibly know?
David Beard:
Who knows?
David Nir:
I mean, it's like that gif of the guy in the hot dog suit, right?
David Beard:
We're all trying to find the guy who did this.
David Nir:
Yeah, exactly. And you're totally right, I mean, they're going to be pissed for a few days, and they're going to go right back into that bubble and it'll be like nothing has ever changed.
One last thing I want to talk about, Drew Savicki, he's an election analyst; you often see his work on Twitter. He crunched the numbers of Tuesday night's runoff for Georgia's old 6th Congressional District. This is a district in the Atlanta suburbs, Warnock won that district by a 59 to 41 margin over Herschel Walker. Why am I talking about an old district that doesn't even exist anymore? This was the seat that was the site of the very, very famous special election in 2017 that Jon Ossoff ran in. And I have to take a victory lap here, this one really means a lot to me and to Daily Kos Elections.
In 2016, after Trump won, we crunched the numbers, and we saw the trends, and we saw some pretty startling results showing up in a number of suburban areas that had long, long been Republican bastions, and one of those was the Atlanta suburbs. In fact, Georgia's 6th District we saw had gone from a 20-point win for Mitt Romney in 2012, to just about a one-point win for Donald Trump only four years later in 2016. It was one of the biggest shifts that we saw that year; frankly, one of the biggest four-year shifts we've really ever seen.
And the sixth district became vacant early on in the Trump administration, because Trump tapped the Republican Congressman Tom Price to run his Department of Health and Human Services, and basically to become the architect of rolling back Obamacare, which completely failed. And Democrats everywhere were so unsure of what to do in the Trump era, do we try to go for these Obama/Trump voters and win them back? Do we try to welcome these brand new Hillary Clinton voters into the fold, or are they just going to go right back to voting for Republicans as soon as they have the chance? And no one was really sure, but we said at Daily Kos Elections we have to give it a try, we have to see what happens here, and we said, we are going to get involved in this race.
And we learned about a candidate, Jon Ossoff; he was a 30-year-old documentary maker who absolutely no one had heard of, except for one really, really important guy, and that guy was the late Congressman and civil rights hero John Lewis. Jon Ossoff had worked for John Lewis, and he got an endorsement from Lewis right out the gate. And we said, well, this is a first-time candidate, we certainly don't know much about him, we did all our due diligence, but the most important thing was that John Lewis said, "Hey, this guy is A-OK." And Daily Kos endorsed Jon Ossoff very shortly after he got into the race, and our community completely exploded with support.
The Daily Kos community donated $400,000 to him in just the first week after we endorsed him, that was more money than we'd ever raised for any candidate ever, including Elizabeth Warren, and Ossoff very quickly became a household name. I think I've told this story before, but a few months later I was wearing an Ossoff T-shirt on the subway here in New York City, and not one but two different people commented on it to me, and this was for a special election taking place in a different state hundreds and hundreds of miles away.
And Ossoff lost, he lost that race by four points to Republican Karen Handel, and a lot of folks in the media, and frankly a lot of political analysts and operatives, were treating it like it was no better than a moral victory. Okay, great. Well, whatever, he came close, so what? He still lost. They were treating Georgia 6th as a traditional swing district that Democrats should have won; he raised all this money, he got all this attention, he must have totally screwed up somehow.
And at Daily Kos Elections we said no, that it's completely the wrong way of looking at this. What we have to focus on is the fact that this narrow margin shows that these former Republican voters, these Romney voters who switched to Clinton, they absolutely are gettable for us in future elections. And we were one trillion percent right about that, because Democrats flipped that district the following year. Lucy McBath won that district; she ran an amazing campaign but unquestionably built off all the work that Jon Ossoff and his huge army did in the prior year. And now we see that, as we were talking about this whole episode, just how important metro Atlanta is to Democrats. It is why Joe Biden won in 2020; it is why we now have both of these Senate seats; it is why we won those runoffs in 2021; it is why Warnock just won a full six year term.
So we went from this race being a four-point Republican win in that special election, to a 19-point Democratic win in the runoff this week, and that is truly astonishing. And it just shows you have to be open to the data, you have to be okay with losing, and you have to play the long term game. And so I am really, really proud of what Democrats in the Atlanta suburbs have done. The world has changed dramatically, and it's because of those changes that we have a 51-seat majority in the Senate come January, and that is freaking awesome.
David Beard:
And I'll just add briefly that I started reading Daily Kos late in high school, I started reading Swing State Project early in college and have been a part of that community off and on for many years now, and the Daily Kos community is consistently one of the best parts about the democratic grassroots, both in good times and in bad, and there's no better evidence than that 2017 special, and all the money that the community raised that year, but it's been going on for the better part of two decades, and it is a vital part of the Democratic Party.
David Nir:
Well, I am certainly pleased with how 2022 wrapped up, and I am also extremely excited for the guest we have on in the second half of the show. We will be joined by Daily Kos Elections alum Matt Booker, who is now a pollster. He's going to tell us all about his experience in that line of work, and how he came to be at DKE and some of his highlights from working here. Really, really fun episode, please stay with us.
I am so stoked to introduce today's guest. Matt Booker is the first ever alum of Daily Kos Elections, he worked for us for several years on a huge variety of really important projects, and then he graduated; he entered the polling industry. He recently wrapped up a gig at a firm called Brilliant Corners and will be starting at a new shop next year, and has so many insights to share about his time at DKE, and what he's learned ever since then. Matt, it is awesome to have you on the show.
Matt Booker:
Beard, Nir, it is a pleasure to be here. And as you said, the first DKE alum ever, so I got to represent.
David Nir:
That's right, you do. Well, we obviously have to keep talking about the Georgia runoff. I mean, we're going to talk about that one forever, it was a race for the ages. But I got to ask you, what's your reaction to the whole thing? What thoughts do you have about Warnock and the win?
Matt Booker:
Well, my first thought is Herschel Walker played football when the helmets were soft.
David Nir:
You're quoting someone there, aren't you?
Matt Booker:
Yeah, I was, yeah. No, that was a great, it was a big time win for Dems. I mean, what a freaking win for them. I personally never really… I had some doubt in the first round… second round I wasn't really feeling that much anxiety about it. Having 51 is just, I mean, that's crucial, that's critical. And to have someone like Warnock who is just, I mean, that's a generational talent right there. I mean, he is unique, he was uniquely qualified to take over the pulpit at a church that Martin Luther King once spoke at. I mean, I think that we can all agree on that one. So it's just great to have him for a full term, six years. Nir, you and I have spoken on this, I mean, how special is it that for at least four more years a black guy and a Jewish guy are going to be in the Senate, in Georgia of all states. I mean, that's special, that's a buddy comedy, that's modern-day Rush Hour right there.
David Nir:
Yeah, man, so many times you and I have joked over the years, me being the Jewish guy, you being the Black guy. But the funny thing is of course I'm the older dude, like Warnock, and you're the hippie un-millennial, like Ossoff. So which one of us is which?
Matt Booker:
I think, you know what? I think I'll let you be the cool Black guy, I'll let you be Warnock.
David Nir:
Well, that speech really was amazing, I watched it last night, and I'm really not usually one for politician speeches, but like you said, Warnock is just operating on a different level, and it really did feel like you were listening to Martin Luther King Jr. at times hearing him speak. He talked about how his mother grew up in Georgia in the 1950s, and he said that she picked other people's cotton and other people's tobacco, but on Tuesday night she picked her own son to go to the US Senate, and that is just, that gives me goosebumps just to think about that.
Matt Booker:
I mean, if that sort of thing doesn't tug your heartstrings, what will? I mean, I know that at this point we can be a little jaded out about elections and politics, but we have to appreciate when we have genuinely good guys, good folks on our side, and Warnock's one of them.
David Nir:
So Matt, I was texting with you on election night, and you said you were saving up a story that you wanted to share about Georgia for the podcast, so now's your chance.
Matt Booker:
Beard, Nir, you guys know that I am a huge sports guy, and I believe that there's a lot of analogs between sports and politics, and last night was making me think of a specific story. A guy named Jon Ossoff, who in 2017... obviously, don't need to go too much into that one... we know what he was able to accomplish now, but Daily Kos played a big role in him coming close to flipping a seat in 2017, and it reminded me of the 2007 New England Patriots who famously finished the regular season 16 and 0. But in that final game played the New York Giants, and the Giants played their starters, had already clinched a playoff spot, but played their starters, because they wanted to be the team to end that streak, and they weren't able to; they lost that game 38 to 35.
But a couple months later in the Super Bowl, they played that same New England Patriots team, and also famously denied them a full undefeated season and beat them in that Super Bowl. And the Jon Ossoff parallels remind me of that. There's no moral victories, but the Giants players, after that game, believed that they won that Super Bowl because they had that regular season game against the Patriots, and they believed that they could go toe to toe with a team like that. And having that Ossoff election in 2017 definitely made a lot of people believe, hey, we can win. I mean, it was close, this was a district represented by Republicans for decades, and Ossoff came a couple points short. And I just feel like wins like the Georgia runoff from a couple years ago, and this one, is almost like that Giant's Super Bowl win, that's the culmination of believing, “Hey look, we can do this.” And I think that there was something just really beautiful about this belief that Georgia could be a blue state, starting with Ossoff, and ending the way it has.
David Nir:
I absolutely love that analogy, it was an important proof of concept and now, well, the proof is in the pudding.
David Beard:
So Tuesday night wasn't the only good night we've had recently, we also had a lot of good election wins about a month ago. So I want to take us back to then, and I want to get your reaction to the overall 2022 cycle, which obviously worked out so much better than I think that we expected earlier in the year, and also what you thought about how the polling looked like. Obviously you were privy to a lot of polling ahead of time, and how that seemed to turn out; was it better than expected, worse than expected, in the wake of this good night?
Matt Booker:
Well, I can't talk about specific polls or clients, but I can talk about the polling overall, the picture, and I did not see anything that I'd worked on that was consistent with a red wave. Roe was always coming up as something that people were concerned about. Inflation, all that stuff, sure, but Roe was always a big thing going back to June, and it just never looked like Republicans were just in the driver's seat at any point. And I remember thinking, a lot of the public polling was very close and I just remember thinking, undecideds are going to break against us. I was a believer for very long but just late in the season I was just like, okay, this is just how these things go, this is where things break against us, and it didn't. And I guess that that's a lesson in just believing that the data that you have in front of you and not trying to skew it, and just saying, okay, this maybe isn't too good to be true, maybe this is the actual picture.
So while the polling looked decent, I was very pleasantly surprised to see a very good night for Democrats.
David Beard:
I think it's so interesting how, I think a lot of people had this similar reaction where they had this belief that things were going to be bad, for good reason, and so despite, in many cases, the data showing us that it wasn't going to be so bad and could even be good, a lot of people were thinking, "Well, the undecideds are probably going to break against us. This is probably going to be bad. We saw what happened under Obama, et cetera."
And there's almost like a human nature aspect to it for us to expect this bad news, even when the data, as you said, was showing us things could be good. And they turned out to be.
Matt Booker:
No, absolutely.
And I think that another aspect, and this was kind of something I was keeping in my back pocket, was the special elections.
I mean, you know, you think about the Hudson Valley one with Pat Ryan in August and the Minnesota one from, I believe, around the same time. I mean, that was another ... I mean, as a former DKE'er, I know we put a lot of stock into special elections.
So those looked good for us. It just felt like it can't happen, we can't do well in a midterm. But obviously, we did; and held our losses too, in most places at least, to a minimum, and even gained in certain areas. So that was just ...
I think that this election, and the last few, there have been ... You know, even in 2020 when we all thought the Dems were heading for a really big night, and obviously, you know, you win the presidency, you won the night, flat out, no questions, but Republicans gained in the House and I think that took a lot of people by surprise.
So I think that the last few elections have shaken up a lot of people's understandings about what should happen on election nights, and 2022, I guess, was no exception. It just so happened the good guys were the recipients this time.
David Nir:
It's really interesting to me you saying that the polling you were seeing was not congruent with this idea of a red wave. And that really reinforces the difference between the good pollsters and the crap pollsters, or as some folks like to say, "the narrative-pushing GOP pollsters."
Because you're a private firm, you're being hired by clients who have a really vested interest in you getting the numbers right. They don't want to push any agenda. In fact, most of their polling data's never going to see the light of day. So they really need to know whether they're up or they're down.
And the nonpartisan pollsters, it seems, for the most part, were also telling this, "It's not going to be a red wave" story, and really, we were just crowded out by all of these crappy pollsters on the right who, I don't know if they were juicing their numbers or just engaged in fantasy, but who were pushing this red wave story.
So it's really compelling to me that the high-quality private polling that the public never got to see was also in line with the better-quality nonpartisan public polling that we did get to see.
Matt Booker:
This is one of my, I don't know if I would call it a pet peeve, but this is something I think about when I see people on Twitter. A poll comes out and they automatically say like, "Oh, this is a private poll. Take it with a grain of salt."
Just think about it logically, right? If you are paying for data, why would you just pay for someone to kiss your ass and be like, "Oh, you're doing so amazing." No, if you're paying for this, you want to have the best possible data. You're not cooking the books, you're not trying to create a better electorate, or whatever the case may be.
Private polls ... I'm not going to say they're infallible, I wouldn't say any poll is infallible, but when campaigns do private polls, it's not for the benefit of just juicing donors. I mean, it can, but most of the time, it's for figuring out what messages are going to work or where you stand currently or what you think the electorate's going to look like.
So at times, I think a lot of GOP pollsters were flooding the zone with this one, but overall, when you look at private polling, I think that the skepticism is a little bit overrated, because you don't spend thousands of dollars, and that is what polling costs, thousands of dollars, you don't spend that money from your campaign budget to just hear what you want to hear; you want to hear the real story.
David Beard:
And lastly, one last question on 2022 before we move on.
Wisconsin Senate; I know Mandela Barnes was one of your favorite candidates of the cycle. One of the toughest losses of the night. Any thoughts on that one?
Matt Booker:
Well, I ... As Nir knows, I am a Barnes Bro (TM) through and through, and I believed in him always. Like, "Why not? Why not Barnes? Why not Barnesy in Wisconsin?"
And it's just really funny to me how Ron Johnson has defied gravity for so long with being left for dead in 2016, and 2022, facing an incumbent, you know, obviously a much more favorable GOP year.
But I remember seeing these polls coming out that had registered voter numbers with Barnes in the lead, but the likely voter model had Johnson up by one or something, and I'm like, "Could RoJo get RoJo'd here? Could we be looking at an upset?" I always just had my eye on it, and I was like, "Hmm, this could be something."
And on election night, I just remember following that race. Like I'm just on Twitter refreshing constantly, on The Needle on New York Times refreshing constantly. I'm like, "Can Barnes do it?"
Obviously it was very narrow, but I think that this proves that ... I could sit here all day and talk about Black candidates for office in states that you might not think, like Wisconsin, but I don't think that at the end of the day that Barnes was ...
I think that the prevailing thesis was that Barnes was just done in by Ron Johnson, that all these Wisconsinites were going to associate him with 'Defund The Police' and all that.
And he's a guy that lost by 25,000 votes, whatever it was. It was a one point margin. It was a close race. I think that Barnes ended up being a good candidate by almost any metric.
This is the closest race. Ron Johnson, a guy who's been notoriously pesky his whole career, I think if you caught Ron Johnson in an honest moment, he would tell you this was his hardest campaign to run, was against a guy from Milwaukee with tattoos and a black guy. I think it might have caught him by surprise how good of a candidate Barnes was.
So I'm a Barnes Bro dead-ender. I think he did a great job. I would love to see what he does in the future. It obviously sucks that Johnson will be going back to the Senate, I think that there's a lot of dialogue about their "Ron Kind would've won", but I think that Barnes was a really good candidate.
And I think that more candidates like him, Black, younger, in states that maybe are on the whiter side that are not just heavily Black ... Like you can go into suburbs, you can go into white areas and win and get a lot of votes.
And I think that that's an important thing for future candidates to realize; that if you live in a state that's mostly white or whatever, you don't have to feel like, "Oh, I'm never going to convince these people to vote for me." If you have a message, you can.
David Beard:
Absolutely.
And now I want to take you back in time a little bit from before you started working at Daily Kos Elections.
Now, one of the interesting things about Daily Kos Elections is that most of us sort of stumbled into it one way or another, but you actually applied to work at Daily Kos Elections and then were hired on to do it.
So tell us about how you first got interested in politics and elections and then ended up applying and getting this job.
Matt Booker:
That's a pretty funny story.
So growing up, my household was ... My mom was pretty political. Like she would always have MSNBC on and she would always be telling me about the elections and stuff like that. I just kind of grew up following it. And as I got older, later in the life, that was a big thing for me, just following politics even into college.
And this may not come as a surprise, you know, Nir knows this, but originally, I thought maybe I was going to do a career in sports, sports media type thing. But in 2016, when Trump got elected, it coincided with me having a class in college at Rutgers, had to give a little Rutgers shout out there, at Rutgers called Political Campaigning. And that really ... I was like, "Wow, this is really fun stuff. I want to do politics for my career."
And during that same time period, fall 2016, I had another class about congressional politics that I wrote a paper that needed a case study on ... The paper's topic was gerrymandering and polarization, and it needed a case study.
So I found an article from a guy named Stephen Wolf, who wrote for an outlet called Daily Kos, and I used an article that he wrote about North Carolina's political geography as the case study. So obviously cited him. If Stephen's hearing this, I definitely cited him.
So later on, when I was ... Summer 2018, after I graduated college, I was looking for jobs and I was like, "That article I cited in that paper, what was that outlet?" So I type in that article and I find it was Daily Kos and I was like, "Oh, Daily Kos. Okay, okay."
So then I go and find on their page that they are hiring in their elections department for a research coordinator. And I'm reading the job description and I'm like, "This is my job. The universe put this job in front of me for me. This job exists for me." It was perfect.
So I applied and interviewed, and this is probably a little anti-climactic, but I just applied, interviewed and got the job, and then I was rolling on from there.
David Nir:
I couldn't be more glad that the universe arranged to deliver you right to our front door, because the three years you spent with us were just absolutely a joy.
I would love to hear what you have to say looking back as what you think some of your highlights were from your time at DKE.
Matt Booker:
Oh my God, so many. It's almost like ... My time at DKE was from August 2018, which was ... People will recall, that was just a few months before a great election for Democrats, which was a great time. But I was also kind of drinking from a fire hose, learning my first job. It was a lot, but it was an amazing time.
And those preceding years after that, where I started to really get comfortable, I kind of compare it to getting your master’s in elections. I mean, Nir and Beard, you guys know this, I mean, being at Daily Kos Elections is just ... I mean, it's a really special thing if you are an elections nerd. I mean, the group of guys that's there is just ... I mean, it's the best elections team. No disrespect to some of the other folks out here, there's some folks doing good work, but this is the best team in the business.
And I feel almost like being here was getting a master’s that I got paid to do. You know, I have a master's in elections because I got to learn from some of the best folks in the business.
And that is what I take away from my time. I mean, it was just talking and learning and giving my input as I felt more comfortable.
It was just a really special time to grow as an elections analyst, you know, someone that was just always interested in politics and then later on became a person who ... I would never say I'm an expert, but a person who just really adopted the Daily Kos Elections way of looking at things and just being very detail-oriented.
Those are the things that I'm going to keep with me for the rest of my career.
David Nir:
It was a really instructive experience for me, too, because as Beard mentioned, prior to you, really everyone who's gotten involved in Daily Kos Elections has sort of organically migrated onto the team and slowly become integrated. And like you said, it was a fire hose for you from the beginning. And what it made me realize was, "Wow. You know what? We actually know quite a bit of stuff at DKE."
And it's so funny that you talk about it being like getting a master's degree, because I felt like we were running DKE University with just one student, and you had all these professors and mentors. And it really gave me a whole new appreciation for everything that we do, seeing it through the eyes of someone new. And I loved getting to have that experience too, because it was sort of like a refresher course for me as well.
Matt Booker:
You have told me that over the years, me being the first real hire outside of the larger structure of Daily Kos Elections was really instructive on your end. And I like to think that I've imparted some things on you, I mean, how things are going to go in the future.
So it was just a really great experience, and just learning ...
I think that, to me, the thing that I think the most about when I think about Daily Kos Elections is just flat out the attention to detail; just the relentless drive to be correct. Not necessarily first on the spot, because we know there's some folks out there that just like to be first and accuracy second, right?
David Nir:
Oh yeah.
Matt Booker:
But Daily Kos Elections' north star has always been accuracy. And I think that that is something that's been imparted on me and it's served Daily Kos Elections so well for all these years and continuing into now.
So I think that's the most special thing to me about Daily Kos, is just the commitment to accuracy.
David Nir:
I like that term you used about our ‘north star.’ I think that our other guiding principle is we always love to focus on the races where the spotlight ain't.
I think the Jon Ossoff special election was a great example of that.
Matt Booker:
Yeah.
David Nir:
But I'd love to hear from you on some of the other under-the-radar races that you had the chance to cover while you were with us at DKE.
Matt Booker:
Oh, so this is really funny.
So after that election, after 2018, David Nir came to me and asked me if I wanted to start covering special elections, special legislative elections, which are smaller, not as paid attention to, but as I talked about before, very instructive when it comes to thinking about what kind of environment it is. And I jumped at that. I was like, "Of course I want to do that." So I ended up making that kind of my beat while I was at Daily Kos Elections.
So one of my favorite ones was this Texas House one from 2019 after we famously—that's the Daily Kos thing; crunching the numbers on legislative and congressional districts—we saw that Beto O'Rourke won the majority of State House districts in the Texas House in his 2018 Senate bid.
And a district that he didn't quite win was one in the Houston suburbs. I think he lost it by three or four points. It was very, very narrow. It was a district that Donald Trump won in 2016 by just a few points.
And we were all over that one. We covered that one from the start. I believe we endorsed the candidate Eliz Markowitz in that election. And I covered that very strongly.
That's a Trump term. We covered that very heavily, and ...
David Nir:
No, you covered it very strongly.
Matt Booker:
I did cover it strongly.
That was a really fun experience, just covering that under-the-radar election that had a lot of value, because that was one less district we would've had to flip in 2020 for Democrats. And unfortunately Markowitz did not flip that district. But that was a really fun one to cover, because I think that was the first really, really... Because a lot of these special election districts are just safe seats, 80% Democratic, 80% Republican, and writing about them would just be the same thing. This was a strongly Republican district, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but this was a really competitive one. And I think that I remember that one the most, because that was probably the first true special election that was really competitive that I covered.
David Nir:
Matt, I love the fact that you picked as your highlight race, a race that Democrats lost because even though it was a loss, it was still so instructive. We learned so much. And that's really the DKE way, and the Ossoff race was just like that, too. It's about taking the lessons that you learn from these races and applying them to the future and understanding that you're playing chess, not checkers, and that you always have to have a longterm plan. I think that is the most core part of the DKE philosophy. Let's just put it that way. It's very strongly the DKE philosophy.
David Beard:
So let's turn to your current profession, which is polling. So polling is an industry that I think there's a ton of misperceptions about. People have a very vague idea of polling and they have a lot of negative connotations about push polling or candidates being beholden to polling, but it's very different when you're actually in the field. So tell us a little bit about how it is working in the polling industry and some things that maybe people wouldn't think is actually true about what you do day to day.
Matt Booker:
Well, I think that's a really interesting question because in my experience, I don't necessarily think that candidates are beholden to polling. A lot of candidates honestly can be skeptical about polling. A lot of candidates can think, I know my message, I know my district, whatever the case is. But it's just always a good guide to just have data and just have some sense of where you are.
I think one thing that I would want the public to know is that when you see the topline numbers, that's not always what's in a poll. A lot of polling can be messaging or favorabilities and things like that. I think there might be a sense that when polls get released, all they ask is the horse race favorabilities, and that's it. But there is so much more to polling. You figure out what messages might work and you see what tests well. Polling is a really multifaceted thing. There is the horse race aspect, but there is the aspect of trying to measure attitudes and figuring out where people are.
David Nir:
Matt, you use a couple of terms of art there, you talked about toplines and horse race. When you talk about toplines, you mean the candidate matchup, the horse race matchup. So, for instance, Warnock 48, Walker 46, that's the topline.
Matt Booker:
Exactly.
David Nir:
So why don't you talk to us a little bit about some interesting stuff you might have learned about all those other components that go into polls, the stuff that we maybe don't necessarily see, the messaging and so forth that you were just mentioning?
Matt Booker:
Yeah. A lot of times you'll ask respondents, for example, what's the most important issue to you? Or you'll give them or you'll... I wouldn't call this push polling, but this is where you'll have a chance to say, you can read some of a candidate's high points or their bio or some things they believe in or go deeper into a certain issue and just really measure how people are thinking about things. Because things go beyond. And I think that one thing that this election cycle showed is that consistently when you would ask people what's the most important issue in the country? Inflation, inflation, inflation every single time in polls, but that's not always the case when people are just given binary options. If you read to them, these are the stakes of an election or whatever the case is, they might say, "Oh, inflation was what I answered earlier." But when you message to them or whatever, maybe abortion is what they actually think is the most important to their vote or what's the most important reason why they're supporting a candidate.
And also other things like, are you more for X candidate? Is your vote more for X candidate or against Y candidate? It goes so much beyond just what... a lot of polling is to uncover why... if there is a topline, if there is Warnock 48, Walker 46, a lot of polling, a lot of the questions that are involved in polls are, why is that the case? How did you arrive to that conclusion? Like I said, it's about the attitudes and that's a lot of the sort of things that pollsters will try to measure. And you see a little bit of that in public polls too, but I think public polls are more about the horse race, more about things that can be easily measured. I think when you get into private polling and you get into the dialogues that you'll have with campaigns, it's more about what's underneath the surface and how can we make decisions from there.
David Nir:
Yeah, polling is in a way a lot like an iceberg. For the most part, the public only sees that little 10% at the top. But I think there's another related area that the public sees even less of, I mean, virtually none of in the campaign world, and that is focus groups. And these are certainly very popular with campaigns and party committees for all sorts of reasons, but you really never, ever get any details on them as just an ordinary election observer. I mean, maybe once in a while some rando claims to have conducted a focus group and starts tweeting about it, and I feel like those are suspect, at least 50% of the time. But I would love for you to walk us through what it's like to put together a focus group. Where do you start? How does it work? What happens during the focus group? What kind of materials are produced as a result of the focus group? How do campaigns then use that information? Tell us everything.
Matt Booker:
So first I would say to your point, Nir, that when you see people tweeting about focus groups or whatever, that they conducted a focus group, look at it skeptically because those are hard as fuck to conduct. Look, the recruiting is hard just to get people to want to do focus groups. That takes a month sometimes to just recruit them, just to get six or eight people to sit down with you to talk. So it is really, really hard to conduct a focus group. So I'm so glad you brought that up because I see a lot of people tweet like, "Oh, I conducted a focus group," or, "I'm facilitating this today." Maybe, but if they are, they didn't hatch that a week ago. This has been meticulously planned over a while. These are hard to conduct, but they have tremendous, tremendous value. The language...
I talked about attitudes before with polling and how polling can measure attitudes. Well, focus groups are almost like a laboratory for messaging the types of things you might want to test in a poll. Is this something that when we look at a greater scale at a population sample that is similar to the electorate that we think is going to exist, these are things that you talk about in a focus group. I'll give you a great example, because this is something I've seen a lot on Twitter. We're all extremely online here. This is something I've seen a lot on Twitter is that people complain that Warnock did not talk in the election enough about Walker's scandals, right? He attacked more “so, Walker's not qualified for this” instead of saying, "Walker's a deadbeat dad," or whatever the case is.
I can almost guarantee you that the Warnock campaign talked to a lot of voters in the state of Georgia and found for whatever reason, maybe they thought that Walker overcame his mental issues and that was actually a bonus for him. They found that talking to people about how they actually felt when presented with Walker's issues, the best way to talk about it was, this guy's not qualified. I can almost guarantee you that that was the case, because this is where you learn how you're going to approach things when you do it to a larger audience.
And this goes back to polling being a strategizing tool. This is not a thing that candidates use to prop themselves up. They're spending the amount of money that polling costs. And to reiterate, it is not cheap. We see these fundraising numbers nowadays that are eye-popping, but polling is still not just something that you walk into and say, "Oh, we're just going to get some polling." You have to strategize and plan your budget around polling. So I can almost guarantee you that when candidates think about their messaging, a big component of that is focus groups and these things are planned well in advance. It's not a thing you threw together before dinner.
David Nir:
Matt, you mentioned a couple times that a focus group isn't something you can just slap together the night before. I would really love to hear more about how you actually go about doing that sort of recruitment and what kind of preparation do you need for the focus group and what kind of materials are you sharing with them during that session?
Matt Booker:
So there's a couple of things. That's a great question. There's a couple of things. You need a moderator, obviously, someone that you know is going to ask the questions from the moderator guide, which is the most important thing. You have to plan beforehand, the types of things you're going to talk about. You obviously let your participants drive the conversation, but within a focus group you have to have a set. You want to keep it within the realm of what questions you want answered, right? Remember I said we have our messaging laboratory, you want to have your experiments lined up almost, and your moderator is that person that's conducting your experiment. So you have to have your sort of list of talking points, what you want to unearth going on.
As for the participants themselves, I think this is a really interesting aspect of it because a focus group can be whatever: Black men under 30 without a college degree who live in the Raleigh area. Just throwing that out there. You have different groups for different purposes and you may adjust your moderator's guide and tell your moderator, "These are the things that we want to talk about here with this group, but we want to have a little bit of a different dialogue with white women with a college degree from the Charlotte suburbs."
You can get really granular in who you talk to. Like I said, the big thing here, the big takeaway for me with focus groups are, it's a laboratory. You want to do your experiments, you can get as granular as you want. It's not like polling, where you are talking to a sample that's maybe a little bit more representative of the population. Here is when you can really dive down and see what messages might resonate with certain audiences. And this is where you can get really granular with who your audience is and what you talk about with them. I would say maybe, this is a little quick and dirty way to describe it: With polling, your audience is in the driver's seat. With focus groups, you are in the driver's seat. You are the one running the experiments here.
David Nir:
That was extremely illuminating. And, Matt, it's really amazing because, like we were talking about earlier, I felt that I was part of a team that spent several years helping to provide you with a very particular sort of political education and now the roles are totally reversed. You just offered tremendous insight into something that I have basically no familiarity with at all, and that could not make me happier or prouder. It has been absolutely fantastic having you on The Downballot and I can't wait to see what you do next.
Matt Booker:
It's been amazing being here. This is sort of like coming back to your college's homecoming football game, getting to hang out with you two for a little bit. So it's just been really special and I am very privileged to be the only DKE alum in the wild. So it's just amazing to be here with you guys and to go forth and use the DKE University degree that I have in my future. So thank you guys for having me. It's been amazing.
David Nir:
And, Matt, one last thing. Where can folks find you on Twitter?
Matt Booker:
They can find me... As I am a graduate of DKE University, I have kept this in my handle. You can find me @matt_DKE and I will be talking about elections and the game of football and various other topics.
David Nir:
Well, that's awesome, Matt. We look forward to having you back in the future.
Matt Booker:
Appreciate it guys.
David Beard:
That's all from us this week. Thanks to Matt Booker 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 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.