Another special election just delivered still more bad news for the GOP, but Democrat Marilyn Lands’, well, landslide should really have Republicans quaking. As we explain on this week’s episode of The Downballot, this was the first test of in vitro fertilization at the ballot box since the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling that imperiled the procedure, and Republicans failed spectacularly—with dire implications for November.
Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard also examine the fallout from Tammy Murphy’s shock decision to abandon her Senate bid and why Andy Kim’s campaign has dealt a major blow to New Jersey’s political machine. The Davids then explore whether the seemingly impossible might come to pass: Could Democrats take back control of the House before Election Day? Whatever the odds, Democrats need to be ready.
Our guest this week is Lauren Baer, a 2018 congressional candidate in Florida who now runs Arena, an organization dedicated to supporting the next generation of campaign staff. Baer tells us about her group’s work to train and place staff with campaigns, including how they help staffers weather the dry “shoulder season” between election cycles. She also warns about the huge GOP advantage in funding their talent pipeline and explains how Democrats can make up this crucial gap in campaign infrastructure.
Subscribe to “The Downballot” on Apple Podcasts to make sure you never miss a show. New episodes every Thursday morning!
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. Please subscribe to “The Downballot” on Apple Podcasts and leave us a five-star rating and review.
Beard: Boy, do we have some news to cover this week.
Nir: We sure do. There was an enormous landslide special election victory for Democrats in Alabama that really should have Republicans quaking in their boots about November. Then there was a shocking dropout in New Jersey’s Senate race that completely upended that contest. And then we had yet another stunning Republican resignation from the House, whittling the GOP’s numbers down further and further to the point that we’ve got to start wondering, can Democrats take control of the House back before Election Day?
And then on our deep dive this week, we are talking about campaign staffing, how to train and professionalize and provide a home for the people who provide a crucial infrastructure to our candidates and help us secure majorities across the nation. We are talking with Lauren Baer, who is the managing partner at Arena, an organization dedicated to supporting the next generation of campaign staff. We have a terrific episode jam-packed with news. Let’s get rolling.
Nir: I love starting off episodes this way, Beard. Tuesday night, another special election, another enormous, enormous, and I think really important win for Democrats.
Beard: Yeah, I know there are all these theories out there about why all these special election victories are actually not as good news as people think or whatever, but they sure feel good when we get to do them every week or every month, so I’m still enjoying them. I don’t know about anybody else.
Nir: Yeah, I mean, are Republicans out there reading all these polling analyses and saying, “Oh, well, these polling analyses make me feel really awesome.” Yeah, I don’t know about that.
Beard: Yeah, it must be the Republicans look at all these races and they’re like, “Losing all these special elections is just going to plan,” because their plan of course is to win all these voters who only vote in the presidential and never in any other election. So losing is what they want to have happen. So we’re all in agreement that it’s great for Democrats to win all these special elections.
Nir: Well, it was especially great for Democrat Marilyn Lands, who flipped a vacant Republican seat in the Alabama State House in a monster, I mean monster, 25-point landslide on Tuesday night. She defeated Republican Teddy Powell 62 to 37. And just to put that in perspective, this is a district in the Huntsville suburbs that voted for Donald Trump in 2020 by a small 49 to 48 margin, but it still voted for Trump, a competitive seat according to the presidential baseline.
However, in 2022, it went heavily for Republicans in the midterms. Katie Britt won it by 11 in the open US Senate race, and Governor Kay Ivey won it by 16 in her bid for reelection. Lands also ran that year and she lost 52 to 45 to Republican David Cole. So this is definitely a district that Republicans had every reason to keep, and it wasn’t even close. It was an absolute, absolute blowout.
And the timing had a lot to do with it. The timing was really amazing. This was the first special election that was supposed to be competitive anywhere in the country since the Alabama Supreme Court issued that infamous ruling threatening to shut down in vitro fertilization. And this election just so happened to take place in Alabama. I mean, you really couldn’t write it any better. Lands ran heavily on IVF and she also slammed the state’s near-total ban on abortion. She had this really compelling TV ad featuring an Alabama woman named Alyssa Gonzalez who had to drive 10 hours to obtain an abortion after a fatal fetal diagnosis. And in that same ad Lands sat side by side with Gonzalez and she talked about an abortion that she had had two decades earlier in a similar situation, except of course, she was able to get care close to home because Roe v. Wade was still the law of the land.
Beard: Yeah, I think this goes to show, obviously the IVF ruling played a major role here, but I think it’s part of a broader campaign that we’ve seen continuing since Dobbs happened in 2022. This is all a piece of the bigger picture as the Lands ad, and how she ran her campaign, show. And people think like, “Oh, this is Alabama, this is the Deep South, extremely conservative, very evangelical,” and obviously Huntsville because of its defense industry is slightly less so than the rest of the state, but still it is still the Deep South. It is still an area that you would not naturally think to be like, “Oh, let’s go pro-reproductive rights as your campaign theme.” But it worked wonderfully, it worked amazingly, even in Alabama.
Nir: And Powell, the Republican, he took the exact opposite approach. He was very dismissive of reproductive rights. He told Politico, “It’s certainly an issue that needs to be dealt with, but not our top issue. I don’t think that this is the issue that wins or loses the race.” Oops.
Specifically regarding the state’s abortion ban, he told the Washington Post, “I mean, I’ll address it. I think there’s room for improvement in the law, but the law is what the law is and it’s been decided. It is in place.” I mean saying it is what it is to women like Alyssa Gonzalez who face a very grave risk to their health because of a terrible situation and have to drive far out of state to get abortion care, that’s going to be your attitude, I mean, really, it just shows Republicans have absolutely nothing when it comes to reproductive rights. They have no answers at all.
Beard: Yeah, we heard this just after the Dobbs decision was issued back in the summer of 2022. I remember articles quoting anonymous GOP consultants being like, “This is not going to be a major factor in November. Sure, a few people are upset about it now and there are protests, but this is not something that people are going to vote on in November.” We saw clearly that that was wrong. It’s continued to be wrong. Republicans are going to keep convincing themselves that this issue is not going to be a major decider for people when obviously it’s going to continue to be.
Nir: Now Republicans still have supermajorities in the Alabama legislature. One special election obviously was not going to change that. And of course, we have always cautioned against reading too much into a single race, a single poll, a single piece of data. But this contest was a perfect distillation of the GOP’s biggest weakness, in a suburban district that is very similar to many of the most important congressional battlegrounds.
And interestingly, Politico reported that Powell had filmed an ad on IVF but chose not to run it. And what that says to me, Beard, is that Republicans realize that even allowing this issue to be talked about is a loser for them. But the problem is if they don’t say something, it’s still a loser for them. They are truly damned if they do, damned if they don’t. And it’s exactly what they deserve.
Beard: Yeah, it’s a common tactic in campaigns that if there’s an issue that you are bad on, you tend not to want to bring it up because even if you bring up a good defense — and obviously the Republicans don’t have a good defense in this case — but even if you bring up a good defense of an issue you’re doing poorly on, all it does is raise the salience of that issue and make it more likely for voters to vote on that issue. So clearly I think the indication here, if they filmed an ad and decided not to air it, is that they knew this was a loser for them and they wanted to try and turn the conversation to any other topic where they felt like they could do better on. Obviously given the result they failed.
As to the point about the suburbs, I think that’s absolutely right, and looking at even the presidential and the Senate races, a lot of those races are going to be decided in suburban areas that are more pro-choice than the Huntsville, Alabama suburbs. We’re talking about the suburbs of Philadelphia, the suburbs of Detroit, and the suburbs of Phoenix. These are areas that are very pro-choice that are going to be very strongly pro-reproductive rights. And looking at this doesn’t bode well for Republicans when this issue comes up.
Nir: Yeah, we already knew that abortion was a terrible issue for them, and now we know that it’s true of IVF as well. That’s what this election teaches us, and we can be guaranteed to see tons of Democratic ads and attacks on IVF as well as abortion.
Beard: Now onto a topic that absolutely would have led the podcast if not for this amazing Alabama result, where we had a blockbuster decision in New Jersey where state First Lady Tammy Murphy, who, when she got into the race six months ago was the presumed front runner to be the next senator from New Jersey, has dropped out even before the candidate filing deadline, which means that representative Andy Kim, who was the first major candidate to jump in the wake of Senator Menendez’s indictment is almost certainly going to be the next senator from New Jersey. This is just an incredible turn of events. New Jersey is one of the biggest machine states in the country, particularly obviously on the Democratic side, where they control most of the state and a lot of the county offices. The fact that a lot of this state machine lined up on behalf of Tammy Murphy led most observers and commentators to believe that she was going to use that to win the primary and probably win it comfortably, and with somewhat of a good reason that it happened a lot historically.
Historically, if you got the line, which is the way that New Jersey does ballots — I don’t want to get into the details — it gives a big advantage to the person who gets the line with the county Democratic organization. So Murphy was getting a lot of these lines and she had all the support from county officials and county leadership, and everyone assumed that that would lead to her winning comfortably because that’s what tends to happen in New Jersey.
But Kim ran an incredible semi-insurgent campaign. Obviously, he’s a sitting congressman, and he has a lot of support from a lot of groups, but it was definitely an insurgent campaign to go against the Democratic state party and the state officials who run the machine to do this incredible race, to get so much grassroots support that a lot of the county conventions, where there is a degree of grassroots influence, he was able to win those counties and win those lines anyway, despite the push from the top for Tammy Murphy, that Murphy felt like she had no path to victory at this point and dropped out well before the June primary. So it’s really an incredible shift and change over the past six months. And Andy Kim is going to be an incredible senator.
Nir: There is no question that tons of analysis, particularly in the traditional media, constantly referred to Murphy as the front runner because of those county lines, because of who her husband is, because of the support from all of those machine power brokers. But there were dissenters, and I think we were among them, because we looked at the polling, and the polling kept showing Andy Kim in front and Tammy Murphy never released a single poll. And we saw the enthusiasm and energy behind the Kim campaign.
And Beard, you even pointed this out on a previous episode of “The Downballot.” You said that you thought Kim would run much stronger in the counties where he didn’t get the county line than Murphy would do in the counties where she didn’t get the county line. So I am amazed that Murphy bailed. She had every advantage the machine could offer her, but I’m also not surprised that Andy Kim is the one who did it because he is a singular politician. He’s just a very, very different sort of politician.
We saw it on January 6th in that indelible photo of him cleaning up the Capitol. He was down on the floor on the ground of the Capitol, literally picking up trash that the rioters who wanted to destroy our democracy left behind. And the way he got into the race said so much. The day after Bob Menendez was indicted on federal corruption charges, Andy Kim just jumped right in. He didn’t do any of the usual “Oh, I’m thinking about it” charade that lasts for weeks or months and carefully take the temperature of every possible bigwig in the state.
He just said, “There is a problem here. That problem is that we have a totally corrupt United States senator who’s unacceptable, and we got to get rid of him, and I’m going to try to get rid of him.” And let’s not forget that worked too, because Menendez isn’t running for the nomination either. So Andy Kim, as far as I see it, he beat Bob Menendez, he beat Tammy Murphy, he beat Phil Murphy, and he beat the New Jersey machine. This is going to have huge ripple effects for a long time to come.
Beard: And I think ultimately it’s the idea that you can’t beat something with nothing, and I think that has been the issue in the past going up against the machine. Obviously, Phil Murphy has been governor for two terms in New Jersey. He was very, very wealthy. They needed somebody to run for governor. Chris Christie’s term was ending. So he was able to leverage that to get a lot of these lines, and he was basically able to win the nomination comfortably because of this machine that he was able to get behind him. But I think when it came around to try to do that again, the fact that Andy Kim was A, already in the race, and running this campaign that was not about the line and the machine gave him so much credit and power and the ability to push back against something that had really become old and crickety and is in desperate need of replacement.
Kim, in fact, has filed a lawsuit against the line. That’s going to continue to try to bring New Jersey into the way that the other 49 states have ballots so that it’s just everyone listed, as opposed to this very complicated county line system. So that’s something that we may see continue to affect New Jersey if this lawsuit is successful so that we’ll have more fair primaries going forward in Democratic primaries in New Jersey.
Nir: Yeah, regardless of the outcome of the lawsuit, which by the way will continue no matter what — because even if for some reason Kim was found not to have standing, there are two co-plaintiffs who are also candidates for office this year, they definitely have standing. Regardless of what happens with the lawsuit, a number of powerful New Jersey officials began coming out against the line clearly because of Kim’s campaign, and New Jersey’s going to have another race for governor next year. I think that this kind of corrupt machine politics is going to be a central issue in that race. I just think the old ways are coming to a close.
Beard, this reminds me of something you said about a very different sort of figure, Joe Morrissey, the very conservative, very corrupt state legislator in Virginia who finally lost his primary after many years in office last year. And you pointed out that once there was a bright spotlight shined on him, the bullshit that he had gotten away with for so many years was suddenly exposed and that those kinds of scummy candidates or scummy systems; they thrive in darkness. They really do.
And the Jersey machine benefited from that darkness. And what Andy Kim did was he turned on a million-watt spotlight onto this system and the cockroaches started scurrying away. And I don’t want to predict that this machine is going to collapse, these things don’t fall apart overnight, but I think it was dealt a potentially mortal blow, and it might linger on its deathbed for some time to come, but I think the beginning of the end of the New Jersey machine is finally upon us.
Beard: And of course, if you get a bunch of institutional support, like party support and support from outside groups, you’re a lot more likely to win. That’s true in all sorts of states. It’s not a New Jersey-specific thing.
The difference is when the ballot changes to ballots like everybody else gets, there’ll be a neutral playing field where then you have to use those advantages to convince voters to vote for you. It won’t be as automatic. And other folks who maybe don’t have that institutional support will still be able to run and have a shot and maybe they’ll be able to convince people to vote for them instead. And that’s all you can ask for is a fair place on the ballot and a chance to convince voters to vote for you in the primary.
Nir: So now if we hadn’t had Alabama and if we hadn’t had New Jersey, I think this next story would’ve been our lead story too. So a couple of weeks ago we wondered whether Colorado Republican Ken Buck was just trolling when he Axios right after he announced his resignation, “I think it’s the next three people that leave that they’re going to be worried about.” Well, he wasn’t just shit-talking because less than two weeks later another Republican, Wisconsin Congressman Mike Gallagher, said that he would also resign early. And in fact, just like Buck, he had already planned to retire anyway. So in both cases, very clearly they were so sick of Congress that they couldn’t even wait another nine or ten months. And maybe the best part of Gallagher’s resignation is that he timed things in such a way that a special election can’t be held until November. If he were to quit ten days earlier, there could have been a special before then. It seems impossible that he was unaware of this provision in Wisconsin law. I mean, it only took the Daily Kos Elections team a few minutes to look this one up.
Beard: Yeah, this was clearly intentional on Gallagher’s part. There’s no way that it wasn’t. Whether it was to stick it to Johnson and the Republican Conference to not have that seat for the rest of the year, or because this way it’s less work for Wisconsin county clerks and there aren’t extra elections scheduled. I don’t know, obviously I’m not inside his mind. But he absolutely was like, “I don’t want to have a special election scheduled,” I guess, in the summer or whenever it would’ve been had he resigned earlier.
Nir: I love this idea that he’s trying to do a solid for the beleaguered county clerks. So Gallagher’s gone on April 19. On April 30 Democrat Tim Kennedy should easily win the special election for the vacant 26th district in upstate New York. And man, at that point, Republicans would have just 217 members and Democrats would have 214.
And when the numbers get that close, you have to start wondering whether the impossible could suddenly become possible. Could Democrats take control of the House before election day? Now, Buck is not alone in saying that there are more resignations coming. Just this week Fox News reporter Chad Pergram said that, “Other Republicans are fed up and could leave before the end of Congress.” That’s not a surprise, but it’s quite something to see that reported publicly, especially by Fox News, which tends to have pretty good sources on the GOP side of Congress.
And then of course there’s always the possibility of chance absences that reduce GOP numbers. Maybe there’s a COVID outbreak, who knows, and give Democrats temporary numerical superiority. Now, I’ve got to point out, it has never happened before in US history that control of the House has changed in between elections, but it has happened in the Senate. In fact, Downballot listeners of a certain age like mine might recall very well when Jim Jeffords left the GOP Conference in the Senate 20 years ago and threw the Senate into a 50/50 tie, totally upending GOP control of the chamber. So who knows, it’s not completely out of the realm of possibility that something like that could happen this year.
Beard: Yeah, obviously it still takes a number of steps from here, but given what we’ve seen so far, it’s going from absolutely not to like, well, I guess you have to consider it at this point because who would’ve thought that two retiring members would’ve decided to just bail the way that we’ve seen Buck and Gallagher bail just in the very recent past few weeks? So the fact that this could keep happening certainly seems possible, and Buck referenced a few more. Now that one other happened, you have to think he had something going.
Nir: Yeah, I’m turning into a believer here. And the question is, let’s say this comes to pass. What the hell happens then? Now, Beard, you and I, I think we like to hold ourselves out as election experts. We do a decent job. I’m not an expert on congressional procedure. So I reached out to the expert on congressional procedure, Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute.
He graciously agreed to an interview, and he laid out what he thinks Democrats’ next steps should be in case they can actually take temporary control of the House. And the key thing that he emphasized is that they have to be prepared in advance. They have to lay a lot of groundwork ahead of time because ultimately they’re only going to have a short amount of time to act.
But let’s say it happens, they gain a numerical advantage, they install Hakeem Jeffries as Speaker, then what? Well, Ornstein said that Democrats would want to pass what he described as a carefully crafted reconciliation bill that could pass the Senate with just 50 votes.
Reconciliation is one of the ways that you can get around the filibuster in the Senate, it was used for instance to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, one of Joe Biden’s signature priorities. So if you can put together a package of popular legislation, you get it through the House, Ornstein said he was very confident that Jeffries could get it through the House.
But then you have to put something together that appeals to either Manchin or Sinema or maybe even Murkowski, who recently said maybe she’d become an independent. So on the top of Norm Ornstein’s wish list, he said a permanent fix to the debt ceiling so that Republicans can’t hold our nation hostage by threatening to default on our loan obligations, a permanent extension of the expanded child tax credit that happened during COVID that was extremely popular and also very successful in reducing child poverty. He also said Democrats would want to include some spending to ensure that there would be no government shutdown just before election day. And then probably the most popular thing of all would be funding for Ukraine.
Beard: Yeah, I think the debt ceiling one in particular would be very tough with such narrow majorities. We’re assuming here that Democrats had basically a one-seat majority in the House and has their current 51-49 in the Senate. I think that, one, given how some Democrats have been reluctant to go out with getting rid of the debt ceiling would be very surprising to me. But I do think the expanded child tax credit, ensuring no government shutdown, and Ukraine funding are things that you could get Democrats pretty much unified behind in this theoretical scenario where you had even a couple of days of a House Democratic majority that could actually pass that.
And the important thing, of course, is that you pass something that the Senate can then pass unamended, because as we see in lots of legislation as it bounces back and forth between the two chambers, you may not have that option here. So whatever passes the House needs to be able to pass the Senate unamended.
Nir: Right, and this I think is part of the reason why Ornstein was emphasizing that Democrats have to get prepared now because this would require tons of coordination between both chambers and lots of communication between Schumer and his caucus and Jeffries and his caucus. But we have seen Democrats pull together, even despite having some really obstinate members like Joe Manchin, pull together and pass tremendous stuff with very narrow majorities. So I think it’s very plausible that they could do something like that again.
Now, the odds of this scenario coming about in the first place obviously are not high, but the reason why it’s worth thinking about all this is that Democrats would have a chance to pass popular legislation that would help the American people, and they’d also have the chance to show the country what it’s like when the grownups are back in charge. That Congress is not just an institution that devolves into endless infighting, that it can actually get stuff done. And if they can do that, then that would help them make their case in November so much stronger as to why the American public should return Democrats to the House in 2025, and the Senate as well with real solid majorities.
Beard: Yeah, and the benefit of course in this, again, unlikely but possible scenario is that you don’t have to then govern the whole two years where you often end up having to pass unpopular policies. You can just pass some popular stuff that you’re very unified about in that short period of time and then be like, “Hey, look at us. We’re competent. We’re not like those crazy people over there who have been running a soap opera for the past year and a half.” So who knows if this ever comes anywhere close to happening, but it would certainly be a fascinating scenario to watch play out and good for the American people if some of these popular policies could pass.
Nir: Well, that does it for our weekly hits. Coming up on our deep dive, we are talking to Lauren Baer, the managing partner at Arena, which is an organization dedicated to training the next generation of candidates, and crucially, campaign staffers. It’s a very overlooked topic on the left, one we are extremely eager to talk about. So please stick with us after the break.
Nir: Joining us this week on “The Downballot” is Lauren Baer, who is the managing partner for Arena, an organization dedicated to convening, training, and supporting the next generation of candidates and campaign staff. Lauren, thank you so much for coming on the show this week.
Lauren Baer: Thank you so much for having me. I’m thrilled to be here.
Nir: So why don’t you just start us off with telling us about Arena’s mission statement and what exactly it is that you folks do?
Baer: Sure, happy to. So at Arena, we like to think of our work as building the teams that power Democratic victories. So we really start with the premise that it takes great candidates to win elections, but great candidates can’t win elections on their own. They need teams of qualified, well-trained campaign staff behind them, and those campaign staff need to represent the diversity of the coalition that elects Democrats, and the diversity of the places where our candidates are running.
So we really do four things at Arena. The first thing that we do is recruit and train campaign staff and organizers. We’ve trained at this point over 7,200 people since 2019, both through our flagship Arena Academy program and our higher-level Arena Academy 201 programs. And most of those people are women, most of them are people of color, and more than 30% of them are members of the LGBTQ+ community. So we are bringing new and diverse people into the campaign staff pipeline.
The second thing we do is we help those folks find jobs up and down the ballot, all the way from local city council and county clerk elections all the way up to the presidential because we know that it’s not enough just to equip them with skills. We want people doing the work and we want them doing the work not just one cycle, but cycle over cycle. So we’ve got a careers team who is there dedicated to helping get our trainees into jobs. We run a jobs board, the only completely free jobs board in the progressive ecosystem, and we’ve got a talent bank of people who are looking for work this cycle.
The third thing that we do is the Arena Toolbox. This is our suite of free downloadable campaign tools. We are nearing 100 of those. It’s everything from how to build your campaign plan to how to buy digital ads. The premise behind this is that the amount of money your campaign has shouldn’t be a barrier to access to having absolutely the best tools that you need to win. So at this point, those have been downloaded more than 77,000 times by candidates and staff alike.
And then the final thing that we do in a handful of races, particularly state legislative races, is place what we call Arena Staff Fellows. These are folks who’ve been through our training programs that we put on races in places where we think democratic majorities are within reach or need to be defended at the state legislative level. So think of states like Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. We look for races where there are staffing gaps, and we fully fund the salary and benefits of our staffers to work on those races. And they’ve proven really, really decisive to victory in some of the key races we’ve seen over the past couple of years. So that’s us in a nutshell, and I’d love to chat more.
Beard: Yeah, well, I definitely want to get into some of the specifics of what you just talked about, but since we’re talking about how people get jobs, I do love to hear from our guests how they got involved in the progressive movement, into your organization specifically, and ended up where you are today.
Baer: Sure. So I had a very circuitous route into the role that I have now. So if you rewind a decade plus in my career, I was trained as a lawyer, worked as a practicing lawyer, also had a background in foreign policy, and actually spent six years as a senior official in the State Department in the Obama administration, advising Secretary Clinton and Secretary Kerry and US Ambassador to the UN Samantha power. Then the 2016 elections happened, and for me, that was really the start of my transition from the world of policy to the world of electoral politics. For me, that was driven really by two things happening in close succession. The first was me giving birth to our first daughter in October of 2016, and then a few weeks later, Donald Trump was elected president, and I was faced with this scenario where my entire vision of what the future looked like and the world that my daughter was going to be brought up and was just totally upended.
Long story short, that led me home to my state of Florida where I was raised and I ran for office myself in the 2018 election cycle. I was the Democratic nominee for Congress in Florida’s 18th district. And while I didn’t win that race, I came out really with just a profound appreciation for how difficult it is to run a campaign, and particularly all of the support that candidates need around them to be successful. I think there’s this mythology on the left that what it takes is a highly skilled and charismatic candidate, and that’s enough to carry us across the finish line. But there’s really so much more going on behind the scenes. So when Arena, which was an organization that had supported me in my own campaign in 2018, came at a point where they were undergoing a leadership transition and asked me to step into the role, it was really a no-brainer to me because I understood on a very personal basis the importance of building this behind the scenes infrastructure if we want to win up and down the ballot.
Nir: Lauren, I want to get back to the academies that you talked about, and you have a few different academies targeted in different directions at different folks. So take us through each of them and what folks would learn if they enter and go through one of your academies.
Baer: Yeah, so our flagship program is called Arena Academy. This is the program that is there for anyone, whether they have any experience in politics at all, and we train folks in Arena Academy on seven different tracks. We train folks to be campaign managers and finance directors, to work in data, digital, and communications, to work as organizers, or to work as organizing directors. This is a five-day long boot camp-style program where people are going to be engaged in a really hands-on learning experience.
Some of that learning is going to take place in your track, which means with the cohort of people who are learning to take on a similar role that you are, so classes are just for the campaign managers or just for the finance directors. And some of it is going to take place in larger plenary sessions where we bring everyone together to talk about topics and issues that are relevant no matter what role you hold. For example, how to build diverse and representative teams or how to combat mis- and disinformation in this very challenging campaign environment that we’re in.
And then we spend the last day and a half of that program in what we call the Arena Cup, which is really unique to Arena. This is a campaign simulation where we give folks real districts and real data to work with, fake candidates, and we build teams, seven people, one from each track. You’ve got 24 hours to build a pathway to victory, present it to a panel of judges, and the winning team walks away with the Arena Cup. And what we find out of this training is people really come out with skills, a ton of skills, hard skills, also soft skills.
But more than that, they come away with a sense of community. I think so many people come to Arena because they want to find their place in politics, but they also really want to find their people. They want to find other folks who like them are concerned about what they’re seeing in their communities, who are wanting to be motivated to action. What we hear from our trainees is that the community that they take with them is sometimes just as valuable as what they’ve learned in any of the classes.
Nir: I think the Arena Cup sounds super awesome and a ton of fun, almost like an immersive experience. I would want to do it.
Baer: It’s really great and people really, really get into it. And one of the coolest things is just seeing what people are able to create in 24 hours, particularly folks who come into these trainings having never done anything with politics before. We see incredible creativity come out of this, incredible digital, great messaging.
And what it always reminds me of is the importance of bringing fresh perspectives to politics and to how we run our campaigns. I think it’s easy for those of us who’ve worked in this space for a long time to think that it’s the conventional wisdom that’s going to take us across the finish line. And every time we run an Arena Cup simulation, it reminds me of what happens when we bring new and diverse voices into the space and how much benefit we all can get from that.
Beard: Now, the first few things that you talked about I think all fit into a really, really valuable, but sort of in the same box around the training and the academies and the toolbox and all of that. And then you’ve got the staff fellowships, which I think seem a little bit different and seem a little bit more into inserting Arena into some of these campaigns a little bit more in terms of funding that you’re providing for these fellows. So can you tell us where that came from, how Arena decided to get involved in that way and make that jump into actually funding positions versus just focusing on training?
Baer: Yeah, sure, I’m happy to talk about that. And we really start from the premise here that staff is important, and who you have on your campaign and how many staff you have on your campaign and the roles that they are filling can really be the difference between a win and a loss, particularly in a downballot race. When we’re talking about state legislative races, most of these races around the country, the ones that are in actually competitive districts, so not ones that are gerrymandered to be definitively Democratic or definitively Republican, but actually competitive districts, are decided by margins of a few thousand or even just a few hundred votes.
Those are races where another body can be the difference between a win and a loss. So what we realized is that we have this incredible cadre of people that we have supported, and also at the same time, in these critically important state legislative races, there were massive staffing gaps, because the Democratic Party has traditionally under resourced state legislative races compared to the top of the ticket.
In most cases, state legislative candidates have at most one paid staffer serving a kind of jack-of-all-trades role in their campaign. So we really went through a multi-stage process of determining where we wanted to invest. First, we looked to narrow in on those states, this was last cycle, where we thought a Democratic majority was within reach. We narrowed in on Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Then we worked very, very closely with the legislative caucuses in those states and said, “Tell us this particular districts that you think are going to be difference makers, that are going to be your majority-making districts. And on top of that, tell us which of these districts have a staffing gap.” Once we got to that smaller cohort, we then provided each campaign with a slate of folks that we had trained who were qualified to fill those roles, and the campaigns interviewed. They selected who they wanted, but we funded that person’s role.
And we’re talking about a relatively small investment in the realm of political investments, about $25,000 per race. So if you think about that in the context of how this kind of money is usually spent in campaigns, that might buy you, depending on the media market you’re in, anywhere from two to four minutes of airtime in the final weeks of the race, and our thesis going in was that would be money, much more valuably spent on an extra body on a campaign. And that was really borne out in the results that we had last cycle. We won in 76% of the races that we invested, often by incredibly small margins, including the seat that was decisive for Democrats taking back the majority in the Pennsylvania House, which if I remember correctly, believe was a margin of 52 or 62 votes. So incredibly, incredibly small. So all of this at heart goes back to our belief that people and who you have on races is absolutely essential to winning.
Nir: I had to look that one up. It was Missy Cerrato in Pennsylvania’s 151st State House District. According to Wikipedia, she won by 58 votes, and of course, Democrats took back the Pennsylvania House by literally just one seat. So your emphasis on the marginal impact that you can make in that marginal race, I mean really fewer than five dozen votes, it’s really dramatic.
Baer: Yeah, and when you think about all that’s on the line in state houses, the implications of this are huge. And here I want to point out this is something Republicans have been keyed into for decades. States now in a post-Roe world are absolutely fundamental to determining our reproductive rights and freedoms. They exercise a huge degree of control over things like gun violence prevention. They’re absolutely relevant to debates that we’re having over racial justice, environmental justice, and climate change. So that’s more than just one state house seat on the line there. That’s really the future of millions of Pennsylvanians right there, and you see a massive shift in outcomes based on a small investment and the presence of a single staffer.
Nir: So I would love to hear from you your thoughts on how campaign staff and staffing have changed over the years, in particular with regard to professionalization, because you’re talking about both bringing in completely new people, but also you’re training them in ways that probably for the most part didn’t really exist a few decades ago.
Baer: Yeah, 100%. I would say that this idea of professionalizing campaign staff is quite new, new in the past decade. For a long time, there had been this belief that, again, it took sort of a charismatic candidate and a ragtag team of volunteers who didn’t necessarily need any specialized training or expertise in order to win. And it’s a little bit strange, if you think about that, right?
There aren’t really that many other fields that are dealing with something that is so consequential as who is holding power at a federal, state, and local level, where they say, “Let’s actually hand over the running of this thing to people who have no formal training. Let’s not invest anything in human capacity.” So Arena is really, I think, part of a larger movement, but the leading organization in a movement to professionalize the ranks of who is working in politics, to say that this isn’t just a volunteer role, that it’s a real job, that it’s a job that requires particular skills, that those skills require investment and training.
And that also if we’re going to have a return on that investment that we’re making in training, well then by golly, we really would like people to stay in this work for longer than one election cycle, which means we have to think about things like how do we bridge the gap for folks who are working in campaigns from one cycle to the next?
Politics used to be a job, pardon me here, for rich, white, cisgender men who could afford to work for free or very little pay and then take a 6 or 12-month wage gap between their next role during the shoulder season. We fundamentally believe that, as I said before, winning requires campaign teams that look like America, that look like the Democratic coalition. So that means not just professionalizing the skills, but also leveling up on pay and benefits and treatment on campaigns so that these are competitive jobs that attract and retain talent.
Nir: Lauren, you used an interesting phrase just now that I’ve usually heard in the context of travel, but you talked about the shoulder season, which of course is that downtime between November and whenever the next set of campaigns gets revved up. And that’s always been a great concern of mine, personally. What do you do with folks who during that time you’ve asked them to devote their lives, probably uproot them, move to a different state or a different city, and then November comes, win or lose, and you’re probably out of a job? So I would love to hear you talk about efforts on how to fill that gap to make sure that we’re not just letting people go and then trying to grab them back six or eight months later.
Baer: Yeah. So I will tell you about some of the things that we are doing now, and then I’m also happy to talk about some of the bigger things that I think need to be done in the ecosystem. So one thing that we’re doing at Arena is really focusing in on that shoulder season as key training time. This year, or I should say last year, in 2023, we held our first training of the off-year earlier than we ever had. We held it in February of the off-year, right after the midterm elections.
And conventional wisdom would be that people are really tired then, and they want to take a break; you’re not going to see a lot of folks thinking about what’s happening a year plus from then in the following November. We found the opposite to be true. We saw the highest application rates we had ever seen, more than four times the number of people applying for slots we had to fill.
So we took the approach that if there was good talent coming off of races, that was really the time to bring them in, see where they needed to grow their skills and capacities so that they could not only land that next job but have that next job be a step up another rung on the ladder for them. So that’s one thing that we did. The second thing we did is we pair that with direct career coaching, helping people prep their resumes, doing interview training. Again, this might seem really basic, but these are all skill sets that have been largely neglected in politics and really need to be taught. A number of folks we work to move into C4 or other movement org jobs where they can find year-round work or organizations that are hiring or doing early cycle work like voter registration, for example.
But what I think really needs to be done and where I think Democratic funders need to direct their attention is actually making it financially viable for folks to survive this period from November until the following spring or fall when the next cycle’s campaigns are really hiring. We have seen Republicans do this really, really well either by, in a systematic way, finding folks C3 and C4 work or by providing fellowships and living stipends. And I think it’s important that we think really seriously about the excellent talent that we have on our side and what it’s going to take to retain them so that they can help notch not just the first victory they helped achieve, but the next one, and the next one, and the next one after that.
Beard: I’ll just say that I lived shoulder season earlier in my career. I was laid off… I mean the campaign ended, so I don’t know if laid off is quite the right term, but the campaign ended in 2008, in 2010, and in 2012, and in each case I was unemployed for between five and eight months until I got my next job, which was not my most productive month. So I would’ve loved some training, some fellowships, something to help me bridge those gaps. So those seem like great things to have happening. Now, one thing that you’ve mentioned is how Republicans have tackled this problem. I know that you recently commissioned some research comparing the differing approaches between Democrats and Republicans in terms of this talent pipeline. So can you walk us through what you found there?
Baer: Sure, happy to. And what was really interesting to me, first of all, given just how important talent is to victory, was the fact that before we commissioned this study, which we did with Dahlberg Advisors, no one had ever done a systematic landscape analysis of talent pipeline organizations on the left and the right and compared them and looked at differences in the way that we recruit, cultivate, and retain talent.
So a couple of key findings from this study. The first is that Republicans spend a heck of a lot more money on this work than we do, to the tune of four times as much as we do. They also invest much more substantially in their talent pipeline organizations. So their largest talent pipeline organization, one we’ve all heard of, Turning Point USA, is larger than the top 10 Democratic talent pipeline organizations combined. So basically we’re putting a bunch of tiny Davids up against a huge Republican Goliath here.
But what’s also interesting that we found just in the context of overall campaign spending, is that closing that gap between how much Democrats are spending and how much Republicans are spending would require just a 1 to 2% shift in overall political spending. So if for every dollar that we plan to spend politically this cycle we just reallocated one penny away from, let’s say, advertisements to the talent pipeline, we would close that gap.
Two pennies, we’re exceeding Republicans and we are making more investments in our future. So as I look at this study, it shows us both that we are not comparatively well positioned right now, but that there is an opportunity for us to seize in terms of closing that gap and better positioning ourselves for victories in the future.
Nir: Well, I could not agree more strongly about the need to redirect resources and close that gap. We have been talking with Lauren Baer, the managing partner at Arena, an organization dedicated to training the next generation of campaign staffers. Lauren, before we let you go, where can folks find out more about Arena? Where can people follow you and your organization on social media? And importantly, where can folks apply if they are interested in one of your training programs or where can they find your jobs board?
Baer: Well, I am so glad that you asked. We have coming up in just under a month Arena Summit, which is our one and only in-person training program this cycle. We will be live in the flesh in Atlanta, and registration is open for that until April 4th. So you can visit arena.run/summit to learn more and register. All are welcome. We would love you there in that incredibly important and consequential swing state, you can find us online @ArenaSummit, which is on X, on Instagram, and on Facebook as well. And in general, visit our website, arena.run. You will find our jobs board there, you will find information about other training programs in the future, and you will find information about our toolbox. We want to help you find your place in politics. We know that the future depends on all of us, and we’re there to help you find the perfect role.
Nir: Lauren, thank you so much for coming on “The Downballot.”
Baer: Thank you so much for having me.
Beard: That’s all from us this week. Thanks to Lauren Baer for joining us. The Downballot comes out every Thursday everywhere you’re listening to podcasts. You can reach out to us by emailing [email protected]. 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 editor Drew Roderick, and we’ll be back next week with a new episode.
