Lies, Damn Lies, and Metrics

Everyone's 2022 election crystal ball is blurry, plus why I suspect the Democrats' apparent advantage in digital organizing is overstated. Also, about the punches that Nancy Pelosi pulled.

Another turning point election is just three weeks away, and I’ll be damned if I know what will happen. The signals are all mixed.

• Early voting has started, and in the battleground state of Georgia, the first day totals are higher than they were in 2018. Is this a sign that the much-heralded red wave of Republicans, highly motivated by two years of Democratic governance, is coming? Or are Democrats taking more advantage of early voting because they are justifiably worried about long lines on Election Day thanks to the restrictive new laws passed by the GOP-controlled legislature last year? We don’t know.

• The latest New York Times/Siena poll found that 49 percent of likely voters were planning to vote for a Republican to represent them in Congress, compared with 45 percent who planned to vote for a Democrat, a seemingly big shift from a month ago, when Dems held a one point advantage in the same survey. Did Democrats peak too soon in June/July/August, when everything from the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, the January 6th committee hearings and the FBI search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate was focusing attention to their benefit? Maybe, though perhaps we shouldn’t let one poll of just 792 voters shape perceptions. FiveThirtyEight’s rolling average of national polls asking the same question currently shows Democrats ahead by a nose, 45.5% to 44.7%. Breathe!

• Is the abortion issue going to motivate more young women to vote than in past cycles? Will many Republican women swing left? If you are following Tom Bonier of the Democratic data firm Targetsmart, there are signs in voter registration and absentee voting trends that show that more women than men are showing up so far. In Wisconsin, the gender gap in absentee voting has upped from +14.8% women in 2018 to +15.8% so far this year. In Idaho he says it has grown from +8.2% women in 2018 to +12.1% in 2022. We’ve already seen this trend upset expectations in special elections in Alaska and New York, and in the Kansas constitutional ballot vote. But political habits and culture are hard to change.

• In a variety of states, including Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Idaho, Michigan, Montana and Pennsylvania, prominent Republicans have decided to publicly endorse Democrats running either because they explicitly fear election deniers winning office or want to speak up for moderation, as I’ve been tracking on Twitter on this thread. Either way, they are creating a permission structure for non-MAGA Republicans to break with their party. Will that be decisive? Or will the trickle of weak Democrats attracted to Republican claims about the economy and indifferent to election denialism balance that out? According to today’s New York Times, 23% of Republicans say they are uncomfortable voting for a 2020 election denier, while 12% of Democrats say they ARE comfortable with that position. Gulp!

• Lastly, what about the wild cards? It’s certainly looking possible for independent candidate Evan McMullin, a never-Trump ex-Republican, to defeat Republican Senator Mike Lee in Utah, especially with state Democrats effectively ceding the race to McMullin. On the other hand, in Oregon, it sure looks like Betsy Johnson, a conservative Democratic state lawmaker running as an independent is going to siphon enough votes away from Tina Kotek to tip the governor’s race to Republican Christine Drazan. There are Libertarian candidates on dozens and dozens of House ballots; in close races they could easily have a disproportionate impact on the outcome.

There’s one positive thing to be said about how 2022 has evolved. In a quote-unquote normal mid-term election, we’d all be positive that the party in the White House was about to take a shellacking. That that isn’t the case is a testament to many things, first and foremost Trump’s presence and the abortion issue. If Democrats manage to hold the Senate and the House it will be an outstanding outcome; if they only lose a few seats in the House that too will be unprecedented. Unfortunately, if Kevin McCarthy becomes House Speaker by a narrow margin, we will still reap the whirlwind.

What About Digital Organizing?

Yesterday, I had a fun conversation with Kyle Tharp, who writes the excellent data-rich FWIW newsletter tracking digital organizing. He wanted to get my thoughts on an argument that he’s been developing in recent issues, which is that Democrats have developed a valuable and little-heralded advantage over their opponents when it comes to tech in campaigns. In particular, he points to the fact that Democrats are not just outspending Republicans in digital ads, they’re spending the money smarter. For example, they’re all over Snapchat, which has deep reach into younger audiences, while Republicans are largely absent. And they’re also doing much more with TikTok, he argues. Meanwhile, Republicans are under-performing in online grassroots fundraising since 2020, with Trump stealing most of the oxygen. And conservative social media platforms like Truth Social are largely failing.

You should subscribe to FWIW to get the full flavor and details of Kyle’s argument. I certainly think he’s right that Dems are leaning into digital more robustly than ever, and it’s heartening to recognize that they’re building mind-share among TikTok and Snapchat users, which may help counter the big lead Republicans and rightwingers have on Facebook. But I think we need to be careful about making too much of these developments.

First of all, the effects of political advertising are greatly overstated compared to how much attention we give to ads and ad buys. A powerful ad can move attitudes a few points, but these effects generally wear off over time. Worse, the bulk of paid political media appears late in the election cycle, when its effects are weakest and where the people campaigns are trying to reach are the handful who are paying the least attention and haven’t made up their minds. As longtime Democratic fundraising maven Hal Malchow has been arguing, it would make much more sense to spend money on convincing voters to become Democrats, since party identification drives voter decisions far more than individual candidate qualities or positions. In 2000, 36% of the electorate voted for candidates of different parties, he notes; in 2020 that had dropped to just 11%.

There are a host of tactics built on digital data and analytics (including advertising, influencer marketing, relational organizing and field targeting) that can extract a marginal improvement in turnout, which is why it makes sense to pay attention to them. But this is like searching for your keys under the lamppost because that's where the light is brightest. It's somewhat astounding how much attention we give to these tactics compared to how little we talk about face-to-face voter engagement—which is the most effective way of earning a vote—or year-round community organizing. But as Daniel Laurison explained in his recent book Producing Politics, field has the lowest status and visibility in campaigns; practitioners seeking to make a career in politics view field as only for entry-level grunts. And as a new meta-study of the persuasive effects of paid media from Swayable found, it doesn’t matter very much what topics or which voters ads target; the different effects are so small to be marginal. Moderates are swayed by the same ads as everyone else; ads meant to be seen by Black or Latino voters have equivalent effects on groups they aren’t made for. And the conventional wisdom about avoiding controversial issues or playing just to “median voters” has no actual basis.

Years ago, when I was running the techPresident.com group blog, we started tracking things like how many followers a candidate had on Twitter, Facebook or MySpace (!), or how many YouTube views they were getting, and we got Aaron Swartz to build us a simple tracker off of Technorati’s API that showed which candidates had the most incoming links from bloggers (see above, and go here along the right rail if you want to dip in further). For a while, we tracked these metrics closely because in the early days of social media, voter engagement was almost entirely organic. But as soon as campaigns started catching on and investing in boosting their numbers, these metrics stopped being meaningful indicators of voter or activist enthusiasm. These days most of the metrics that outsiders can access are measures of push, not pull. It’s interesting if a particular campaign or interest group is spending money on ads somewhere, but the number of impressions they are getting is an extremely blurry indicator. And that’s not just because all kinds of actors are gaming the system. I’ve asked digital practitioners a number of times what it really means if some piece of media gets a million or a hundred million “impressions.” How many “impressions” does digital media generate a day? No one has an answer. So while a hundred million or a billion impressions sounds like a big number, without a denominator it is nothing more than another vanity metric.

Pelosi’s Pulled Punch

There’s no question that the most arresting revelation of last Thursday’s hearing of the January 6th select committee was the footage it shared of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other top congressional leaders scrambling to safety and then working their cellphones to get National Guard and other police reinforcements to the Capitol to quell the insurrection. At one moment earlier in the day, Pelosi hears that Trump had been dissuaded from coming to the Capitol himself by the Secret Service, to which she comments to her aides, “If he comes, I’m going to punch him out. I’ve been waiting for this. For trespassing on the Capitol grounds, I’m going to punch him out. And I’m going to go to jail, and I’m going to be happy.” This, plus the much longer clips played by CNN, has burnished Pelosi’s reputation for toughness and unflappability, which is understandable. Watch this long 17-minute sequence that Anderson Cooper showed on CNN that night; your jaw will drop.

That said, I don’t think I’m the only person who noticed some things about the surfacing of this material. The clips we’ve be shown are from a documentary being made about Pelosi for HBO by none other than her daughter, Alexandra Pelosi, who I think it’s fair to say is inclined to show her mother in only the best possible light. Why are we seeing them only now? One could argue that it’s important for the January 6th committee to lay down a marker just in case Republicans, as is likely, take over the House, dismantle the committee and start their own “investigations.” One topic they might attempt to flog is the “Why didn’t Pelosi call in the National Guard” canard, which Republican Steve Scalise has been raising. So this footage put the lie to that.

But there may be another reason for why now, which is that Pelosi is going to face another subterranean leadership struggle whatever the outcome of next month’s election. And a new book, Unchecked by Rachael Bade of Politico and Karoun Demirjian of The Washington Post is shining some probably unwelcome attention on how Pelosi has handled one of the most critical parts of her job: leading Democrats in their efforts to hold Trump accountable. Bade and Demirjian have published an excerpt in Politico focusing on Pelosi’s efforts to tamp down an inquiry based on evidence in the Mueller report that the president had perjured himself, and then later how she only half-heartedly embraced impeaching him over his Ukraine dealings. They write, “In her eagerness to get impeachment done by Christmas so her frontliners could pivot to talking about legislation she viewed as necessary to protect Democrats’ majority, she put the probe on an artificially accelerated timeline that doomed it to failure before Democrats had made their strongest case against Trump to the nation. That meant sidelining investigative threads that could have exposed a fuller and more complete picture of Trump’s misdeeds.”

Even more damning, Bade and Demirjian recount how Pelosi’s office blocked House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler from even holding hearings on whether Trump was personally profiting from his office or on the hush payments his campaign made in 2016 to keep women from coming forward about his affairs, crimes that were far easier to explain to the public than his machinations in Ukraine. Finally they show how she slow-walked the second impeachment of Trump, stifling an effort to impeach him the very night of January 6th and wondering if a second attempt was necessary at all. Tempers were so hot on Capitol Hill that week that a fast impeachment and referral to the Senate might well have gotten dozens of Republican votes, but we’ll never know, because of Pelosi’s balking.

Hindsight is easy, of course. And on January 7th, 2021, there were many unknowns—including the prospect that Trump would continue trying to stir up a rebellion (all the more reason to act swiftly, no?) and the possibility that some of his supporters, who we now know had stockpiled weapons near Washington, DC, would try something even more dangerous. Maybe Pelosi was right to slow things down. Maybe her daughter, whose sister Christine is said to be in line to run for Congress when their mother retires, knows the answer. I just doubt that we’ll ever be told the whole story, especially not by a documentarian who is a loyal family member.

Odds and Ends

—Here’s a gift link to Anand Giridharadas’ excellent opinion piece in The New York Times, “The Uncomfortable Truths That Could Yet Defeat Fascism.” Among many reasons I like this piece: how often he uses the word “organizer” (12) instead of “activist” (1). And he offers a wonderful example of how progressives can do the kind of association building that Lara Putnam and I called for in our own recent New York Times piece: “Learn from the Democratic Socialists of America’s New Orleans chapter, which in 2017 started offering free brake light repairs to local residents — on the surface, a useful service to help people avoid getting stopped by the police and going into ticket debt and, deeper down, an ingenious way to market bigger political ideas like fighting the carceral system and racism in policing while vividly demonstrating to Louisiana voters potentially wary of the boogeyman of ‘socialism’ that socialists are just neighbors who have your back.”

—No more crypto money for you, says Sam Bankman-Fried! (Why are Democratic-leaning billionaires consistently more flaky than Republican ones?)

—The fledgling Amazon Labor Union lost its unionization vote at a warehouse near Albany, 406 to 206. This is its second loss since its breakthrough win on Staten Island this past spring.

—Why isn’t the DCCC spending any money to help Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in her fight with Republican Joe Kent for the open Washington state 3rd congressional district? All those emails I keep deleting say they need my money to protect democracy and abortion rights, and this race is a sleeper.

—You have to give NY Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik her due. She’s taking tons of credit for bringing millions of federal pork home to her district while still telling her constituents that she’s against the “far-left” and all its supposedly wacky spending priorities, like, um, funding for hospitals and farmers that she’s bragging about. But hey, if Democratic appropriators think it’s ok to let Republicans request and then receive tens of millions in earmarks (something I wrote about last spring) without having to agree that the 2020 election was valid, why shouldn’t she blow her horn?