The MeidasTouch Podcast - Democratic Strategist reveals SHOCKING new election data that DEBUNKS media narrative (Simon Rosenberg)

Episode Date: November 2, 2022

On this special edition of The Mighty, Ben, Brett and Jordy welcome Simon Rosenberg, the founder of New Democrat Network and the New Policy Institute. Rosenberg is a Democratic political strategist now in his 17th election cycle, and served as a strategist for the DCCC during the 2018 election, a year in which Democrats saw tremendous gains. Rosenberg chats with the brothers about the latest election data, which contrary to media narratives, shows incredible Democratic *overperformance* in early voter turnout across the nation. Listen as we dig in deep on the numbers and bring you the current state of the 2022 midterms using raw data. Follow Simon Rosenberg on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SimonWDC Shop Meidas Merch at: https://store.meidastouch.com Join us on Patreon: https://patreon.com/meidastouch Remember to subscribe to ALL the Meidas Media Podcasts: MeidasTouch: https://pod.link/1510240831 Legal AF: https://pod.link/1580828595 The PoliticsGirl Podcast: https://pod.link/1595408601 The Influence Continuum: https://pod.link/1603773245 Kremlin File: https://pod.link/1575837599 Mea Culpa with Michael Cohen: https://pod.link/1530639447 The Weekend Show: https://pod.link/1612691018 The Tony Michaels Podcast: https://pod.link/1561049560 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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charge bet mgm operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming ontario and welcome to this edition of the mighty this is ben mysellus joined by bre and Jordy Micellis. We will be breaking down on this episode. What is the early voting data looking like? What is the real landscape heading into these midterms? There's no one better to talk to us about that than Simon Rosenberg, president of the NDN, longtime democratic strategist. This is his 17th election cycle, and he worked as a strategist for the DCCC

in 2018, crafting a very successful campaign there. Simon, welcome to the Midas Touch podcast. It's great to be here and just thanks for all that you guys do. It's pretty amazing to watch from the outside. Well, we're happy to have you here and we've been watching you from the outside because one of the things we're focused here is the data and you are like us obsessed with the data. What is the data reflecting an early voting turnout? And so I want to explore what that data is. But the first thing that I want to talk about, too, because we had been discussing this amongst the brothers, we were saying, where are all of these polls that I almost never heard of, like coming from out of nowhere, you know, showing all these Republican leads and

kind of out of nowhere, I just saw this flood of it. And you had analyzed that and others had analyzed it too, Tom Bonnier and some others, you know, and said, there may be something going on here. And actually there is something going on here. Can you explain that? Yeah. And this is, you know, it's sort of a tragedy in some ways, and it's a reflection of just the, how illiberal and anti-democratic the Republican Party has become, which is that there's clearly a purposeful campaign to try to game the polling averages and to create an impression that there's a red wave. As I said, as you said, I've been doing this for 17 election cycles. And so I've seen it all, you know, in terms of what

Republicans do. But what they're doing now with the polling averages is only in seven states, by the way, it's not universal. There's a seven state concentrated effort to gain the polling averages. And also, I think it's beginning to kick in on national numbers, too. I mean, they've dropped six national tracks in the last two days of polling. And in the states, you know, what you're seeing is just literally a torrent, a flood of these kind of obscure polling outfits, dropping polls in states that they don't have any traditional experience in. And now in seven of the battleground states, more than half of the polls taken in October are from Republican firms or Republican organizations, which means that the average has now been corrupted and polluted, and we can't really trust any, either on 538 or Real

Clear Politics, any of the state averages. I'm worried that it is beginning to happen with the national average too, but it's just like, you know, and look, what does it mean? It means that they're not confident of winning. I mean, if they have to spend millions of dollars trying to persuade everybody that the election is better than it is, you only do that if you're not winning. And so this is a sign of desperation to me in some ways. But it's had an impact. I mean, we all know it's had an impact, right? I mean, there's been several weeks of kind of you've been dealing with it.

People are kind of down. They think the election is slipping away from us. We've had all those headlines. A lot of this has been manufactured. It may end up being true. It just isn't true in all, not all the data's pointing in the same direction. And that's part of what we're going to talk about today. Yeah. And let's talk about the direction that the data is pointing in because

look, if the data is pointing in a bad direction, we would be the first to say here on the Midas Touch Network and on her Twitter account, hey, here's what's happening. The sky is truly falling down. We need this. It's going to be a disaster. Like we would message that because we tell the truth. That's what we want to do. But the data is actually reflecting something different.

And so what's the picture of the data high level? And then let's maybe try to get into the weeds a little bit state by state. Sure. I think and I think people should be encouraged by what we're seeing. Right. It's not we are not out of the woods here. This is an unbelievably close election. Everything that everybody does between now and Election Day matters, particularly voting

early. That's really important. But let me just say that the most important data we now have is early vote data. And we have to recognize that because the way our elections have changed, it's still kind of a new thing that we have this much data in this many states this early, right? This is kind of still in the analytical data world, this is kind of a new thing. And I don't think it's actually become integrated into sort of the data pundits yet, because it's kind of still a new baby, right? But what we're seeing in the early vote, because really, to me, the greatest question about the general election was, would

this overperformance that we saw in the five-house specials after Dobbs ended, and in Kansas, would it carry over to the general election? Would this energy that we saw be overperformed in the five-house specials in various different parts of the country, right? Alaska, New York, Nebraska, by seven points over our 2020 numbers. It was really impressive. Nobody thought we were going to win New York 19. Our own polling had us down three to four points, and we won by two and a half points, right? So the question for me always was, would this energy carry over to the general? And so far, it looks like it is. Maybe not as high as we want, but certainly we're not down at all, which is sort of the general view. When you look at the target smart data, which is the best early vote site, Tom Bonier, who you mentioned earlier, we are up in virtually

every battleground over our 2020 numbers. And in some of the states, we're up by a substantial margin. I have the list here. Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio, we are up by double digits in those states over where we were in 2020. And that's an amazingly good sign. And in some of these states, we're hundreds of thousands of votes ahead of where we were in 2018. At a national level, at this point in 2018, the last midterm, the Republicans had about a 400,000 vote advantage over us. Today, we have a 2.6 million vote advantage over them. So part of this is that our party now has really embraced the early vote. The Republicans used to embrace the early vote until Trump, right? And now we're embracing it and we're building these grassroots campaigns that can take our prime voters, our most active voters, getting them vote early. And then we can use the final week of the election to moving into turning out more lower propensity voters, which will create, you know, increased Democratic turnout. So this is what I think a lot of commentators, you often hear people say, well, is this cannibalizing the election day vote? That's the silliest thing I've ever heard. Anyone who says that has never

worked in a campaign. What it's doing is by you voting early and all these people voting early, it's going to create more Democrats because it allows our heavily funded campaigns to start turning out lower propensity voters today as opposed to two o'clock on election day. So I'm incredibly encouraged by the early vote data. It sort of confounds some of the polling that we're seeing that's showing kind of a shift to the Republicans. You're not seeing that in the early vote data. And so I think to me, that's the most encouraging data that we have. And it's, by the way, it's consistent across states and it's consistent on day to day-day, which is really important.

You're not seeing huge variances, right, which is a sign of the data being choppy. It's very consistent across geography and over time. And so maybe you can also let our listeners and viewers know, you know, what happened in 2018, what happened in 2020, and why is it so impressive that the numbers in 2022 for a midterm versus, say, a general or a midterm compared to a general is where it is now? So we're using, for comparison, we're using 2020 because 2020 was the election where Republicans started walking away from early vote. And so it's really the fairest comparison. And we won that election by four and a half points nationally, right? So if we're, and in places like, let me give you an example.

I mean, in Pennsylvania, let me just use my data here. In Pennsylvania, we're doing 12 points better than we did in 2020. Well, we only won 2020 by one point, right? And what that would mean is what would that translate into? So if we're doing about, which means we're doing like five points better in polling. Well, if you look at the New York Times poll that just came out about Pennsylvania, Fetterman's up by five points. That's basically the same data, right? If we're five points ahead in the polling, we'd be about 10 points ahead in the early vote.

So it's actually suggesting that we're actually overperforming our performance in 2020. And you see that in the polling. You see that in Georgia, right? In Georgia, we did not win the general election, right? We got into a runoff and then we won it in the runoff. But on election day, we were behind in Georgia. In the polling that just came out of the New York Times, which is the best poll, we're up three points. That's pretty consistent with the overperformance of the early vote data. The same thing is true in, what was the other state? Let me just pull this up. In Iowa, right? We're seeing, you know, we're hopeful about that race against Chuck Grassley. We're seeing very strong Democratic performance in Iowa. Michigan, they're blowing it out. I think it would be great to have

somebody who's working in Michigan come on your show and talk about what they're doing there. Not only are we 22 points ahead of where we were in 2020, because we only won by one point there too, but the turnout is astronomical in Michigan. There's something really significant happening in Michigan, very encouraging. Oh, Wisconsin, right? You know, we're all kind of worried about Wisconsin, but the early vote there is very high and it's 14 points more democratic than it was in 2020. And I'll tell you, anyone who diminishes and says, well, you know, you don't really know about early vote. Those are people that have not worked on campaigns. The whole goal of campaigns is to get people to vote for you, right? And so lots of

people voting for you is really good, right? And it's just that a lot of these pollsters and these analysts don't really know how to use early vote data because this is, we've never really seen an election like this, right? There's never been an election where Democrats have embraced the early, a midterm, where we embraced the early vote the way that we had, build our field operations to turn people out for two to three weeks, not for two days, right? And so this is a whole new experiment. And the DNC deserves a lot of credit. The DNC put about $75 million into building out these field operations in these states. And so far, it looks like that was a smart investment. Reminds me of some of those fake New York Times headlines that you see on Twitter that are like, Democrats are overperforming in the early vote. How is this

bad for Joe Biden? By the way, it's exactly true. I mean, I mean, you know, the New York Times Senate polls this week, you know, these are states that we only won by one point last time. Right. And we're up by five or up by three. Right. We're we're in Arizona. We're up by five. We have never been up by five points in a Senate poll in Arizona in the last 30 years. Right. And so like, so how is that bad for Democrats? Right. You know, and so it's just, you know, and so look, we weren't supposed to be competitive this election, right? We weren't supposed to be in it this late. We're just going to stop a shot. Yeah, we got a shot. The glass is half full. It's incredible that we're here. We've got to go for it. People have got to get the grumpies off here and be really proud of our party for staying in it this long and making this thing competitive when no, but when everyone had written us off. One of the things that I keep hearing ad nauseum on the news is that Dems are actually overperforming in red states right now, and people are attributing that to the overturning of Roe, but underperforming in blue states where people feel like it is safer, where their abortion rights

are going to be more protected. Is that true in your opinion? Does that concern you? It's a really interesting thing that's happening because every election is unique, right? No election is like any other election. And this election has its own contours. And I think there's some evidence that in the states like Rhode Island and Oregon and California, where we've not run massive national advertising campaigns over many months, that the Democratic performance is a little low. And which means that what that shows is that our ads and our campaigns in the battleground states have been very effective, right?

I mean, the environment is different there. Significant this will be for control of the House. It probably won't impact the Senate, but it could impact the control of the House. We're a little down in California. We're a little bit down in Oregon right now. Two states where the early vote is often the most for us country is California and Oregon. Gas prices have also been very high there recently, right? And so, and there isn't any statewide race where the money's being spent to turn out,

you know, massive numbers. There's not a Senate campaign, right? Where we have Senate campaigns, we're doing really well. And that's also where the DNC put their money in. And the places where we didn't make those kinds of investments were underperforming a little bit. It's a little bit unclear how significant it's going to be, but it's something to watch. And what's going on in Arizona right now? I saw you say that that was one of the states where it does seem like we are

underperforming a little bit. Yeah, I think we have to watch Arizona. I mean, the New York Times poll in Arizona was really assuring. I mean, we're up five there. I think we're up two to three to four there. Right. And so the early vote has come in a little low. It's come in a little bit low in terms of the total number. And it's also come in a little low. It's come in a little bit low in terms of the total number. And it's also come in a little low for us. A little bit, not a lot, like not something to freak out about, but it's something to pay attention to. I spoke to Ruben Gallego yesterday, the congressman from Arizona, and he told me that they actually feel good about where things are, that part of the problem they've had is that the ballot is really long. There's a lot of questions and it's slowing down the return of the ballots. Interesting. And they actually know that to be the case. Whether those people go from slowing to not returning, we don't know yet. But now if you look at Mark Kelly's Twitter feed,

he's been doing a lot of media around how to fill out the ballot and talking about the ballot, so they know this is an issue just from their door to door. We have a very, very strong ground game in Arizona. Rubin helped build it. Everyone knows about what happened in Georgia. Well, something very similar happened in Arizona. There were a group of people that changed Arizona. Rubin Gallego was one of them. A lot of it was through years of investment in door to door, always on campaigning. It's a really great story, by the way, for you guys at some point to bring them on and talk about it. And so we know a lot about Arizona on the ground. They're not worried. They feel like the last couple of days have been better. And they're also moving resources and dealing with it, right? They understand what's happening. They're

addressing it in their communications and in their ground game, and they feel like it's going to be okay. And everyone knew this was happening. I mean, this wasn't a secret. I mean, what was interesting, let me give you another example. North Carolina, there are two states that have actually moved pretty significantly towards us in the last four or five days, right? North Carolina and Texas. Watch Texas. Beto is now only six points. He's about five points ahead of the Democratic performance in 2020. And remember, Biden only lost Texas by five points in 2020. And he's doing five points better, and it's improved. He was down in the early vote a week ago. And so he's moved like five or six points in the early vote in the last week in a positive direction. We also saw a similar movement

in North Carolina. We were down three or four points in North Carolina. We're now up in North Carolina. So this is an example of their superior ground game. And remember, in 2020, we didn't have door knocking capacity as a party. And we have, we restored the kind of basic way we do our politics. We're doing it over weeks instead of over a few days. And you're starting to see some of that stuff. Like you're seeing movement in the early vote, which is a sign of our campaigns kicking in and starting to change the nature of who's voting in those elections. And that's one of the reasons why I'm incredibly encouraged by what I'm seeing. Yeah.

One of the groups we've been eyeing about as to who is voting are young voters. I mean, we've been seeing all this modeling. I'm sure you've seen it also that basically says, hey, if young voters show up in 2018 numbers, which is a campaign you are very familiar with, Democrats could keep the House. A, do you agree with that premise? And B, what does youth voter turnout look like at this moment? Yeah, look, I appreciate what you've been doing on this because for some reason, the youth vote in the Democratic Party still remarkably sits at the kids table and not at the center of our politics. I mean, I did the first poll ever of millennials back in 2005, and I introduced the concept of generational politics to the Democratic Party.

My organization introduced bilingual polling and Spanish language advertising, and then we introduced polling of young people and millennials back in 2005. So I've been part of this whole new coalition conversation for a long time. I am still kind of stunned how peripheral youth voting is to our day-to-day politics. It's the center of our politics. It should be. Young people turn out and, you know, it used to be that under 45-year-old voters were a swing vote in the United States. 20 years ago, it would, you know, it used to be that under 45-year-old voters were a swing vote in the United States. 20 years ago, it would, you know, we'd win it sometimes, the Republicans would win it. You know, we've been winning now the under 45-year-old voters by, you know, between 10 and 25 points. There's been a structural shift of young people towards the Democrats the way we have a gender gap. And so we would, you would think we'd be spending as much money into that universe,

right, to increase performance and participation. And we're just not making it as central, in part because young people are hard to reach. They defy an easy way to run campaigns around them when campaigns are limited for resources. Usually, we only really have big youth campaigns during presidential campaigns in the midterms we struggle. In the DCCC, we made young people a major priority. We made Hispanics and young people who are more episodic voters a major priority. We saw extraordinary youth and Hispanic performance in 2018. And you're right. I mean, we just saw the Harvard IOP poll that just came out.

John De La Volpe is sort of the grandmaster of youth polling. And that had very encouraging data, right? They had that youth performance, you know, turnout would be equal to or better than 2018, based on their own self-identification about voting. And also, we were up 25 points among 18 to 29-year-olds, which is enough. I mean, that's a good number. It's not the greatest number, but it's not bad. And so, yes, you're right. If we have big youth performance over the next week, you know, we're going to have a very good midterm. And I think it's one of the reasons why the Biden White House ended with so many programmatic

initiatives designed to speak to young people, right? We saw gun safety. We saw climate. We saw the student loan forgiveness. We saw the cannabis stuff. All that, I think, was an effort to have an older man create a greater connection with younger people. Right. And I think we'll find out if it's going to if it's been effective. I'm going to toss it over to Jordy in just a sec. But before I do, given all that we've talked about during this conversation, why do you think the media is so quick to go along with these narratives that

Republicans dangle in front of them all the time? Yeah. I mean, look, this is, we'll come back after the election and do a whole show on this, I think. But my quick answer is that I think a lot of people bought into the red wave narrative in the spring. And if it doesn't happen, they're going to be professionally embarrassed. And I think that's the bottom line. I mean, I think there's a lot of other reasons why, right? And I think that, but at the end of the day, I think a lot of media commentators, a lot of pollsters, a lot of people in our, you know, both in our family, frankly, and also in the media sort of believe this was going to be a bad midterm.

And they want it to be a bad midterm. And they want it to be a bad midterm for their professional advancement in their careers. And so every time there's anything that looks positive for the Republicans, it gets blown up. And I can tell you, as somebody, as you guys know, I've been pounding away every day and talking to reporters. I mean, I used to be the spokesperson for the DNC. I've been doing this a long time. I have been selling all sorts of stuff to reporters in the last few months that they just don't bite because it doesn't fit the red wave narrative. And so I think we also have to acknowledge that they kind of out-hustled us in this a little bit, right?

We got out-organized here and we don't, part of the reason you guys do what you do is you take the information war that we're in every day really seriously. I still think there are parts of our party that don't take this seriously enough and don't really understand the nature of the conflict that we're in with the other side. And I think we underperformed a little bit in the communications front as a party this cycle. Simon, serious question here. Are Republicans even talking about voting? I mean, I see them memeing QAnon conspiracies and Photoshop Donald Trump with six pack abs, but are they organizing in that way? It's going to be a really interesting question. I mean, one of my favorite stories this cycle was that, you know, the Republicans are talking about all these Hispanic vote centers

that they've built all around the country where our community centers people come in and do whatever they're going to do. And I have a reporter who's in Nevada, call me and say she went to the community center in Las Vegas four times that was never open, you know, and, and so, you know, look, traditionally, they don't do GOTV the way that we do, because they have, you know, their voters are more regular voters. They have a higher percentage of regular routine, routinized voters in their coalition than we do. We have to do more to turn out our, we have more voters, but they have more regular voters. We have more irregular voters, right? So, you know, I think that everyone thinks in this election that the Republican turnout is going to be very high. The question is what happens on our side. And I think that

that's why this early vote could be challenging some of the models that pollsters have that are assuming a significantly more Republican vote on election day. We didn't see that in the five House specials. We didn't see that in Kansas. And the real question now is, will the anti-MAGA majority that showed up in such record numbers in the last two elections, will it show up again? And I remain optimistic based on the early vote data that it will. I love this phrase that you used earlier, get the grumpies off. I might need to steal that. So we're only a handful of days away from these midterms now.

There may be a lot to be distracted about. But what's your message to our listeners about this notion of staying focused down the home stretch and making sure that they get the grumpies off? Yeah, listen, there's going to have to be a big conversation after the election about the pessimism that reigned over our family over the last year or so. I think something happened during the BBB fight last fall where we kind of got, went, fought with each other. And there was sort of like a anger and frustration inside the family that we never really worked through, to be honest. And I think that my view

is that the kind of frustration and anger, disappointment, it's self-indulgent. We don't have room for that. Do you think people in Ukraine right now are sitting around being pissed at their brother who was three minutes late to dinner or didn't return his text on time? I mean, we have an urgent election in front of us and everybody's got to buck up, do the work, realize that our democracy is on the line, and we'll go have all the grumpy stuff after the election. But listen, Joe Biden's been a really good president. Our party has done a remarkable job over the last 30 years. I'd rather be us than them every day in the week. And somehow we've got to find you know, I was a Clinton guy. And Bill Clinton always said that optimism may be the most powerful tool that we have in the Democratic Party, we have to regain

that sense of optimism and hope. And, you know, shirk off the grumpies, right? It's, it's become too widespread. And I will tell you, I've never seen anything like this in the 30 years I've been doing this. This is something that's unique to the cycle. I think some of this is that, and what we can talk about after the election is I think a lot of what the Republican Party and Fox News and Russia and China and Saudi Arabia and Iran try to do in our domestic discourse is they try to spread negative sentiment. They try to make the United States feel less good about itself, to make us feel less good about our country, to make us less feel good about our own party. We're being flooded with negative sentiment.

And that's why it's really important that work you're doing, where you're spreading positive sentiment, real talk, getting the grumpies off, right? This is an urgent thing because I think some of this is being done to us. We have to get smarter about the information war that we're in. Part of it is about the role of negative and positive sentiment. I think this is a really important, big conversation that we have to have after the election, which is why what you're seeing on my Twitter feed is I'm being unrelentingly positive right now. I'm trying just to present the data that I can see. I'm not cherry picking stuff. I'm not, you know, manipulating stuff. I'm just

looking at stuff and I'm sharing what I see. But I'm only sharing the things that are happy because there's an entire party on the other side that's spreading, spending all their time telling you all the reasons not to be happy. I'm not interested in doing their work for them. And we as Democrats have to learn to stop doing the Republican Party's work for them. We can say things that are declarative sentences that have a period and we don't have to use but and however, because every time we say but and however, we're doing the Republican Party's work for them. And we have to unlearn some of the habits that we've gained in recent years, the self-doubt that's creeped in.

You know, guys, screw it. Like, I mean, this is an amazing party. We're all lucky to be doing what we're doing. We've done so much good for the country. We've got to be loud and proud about who we are and get the grumpies off and go win these goddamn midterms, right? That's what we've got to do. And so I really appreciate the opportunity to be with you all today. And I just am grateful for all the work that you do day in and day out.

It really matters. Thank you so much, Simon. And we appreciate all the great work that you do day in and day out. And you may have just answered that with that incredible, I want to run through a brick wall right now and just sprint through these midterms. But what's the single most important thing someone listening to this podcast can do right now to help the Democrats win these elections? There's three important things. You have to vote early. Voting early creates more Democratic turnout. This is really important. It's a new thing. We have to learn how to vote early. It allows the campaigns to move to lower propensity voters and make it more likely that we win the election. Two, whatever you do, texting, door knocking, postcards, right, you know, phone calling, do more of it. Three, spread positive sentiment

through your networks. Four, give a little bit of money. But I think at this point, you know, so much money, the grassroots of the Democratic Party has really rallied. Our candidates have more money than the Republicans do. I think at this point, 50 bucks here or there is less important than all the work you can do. We need to create this wave, right, of labor and work and enthusiasm to close really strong. Do what you can. Whatever you thought you were going to do, do a little bit more. Simon Rosenberg, thank you so much for sharing all that insight with us. Truly an incredible conversation. We appreciate you. Okay. Thanks guys. Thanks for all that you do. At Midas Touch, we are unapologetically pro-democracy and we demand justice and accountability. That's why we're spreading our message to convict 45. That's right. Gear up

right now with your convict 45 tees and pins at store.midastouch.com. That's store.midastouch.com.