91. DNC Special: The Pollster (John Anzalone)

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0:19Welcome to The Rest Is Politics with me, Roy Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. So we've taken a little bit of a risk here. And what we've decided to do is to give you a little bit of a flavor of the convention, not by going for the huge names, but giving you a flavor of the different characters around the convention. And we've tried to get a variety of ages, geographies, and types of persons. So we've gone from a real veteran California attack dog in his 70s to one of the youngest members from the East Coast, so West Coast to East Coast, old to young. We've gone from people who are at the state level to people who are federal congresswomen, real veteran federal congresswoman in the shape of Rosa DeLauro, who's 81, and an amazing pollster who's been right in the heart of these conventions since the 80s.

1:14So I hope you'll hear all the different voices and all the different tones and approaches to this convention, as well as a little bit of an insight into their individual lives. What did you think about the process, Alistair? No, I really enjoyed it. I think they're all interesting in very, very different ways. All, as you say, giving a slightly different feel to why they were here, why they enjoyed it, why they didn't enjoy it, and so forth. So yeah, we're going to run these out. We'll carry on doing our leading every Monday, but we're going to run these out over the next few days under the sort of banner of Democratic National Convention special.

1:49so we've got the pollster we've got the attack dog we've got the veteran we've got the young buck and we also found probably the only close friend of donald trump who's actually who was actually at the convention we've got a very very interesting uh spat with him so i hope you've already left me by that the other four we did together it was just me and him in a boxing ring but uh no he was a very very interesting and very very intelligent guy but yeah we do we try to disagree agreeably but he got very close at times well um thank you alice very much and i hope you all enjoy hearing this quite unusual collection of five interviews so here we go the first one the pollster john anzalone welcome to the rest of politics with me rory stuart and me alice campbell with a gentleman by the name of john anzalone who is one of those people you hear a lot about a pollster and a pollster who's polled for many Democratic Party leaders going back as far as?

2:53Oh, God. You know, Joe Biden, 1987, his first presidential campaign. Now, I wasn't polling for him. I was a young organizer, but that's how I met Joe Biden. Okay. This is something like your seventh convention? Yeah. Yeah. And can you give us a bit of a sense of, without telling stories out of school, you did slightly say that you sometimes find this convention a bit of a drag and they were more fun in the past? Well, listen, security has slowed everything down, right? And so, you know, when you're young and you have a little more hours in your day, right? Without being paralyzed the next morning.

3:24I mean, it was all about having fun. Yeah. You first came, you were in your twenties? Yeah, I would have been in my twenties. So, my first one was 1988 in Atlanta and it was a great one. And the best thing about Atlanta was not Michael Dukakis, who was a technocrat and very dry, but it was Jesse Jackson. And his speech was maybe one of the best speeches. And a matter of fact, one of my sons was in speech and debate, and I made him watch the Jesse Jackson speech of 1988. But again, that was when we didn't have any security. Everyone was about, you know, again, I think I told you, I'm not afraid to say it, drinking and fucking and having fun and, you know, working hard and getting into the convention, usually with a fake credential.

4:04And I'm sure some of that stuff still happens with younger people. But there used to be a great black market of fake credentials. And that's how we all got in. And there was never a convention where the fire marshal didn't shut down the place on one night or the other. And then they would, you know, get a little strict. And was it also more exciting because there was less message discipline, less central control? It was more unpredictable in terms of what could happen? Well, I think that the message for the candidate was controlled without a doubt. I mean, there's no doubt that any of the presidential candidates, once they became the nominee, had a certain amount of time, right?

4:36You always have a certain amount of time to get the message right. I think that, you know, just back then, you know, everyone was just a little bit more riled up. The platform committees, we have a platform committee, which in the back of the day used to get people in trouble because, you know, there would be certain things that they would vote on that would not be kosher with the nominee. Gotcha. But that no longer happens. They've got more control. I think very rarely happens. I think that nowadays presidential campaigns are about bigger thematics. I mean, Kamala Harris, you're going to, I think, hear her talk about her being for the people in the middle class and Donald Trump being for himself and those at the top and big corporations.

5:12And there will be some policy things that flow proof points underneath. But I think thematics really drive presidential campaigns. Whereas previously, the platform committees would have tried to drive through very specific policies, child tax credits, whatever. Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, President Biden, when he was vice president in 2020, was a little different because we were in a COVID environment and we had a president who really wasn't putting a national strategy together. And so Biden laid out what he was going to do. And voters wanted to know what his agenda was going to be. And so he put his agenda out there about bringing his supply chain back.

5:46So he was actually, I think, a little bit more policy driven than we've seen in a long time. How much polling will be going on in American politics right now? Man, Americans frigging love polls, don't they? I mean, we have, what's crazy is, you know, I would say even back as early as, you know, Clinton Gore and, you know, Gore Bush, et cetera, there was maybe four or five national public polls. I mean, the Wall Street Journal, NBC had them, Washington Post, things like that. Now there's a poll every day, like literally every day. And I have no idea who the company is. I mean, they just kind of spring up.

6:19And so there's just this, you know, abundance of polls. But what about the pollsters who are working for the candidates? Regardless of whether you're on the Trump campaign or you're on the Harris campaign, it is, you know, a robust part of the campaign, as is analytics, which we call big data. But you can, for sure, Tony Fabrizio, who's a friend who's the Trump pollster, both Tony and I helped co-found the Wall Street Journal poll. You can bet that they're doing a ton of polling. What does a ton mean? Well, I think that at a regular pace, you know, everyone's different and the research program is different for every candidate.

6:54And, you know, the Harris campaign has a, again, a really great group of pollsters and Jeff Guerin and my partner, Molly Murphy and a guy named Jeff Pollack and David Binder, who's one of the best qualitative researchers in America. So they're going to be well taken care of. So give me a sense of how often a candidate will engage with polls and how it might happen and how does the briefing occur? You know, when I say robust, and I'm not talking specifically about Harris, I'm just saying my experience in past campaigns is that when you're getting post Labor Day, there's almost never a week that goes by that you're not going to have some type of poll in the field.

7:30And why is that? One is America is electoral college. So you're going to have seven battleground states. So you poll those individually. But a lot of times in American politics, you'll take those seven, combine them for a combined battleground states poll where you'll do message testing. The Republicans do this. The Democrats do this. So every week. And I just want to say, so I'm the candidate. And somebody like you would come in and do a presentation of roughly how long and what would you show me and what conclusions might I draw from it? You know, that differs from campaign to campaign. You know, Hillary Clinton, I, you know, would present to her and our polling team at a regular basis.

8:07In 2020, you know, that didn't happen. You know, we weren't physically, you know, with VP Biden at the time. There was times when we would present over Zoom and things like that. But the candidate would expect once a week to sit down and look at the polls. I don't know about once a week, but the candidate is going to get those summaries, if you will, whether it's by the pollsters or whether it's by other key people, right? I mean, she or he is going to be on the campaign trail. Like, right, I mean, they're moving constantly. So it's not as if, you know, we're no longer in a physical place, you know.

8:38So give us a sense of just completely hypothetically, but if you were a presidential candidate running now, What would be an example of something you might look at in a poll, something that might worry you, and how it might lead you to change a policy? Maybe if you don't want to put Vice President Harris on the thing, think maybe about something President Obama did or somebody in the past where you can think they saw a poll after Labor Day. This was the conclusion they did, and this is the action they took. Well, first of all, I think, and you can appreciate this because you've both been in politics.

9:07Any advice I've given an individual candidate, I wouldn't talk publicly. I think that it's really a little bit less about individual policy. I think that every candidate, whether you're a Democrat or Republican running for president, usually, what do they do? They go a little bit into the center. The Republican's a little too conservative. The Democrat might be a little too liberal. And you will move, right, and communicate on certain policy issues. But I would think about it a little differently. I think most of the tack that you would make in a campaign really has a little bit more to do with message development, right?

9:41I mean, at the beginning of the campaign, you had someone like Joe Biden talking a lot about the soul of the nation. But at the end of the day, he was really talking about economic politics, right? And again, you can, you know, chew gum and walk at the same time. But a lot of time, research will help that, you know, what is the electorate wanting to digest? What do they need to know from the candidates? And it's usually economic. the thing i always remember from back when i was working with the labor party when we wrote in american pollsters and we had a few at different points was there was all the number stuff which i don't think we ever worried too much about but where i found it very very helpful was when they were literally would test different versions of the same sentence almost different versions of the same message and some would work better than others sure i mean listen i think that you know Again, we're in the business of message development.

10:37And message development is about words, right? And it's what resonates with voters or consumers if you're working for a corporation. Nowadays, for example, we use things called heat maps on the online qualitative side of it where you may have a paragraph and people can use their cursor to highlight the words that they like or the sentiments that they like, right? And so, you know, none of these tools are quite frankly new. We used to do it in focus groups more often than not. Would you still be doing lots of focus groups? Yeah, focus groups are fantastic. Yeah, I always feel focus groups. The bottom line, for me, I think that, you know, focus groups at the beginning, middle, and end of a campaign are really important.

11:17I think that even, you know, showing focus groups ads are important as well. So listen, sorry, just explain the difference between a poll and a focus group. So a focus group is what we call a qualitative tool. So, you know, it's not projective to the, you know, a bigger population, but you really get really great feedback from people. And you literally have eight or 10 people in a room and you're just talking to them and they're voters. What would you be asking them today if you were a Democrat running in the presidential election? What kind of issues would you be tackling? Well, you know, I'd love to know what's going on in their lives.

11:48Like it doesn't have to be about politics. Like I'd love to know their day in life is right. And I think that is really important. And I'd like to know what their concerns are about life. I'd love to have a conversation with them up front in a focus group that has nothing to do with politics. For example, what would be the conversation? Well, I think the conversation would be what your biggest financial concern is. Like what worries you, what keeps you up at night? You know, things like that. If you could buy your kid something that you really can't afford now, what would it be? I mean, and I say that because I remember one guy saying, I'm here tonight because your kid needs a bat for Little League.

12:21That's really good information. Like that, you know, okay, what is it that you're not being able to afford? You know, is it necessities? Is it, you know, luxury? Is it something for your kid? So things like that. Do you tell you, I was always amazed when Philip Gould did our focus groups and he never told them who they were doing it for and they never asked. Do you ever, do you say you were from the Democratic Party? No. Do you say you were doing politics? No. No. So they tend to know because a lot of times they take a little questionnaire beforehand. So there might be politicians on the popularity rate and things like that.

12:53The evolution of focus groups from when I started, you know, 30 something years ago till now, is that they could agree to do a focus group and they heard a name on a little questionnaire and what will they do? Go and Google information about it. So sometimes they come a little too prepared. But all in all, no, it could literally be about picking which light beer you want, or it could be picking which president you want. You just touched on something very interesting, which is the relationship between marketing commercial products and marketing a candidate, light beer against politics. And I guess that the polling industry in the US has developed those two things at the same time.

13:31Techniques of marketing, techniques of sales, techniques of market research have things in common, right, between commodities and people. I would say that the campaign industry has actually moved in and helped the corporate industry over the last two decades. More and more corporations are hiring people like me because we live in a frenetic world and our world is different in terms of how quick we have to actually have action or reaction. There's a lot of crisis management to what we do, right? There's a lot of minimizing mistakes. I mean, that's really in a nutshell what a campaign is often about.

14:07And so a lot of our strategic advice or acumen and techniques in research has actually, I think, been brought over to corporate America to help them move a little faster. How, in your experience, do candidates take bad news from polls? I'll tell you what. The person, in my experience, who took bad news the best, like just a total friggin' champ. Clinton. Hillary Clinton. I mean, she just synthesized the situation at all times. Not that she wasn't disappointed, but, you know, there just wasn't anyone more smart than Hillary Clinton. But she had been through so much because her husband was president.

14:54They had gone through a lot of crises. And it wasn't just president, but it was governor, it was attorney general, right, etc. And so I think she was able to deal with bad news at a different level than most candidates. How do you think Trump will be taking, well, he must be in quite a lot of bad news. One, I think that he doesn't believe it. I think Kamala Harris has him totally throttled right now. I don't think he knows how to deal with it. He is clearly a narcissist and he's a guy who just expects to be in control. He's a bully and he can't get at her right now. And he doesn't know how to act and therefore he's acting out.

15:32We've seen this in the last four weeks, rather, in all of his rallies. I mean, here's the irony is that her rallies right now, which are so absolutely electric. I went to that one a couple of weeks ago in Atlanta. I've been in this for 40 years. I'm not sure I've been to a more exciting electric rally in my life. Her rallies look like Donald Trump's of 16 and 20. And his rallies look like a carnival barker right now. People aren't excited. People aren't cheering. People are leaving. And he's stumbling around. And he is not a disciplined guy. And you can see that he's not focused. What will your opposite numbers be trying to do?

16:14Well, I think that he has a really talented group of people around him. I'm like, no one's going to say that Susie Wiles and Chris Clausewita and Tony Fabrizio aren't really talented people. And for literally seven months, six and a half, seven months, they ran a great campaign. you know, you didn't really hear a whole lot from Donald Trump during that time. And the campaign was focused. I don't know if he was. And then she became the nominee. And I think they were just not able to control the wild animal who couldn't believe what was going on. And have they got time to arrest it back or not? Well, we sure hope not.

16:48But I mean, you know, the fact is, is that any presidential race in America really begins after the conventions and labor. We always say in politics, the bell rings on Labor Day. Yeah. And then you have two months and it is a foot race. And I think that the Democratic community right now is compared to where we were a month ago. Let's just be honest. This is like a defibrillator has been jolted into the Democratic community. And she has met the moment. They're running a fantastic campaign. And we were down four and now we're up two in national polls. Now, I'm not going to be overconfident here, but right now, you'd kind of rather be us than them.

17:31And a month ago, you would have rather been them than us. One of the things that I'm picking up from some Democrats is that they feel that everything you've said is true. But those of them who tried quite early to say, listen, we need to get rid of President Biden. We're going to do much better if we have a new candidate. feel that it's happened their strategy is working it's been terrifically successful but they're not getting rewarded and the people who are getting rewarded was the loyalists who went out there and lied on tv all the way not my lane not my lane you know listen when you're two months away from election i don't care what camp you're in or where you're coming from shut you you you wake up And you do everything you can to elect a democratic president.

18:24And that is Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. They're a fantastic team and everyone else can go fuck themselves. Very good. Now, what is Donald Trump thinking about when he's tweeting this out? So this is his pinned tweet at the moment. Gasoline up 51%. This was his latest tweet. Electricity up 32%. Airfare up 23%. And then a previous one was illegal immigration into the US with a graph, a tiny graph that you can't really read. Well, that's because, you know, border crossings are at a historic low. But this is his campaign. And the fact is, is that when his campaign can focus something and put it on Twitter, which no one will see because Twitter is not real.

19:00Right. I mean, no one's going to be persuaded by Twitter. And so, you know, this is them in a vacuum signaling what they wish their candidate would talk about. But instead, I mean, he may have done it, but my point is they gave it to him. But he's not doing that in his route, but his team is saying that's what he should be doing I think that that's what their signal so that what he is an undisciplined guy who wants to talk about Her race her gender her smarts And by the way the public polling shows people think that she's incredibly intelligent and more intelligent than him and More, you know capable to be president when he does something like he did the other day where he said I'm better looking than her I'm smarter than her.

19:44They say I'd ramble, but I'm really smart. I'm smarter than her. Would you go and ask the public what they think of that specifically? Listen, whether it's a campaign or whether there's independent expenditures, and we spend a lot of money compared to you guys over there. Remember that there's probably going to be over$2 billion spent just in paid communication in the next two months. I think the estimate was$2.7 billion in paid communication by just the presidential campaign. So some of that has already been spent. She's what raised maybe 400 million since she's gotten in. It's kind of crazy.

20:17And so, you know, will each side and the independent expenditures be testing clips of each candidate? Absolutely. I mean, that's just, that's normal practice. And independent expenditures means the PACs, the super PACs, the money going into that? Right. They legally cannot have any coordination with the campaign, the campaign we call the hard side. And so there's future forward, there's American bridge. With hundreds of millions of dollars behind. Hundreds of millions of dollars. Like I would imagine that all the independent expenditures combined just on the Democratic side, I don't know, three, four, five hundred million dollars.

20:48I don't know the number. And the Republicans usually have kind of an open spigot of money as well. And then they'll have their own pollsters. They'll have their own focus groups. Their own pollsters, their own focus groups, their own media consultants, mail, et cetera, which I think is a huge mistake. And we're going to have a tremendous field operation in every state. and the Trump campaign's announced that they're not spending any money in the states on offices, field, staff, etc. They're going to leave that to their friends and allies in the independent expenditure world. And they just assume that their people are going to show up because guess what?

21:21They did in 16, they did in 20. But you know what? They might not show up at that level because what the polls are really clear about, what Kamala Harris and Tim Wohl's has done, is they have ignited enthusiasm. And so the enthusiasm of a Trump voter and the enthusiasm of a Harris voter are not the same. How long do you think that can be sustained? I think ours is sustained. I think this is like a great Alabama football season where we can even have one loss and we're going to still come every week and kick ass. Maybe a bad analogy. That's where my kids go to college. Alabama has 18 national champs, Alistair.

22:02Come on, man. It's like Manchester Union. I could have used any one. Manchester Union. Whatever. Anyway, so my point is that I don't think that our enthusiasm goes down because, one, I think we know it's at stake. And one of our biggest motivators is to beat Trump. When you add the key motivator of beating Trump to the fact that we have a candidate who is frigging on fire right now and in herself is motivating people, that combination is deadly. Again, these two months, you know, basically the first step in any campaign, consolidate your base. We've done that. They've done that. The second step post Labor Day is always that small universe of swing voter.

22:45And it's going to be tough. It's going to be competitive. in this race in no means over, but I like her message. I like her demeanor and what she is doing to connect with voters and ignite them. This may be unfair, but I suspect you're not exactly an impartial objective observer on this. It sounds like - Except that I'm a pollster and I see the numbers. And when you see, you know, in one month, the national polls go from minus four to plus two, something's happening. Right. Let's just agree on that. Yeah, but as Brits, we can't understand why he's not minus every number in the world. We don't have time for that.

23:24That's psychology. That's not polling. Just give me a little bit. What is the psychology there? Well, I mean, you know, listen, I think he has tapped in starting in 2015, quite frankly, to the grievances of a certain class of people. And I don't mean socioeconomic. I just mean in general. And, you know, he has done the rare thing in American politics, which we've seen in other countries, Berlusconi, etc., where he has become a cult leader. I think that's fair to say he has become a cult leader and he is saying the things that were in the bubbles of people's head that they couldn't say. And now because of social media, those people also have the permission infrastructure to say those things.

24:09Go on Twitter, go on Instagram, go on Facebook. And now people feel that they have the right to say whatever is in their head when in the past people just didn't do that. And I think there was also some accountability. I think there was accountability within their own family framework. I think there was accountability within the workplace and friends, etc. And I think that, quite frankly, has kind of all broken down. Where I was leading to when I was saying that you're not necessarily objective, but I'd like to encourage you to play devil's advocate for a second. We'll think from the other side.

24:41in getting those swing voters on site those independent voters what is the big challenge just looking at technically as a pollster that vice president harris faces to win over the key independent yeah i would say that this is not just her problem this is a problem that the democratic party has had for the last 15 years which is the party has been branded so brilliantly by republicans as no longer the party of the people right rather it's the party of you know transgender people or it's the party, you know, this is this is Republicans talking of immigrants, the party of whatever it may be. And so, yeah, it's the woke, this is a DEI, etc.