February 24, 2025 • 44 mins
In this episode, Ryan and Luke Thompson delve into the intricacies of running for political office, discussing the financial implications, the importance of hard work, and the impact on candidates' families. They explore the role of consultants in selecting candidates and the ambition that drives individuals to seek office. The discussion emphasizes the need for strategic planning and the challenges faced by candidates and their families during campaigns.
Follow Luke Thompson on X HERE
Check out Luke's work at National Review HERE
It's a Numbers Game with Ryan Girdusky is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network. Find out more HERE
Follow Ryan on X HERE
#politicalcampaigns #campaignfinance #candidateselection #politicalambition #familyimpact #politicalconsultants #electionstrategies #fundraising #voterengagement #politics #campaignstrategies #polling #oppositionresearch #socialmedia #candidateimage #clientrelationships #politicalconsulting
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome back to a Numbers Game with Ryan Grodski. Thank
you for being here this week. As always, I'm one
of my listeners that all the data on this podcast
will be up on my substack and go read it
and go to nappopnewsletter dot com for thirty day free subscription.
So this week I would like to talk to you
guys about money in politics and politics in general. It's
a big conversation that we've had in the country because
(00:27):
it costs a lot of money to run for public office.
In the twenty one months the church along twenty twenty
three to the twenty twenty four campaign cycle, billions of
dollars run to the campaigns from the top of the
ballot to the bottom. Cannot's running for president alone, just
the presidency raised one point six two six billion dollars
and spent one point three two three billion. But that's
(00:50):
not all. Cants running for Congress raised three point two
seven billion dollars and spent two point seven seven billion.
Party committees raised two points one billion and spent one
point eight and super packs raised twelve point twenty five
billion and spent ten point nine billion. All together. That
means candidates and their respected committees and packs running for
(01:11):
federal office raised nineteen point twenty five billion and spent
sixteen point seven nine to three billion dollars. Now that
sounds like an insane number, and it is, but it's
actually less than Americans spent on Easter. Americans spent twenty
point billion dollars on Easter. But still a lot of money.
And it's just for federalists, not including the local races,
(01:31):
the governors that happened in twenty twenty four, the mayors,
the city councils, of the school boards, the state legislatures
which are a lot more. But it's still a lot
of money, and it's only going to go up over time,
especially people moving money to super PACs, which are allowed
to raise unlimited sums of money. Fundraising for presidential committees
actually hasn't gone up so much. In two thousand and eight,
that's when all the candidates running for president in both
(01:52):
the primary and the general and third parties raised one
point six billion dollars. Swell money in politics is very
intimidating to a lot of people who want to run
for office, even local office. They get scared. It's one
of the most frequently asked questions I get from people
who are curious about politics or the dream of running
for office, or just working in this career. People have
a lot of opinions about people who work in politics.
(02:13):
Some are fair and some aren't, but they want to
know more about the business side of politics. So that's
what this episode is going to be about. Now, a
little backsurround me. I've worked in politics since two thousand
and seven. My first job, when I was nineteen, was
working for the New York City Council. I worked for
a councilwoman who was a friend of a great aunt
of mine. She was one of those aunts who thought
(02:34):
I was brilliant at everything, even when I wasn't. And
the councilwoman had called her and said that her PR
guy had died unexpectedly, and she said, well, you have
to hire my nineteen year old nephew. He's so great
at everything. So thank you Ann Susie. That nepotism changed
my life. And then I worked odd jobs on different
campaigns I worked. I ended up being an intern for
the New York State Senator Tom Libis, who was the
(02:55):
deputy Minority leader at the time, A wonderful man. I
learned a lot from him. Sale died a couple of
years ago in prison. But actually my first two big
political mentors both went to jail. It was a very
New York story. I worked for as a low level
stabber for Michael Bloomberg's third mayoral campaign. I worked for
lots of local races, and in twenty ten, I wanted
(03:16):
to get a job working on a race I could
really prove myself. And I'd heard a man named Bob
Turner wanted to run for office against Anthony Meaner, and
so I said to myself, I have to find him.
I have to sit there and apply for this job. Somehow,
I didn't have the experience. I didn't know what he
even looked like, but I had heard he was going
to the New York State Party convention. I told people
in the crowd that I knew a little bit. I
(03:38):
was like twenty two years all at the time. I said,
you know, oh, I'm looking for Bob. Do you know
where he is? And then one person pointed him out.
I approached him cold and I said, my name is
Ryan Grodski. I know this district by the back of
my hand. I would like to work for your campaign.
Sold myself and within like maybe thirty minutes, he introduced
(03:58):
me as his feel director for his campaign, so it
was very exciting. He didn't end up winning the election,
but he did so well. You get over forty percent
against Anthony Minor, who was an entrenched incumbent in a
very democratic district. That when Anthony Minor left office like
a couple months later and there was a special election,
Bob was picked as the party nominee, and he was
the first Republican outside of Staten Island to hold a
(04:19):
seat in New York City in several decades. So it
was a lot to prove myself and be proud of myself.
Were but that's like the nature of politics in this
business is a lot of times if you're trying to
break into it to work in it, the best case
scenario is a major consultant or an elected official will
tell you you're my guy or you're my girl, and
they'll take you under their wings, and then you could
(04:40):
eventually branch off after working them and meeting all their
contacts and all the rest of that. That's what happened
to like the Ruthless Guys similar Ruthless Guys on that
podcast that they worked for McConnell. Being someone's guy or
someone's girl has a lot of benefits. The other way
of coming up is by just working every job possible
that is given to you. So after Turner, I did
(05:02):
a race for an upstart libertary named Thomas Massey. I
did his super pac, took a break, did media gigs
for a couple of years. I ended up working for
James o'keeff for a little while, which is another story
for a different time. I'm we're older. I ran the
super Pact for Chris Cobac when he ran for Senate
by just pitching one of his donors cold. The first
time I met him, I said, I want to I
(05:22):
want to run this guy's super pac. I know you're
supporting him. Fund the super Pack and bring me on.
And he did. And then through Twitter I met a
guy named Jadevance and when the Senate s he'd opened
in Ohio in twenty twenty one, I texted him. I said,
if you're running, I want to be on your team.
And then two years later Our Star packed for school
board elections nationwide at the seventeen seventy six Project Pack,
which is almost entirely funded by small dollar donors. It's
(05:43):
the most successful local government super pac right now in
the country. And that's how I kind of broke into
this business. And I say the whole story about my
life because working in politics is about taking chances. I
failed a ton of times. I've worked on insane races
that we never had a chance, that things everything that
could go wrong did go wrong, where I would have
(06:05):
to stay afterwards and clean the bathroom. And well, I
saw all the phones, volunteers made phone calls on I
mean I did it all. I knocked on doors, I
got petitions, every kind of odd job because no one
said Ryan, you're my guy. Like that never happened in
my entire life. People said, oh, Ryan's the last person here,
let's give him a break. I've was constantly the last
(06:25):
person picked for political dodgeball, but I just kept ongoing
and I still do today. It's just about trying to
open a door until someone lets you in. So last
week I sent out a tweet and I asked people
who don't work in policies what questions they had, what
they wanted to show with the business, and what they
want to know from consultants about what it's like to
run for office, run a race, run a campaign, and
if they aspire on for office one day, what they
(06:47):
should do. So I got my smartest consultant friend, and
we're going to answer them now. Luke Thompson is one
of my closest political operative friends. He is a stellar
track record of the last few year years working for
the super Packs for many people including Representative Riley Moore,
Representative Brandon Gill, Senator Bernie Marino, Senator Dave McCormick. And
(07:09):
he was my boss for the super Pac supporting jd Vance.
I have to Nudgeman said, he also worked for Jeb Bush.
But Luke Thompson, thank you for being here.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Great to be with you. Ryan. We we should get
together more often.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
Luke, I don't actually know what was your first campaign.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
My first campaign I was, I want to say, seven
years old. It would attempt to pass a bond issue
in my hometown to build a second high school because
we had far outgrown the old high school. But we lost.
My parents were pro mil Levy increase, I think the
only tax I've ever seen them be in favor of,
because literally the students were going to class in trailers
(07:48):
in the freezing cold.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
This uh y. So you were bred from this like
there was, there was no second choice.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
It's in the blood.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
Yeah. Okay. So I took questions from people on social
media and I'm going to ask them. We'll just talk,
you know, back and forth. So the first question we got,
which is the most frequent question I got, was how
much money does it cost to run for office? Even
a local one?
Speaker 2 (08:10):
And great question.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Yeah, I'll say this. It costs as much as it
does to reach all the voters in your target universe.
So if you're running for local office like city councilor
school board or even congress or state representative, you have
not everyone votes, a small select people actually go and vote.
The bigger the election, the more will vote, but you
(08:34):
have to spend as much money as it costs to
reach them. The rule I was always taught is you
had to touch a voter seven times. I doesn't mean
to speak to them seven times. It means if we
see a mailer to just see your name and newspapers
to make sure a voter remembers who you are, they
have to see your name seven different times.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of rules of thumb
out there about this, but I think another way to
think about it too, because a lot of people who
ask these questions are thinking about running themselves. Don't know
what mental illness takes them over and makes them want
to run for aufit. I'm grateful that it exists because, yeah,
make my living off of it. Yeah. But you know,
one other way to think about it too is like
(09:11):
how much money do you, as a candidate have to
put in or be able to put in to be
a credible candidate? And you know what's interesting about that is,
at a certain population level, everybody max is or should
if you're going to be a serious candidate, max is
out the one resource that everyone has under a sort
of universal communism, which is the clock. Like everybody has
(09:33):
the same amount of time per day, whether or not
you use it all for politics or you have a
personal life or things like that, those are separate considerations.
But you and your opponent, you know, at midnight of
a given day, will have the same amount of time,
and how you use this up to you. However, even
at the state legislative level, some state house races in
smaller states, you can just out hustle your opponent right
(09:56):
in a lot of places. Once you're even at the
state senate level. It's not possible to simply knock on
every single door enough times that everybody who might vote
knows you and has formed an opinion of you. And
so that's where money really enters. The equation is you
have to be able to talk to people by proxy
(10:16):
or through surrogate. The most primary surrogate mechanism is media.
Lower down, you're typically going to be, you know, having
volunteers have literature to leave it doors. Sometimes those are
the exact same thing that you mail. To save money,
you're going to want to get some phone banks. You
might want to get an office space or even a
like in a coworking space. You might want to have
(10:37):
a spot to drop things or a you know, a
storage unit. As you get a higher and higher up,
you know, say you want to run for congress. Now
you're talking about you will have a full time staffer
or several full time staffers, depending on the district you
will need. You may use your family car for everything.
You may want to lease a car for the term
of your your race because you're not going to be
the only person driving it. Probably or in fact, ideally,
(10:59):
you won't be driving at all because you'll be on
the phone calling who donors. Mostly the sort of rule
of thumb that I have for people as they think
about running for congressional district. Right, assume it's an open seat.
Assume it's you know, set aside whether or not from
a party standpoint, you you know you can win. Right.
(11:21):
What I say is, go home, go through your phone book,
go through your email, go through your classmates, et cetera.
Make a list of people who if they give you
the maximum that you can donate thirty five hundred dollars
right where you can get for three hundred. That's for
Congress or any federal office. Actually, where you can get
three hundred of those people, because the reality is is
you're going to think you're going to close. I'll close
(11:42):
ninety percent of them. You're going to be lucky if
you can close twenty five percent of right, Right, And
so you need to have a list of three hundred
people who you feel high degrees of congresence, not one
hundred percent, but seventy five percent or better. They'll cut
you a three thousand, five hundred dollars check. If you
can't do that or you don't know that many people
with that kind of disposable income. The reality is it's
(12:03):
going to be really really hard. Now you can compensate
for that by use it, putting your personal means in play.
But now you're talking about, well, how much do I
want to spend? How liquid am I what percentage of
that liquidity do I want to spend? I have two kids.
My kids I would like to go to nice school someday,
and so you know, I got to pay for that. Also,
(12:24):
they might need braces. I got to pay for that too, right,
And so you know, those are the kinds of ways
people should think about this and have really hard conversations,
because if you can't raise from your network, a solid
doesn't have to be mid six figures, but a solid
six figure chunk, right, you know, quarter million dollars between
(12:45):
what you know of people you call, or if you're
not able to cut a check that's bigger than that,
you're really going to have hard time hitting this sort
of level of seriousness that's necessary. Now. The good news is,
as you go through politics, you will meet people and
they will give your work. Of people, you'll be connected,
some of those people with donors, some will be affected
(13:06):
interest groups, et cetera. And so you can start knocking
doors and work your way up. Riley Moore friend and
client of mine who you mentioned. You know I ran
his congressional campaign in this cycle, the first thing I
did for Riley. We were friends before he entered politics.
In twenty sixteen, he sent me an email saying, Hey,
I want to run for House Delegates in West Virginia.
I've got you know, there's going to be five thousand voters.
(13:29):
Here's the voter file. Can you tell me which doors
to knock on and which phone owners to call? Did
a little bit of math and set it back to him.
He worked that list like crazy, and it wasn't a
money question that got him that election. He won it
by about one hundred and fifty votes, I think, and
maybe misrememory it may have been a little bigger than that,
but you know, it's not a huge margin, and it
was a hustle margin. Right now, he's a member of
(13:51):
House leadership as a freshman. So you can build it
on a foundation of hard work, but it's a building
block over time.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
And you can I mean money. When Luke was talking
about money that's for federal levels. For local elections, you
can get by on less money. It's not necessary. You
can do the hard work. I remember I did a
race for state Assembly from a guy his name is Thematas,
very very nice guy, very wealthy guy, would not put
(14:19):
the work in. He only wanted to work on Sundays
because he didn't want to spend any time from his business.
This man could so sell snowballs and snowstorms, but I
couldn't get in front of voters ever, and we ended
up losing. He did extremely well, shockingly well, but he
just he just putting the man hours in for a
(14:40):
local office is super essential. So okay, how does a
candidate feed their families while running for office? Do they
love of a savings or they spend campaign dollars as
a substitute.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
So it's really hard. I would like a political culture
that would sort of hate this word, but normalize people
you paying themselves out of paying a salary out of
the campaign, because I think if you're a donor to
camp to a campaign, you should want the candidate to
be working at that full time, not distracted by a job.
(15:12):
Right on the flip side, donors get really unhappy about
you paying yourself a nomenal salary out of your campaign
for federal races. It's completely legal, you know, it's I
think I don't know exactly what the amount is you
have to disclose it. Most people don't do it because
they feel like the political blowback is going to be
worse than the upside.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
And so most you can pay for like meals, if
your team is going out for McDonald's or something, you
can pay for that the campaign funds or total.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Yeah. Yeah, nobody's going to be mad if they see
some meals and some gasoline. Now, people will to be clear.
This is also where danger lies because you'll see, especially
bad candidates will over itemize things, right, So it just
makes their compliance really hard and it winds up costing
them more to sort their compliance that would to just
eat the light bulbs for three dollars that they paid for. Right.
(16:01):
The flip side also is you will see people who
will do things like buy gas cards and all of
a sudden they're kind of using the campaign as petty cash, right,
and that's where you can get in real truck.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Okay, this is a great consulting question. How do consultants
have the good judgment to know who to work for,
who will be a strong cant running for office for
the right reasons, or who is an egomaniac who you
won't follow your advice. I have worked for many an
egomaniac that will not follow my advice. I've only ever
quit one campaign my whole life from a state senator
(16:36):
who was out of control and like abusage to the staff.
As far as like a good judgment. When you're for
a lot of consultants, it's about who's going to hire you, right,
because it's it is a you only are ever really
working for two years if you're working on just campaigns.
It's important realize people who work on campaigns don't always
(16:56):
go to work for Congress or work in the state legislature,
for the govern or, whatever you're doing. It happens a lot,
but a lot of people like Luke and I work
for campaigns. We just do campaigns a year after year
after year. So if that's your life, just the campaign hustle,
you're always both looking for new work while doing work
with the expectation that your job is only a year
(17:17):
to two years long.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
I mean, that's why I do so many super PACs,
is so that I don't have to deal with the candidate.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
That is true, and you work with soup Bac, you
have a lot less anxiety moments.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
Yeah, yeah, well there's the anxiety is more donor related.
Are they going to give? They're not going to give.
I know they won't come through now, I look, it's
a really hard question. And the reality is when you're
starting out in this business, you just have to hustle
for everything right, and you can wind up working with
(17:50):
some real freaks and some real losers. And you know,
the trick is not to get stuck there, and that
requires a kind of I think moral discipline to say, yes,
I know Smith sucks, I know he's not going to win,
and thank god he's not going to win, but damn it,
John Smith, for you know, select campaign is going to
be the best damn Selectman campaign anyone's ever seen. And
(18:11):
in my experience, you know, when you do a good campaign,
people will notice. Not always, but sometimes they will notice.
And you know, so you can a campaign can transcend
its canon. The other thing you can do is just
you know, do what I do and convince your friends
to run for office. You know they do.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
I have to, Luke, No, not really, okay, I guess
I have to run.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
Exactly well, it's this is the bait and switch I
pull as I spend years convincing them they should run
for offs. Then when they finally sit down with me
and they're like, I'm ready to have the talk, the
first thing I say is, you don't want run for offs?
It's stupid. Why do you want to run for office?
You have a great life. Your life is good, your
your spouse likes you, You're doing well in business, you
see your children every day. What are you out of
your mind? What do you want to run a like
low grade fever for the next fifteen months. You want
(19:00):
to hear the same joke fifty five times? You want
to five hundred to sell the Times? Yeah, tell the
same story. Yeah, yeah, but no. I think you know
one thing to keep in mind, and this is especially true.
I think as the millennial population boom enters into sort
(19:21):
of middle age, there's no definition of who a candidate
is or what a candidate looks like. The barriers to
entry that I enumerated are very real, right, to be clear,
they're very real. On the other hand, they're not fatal
right that they can be overcome if you're strategic and so,
you know, go out and meet people, meet people who volunteer,
(19:42):
meet people who knock on doors. Assess whether you think
they're good people, whether they're smart people, whether they're thoughtful people,
whether they're hard working and honest people. You know, politics
could be a business with a fair amount of deceit
in it, but both within a legislature and I think
within a campaign, honesty is the current and see that
you have above all else. And as long as you
(20:03):
have an honest relationship with your client as a consultant,
and as long as you instill in your client that,
especially if going into a legislature, you cannot lie to
your colleagues because they will never trust you and never
forgive you and isolate you and make you miserable. Well,
(20:23):
I'll use an affirmative example. You know, I when when
our mutual friend Vice President Vance was then maybe Senator Advance. Uh,
you know, he went into the Senate as something of
a hot shot, well known entity, you know, conservative firebrand,
et cetera. But his attitude towards the Senate. We talked
about this a lot, was like, I'm going to be
straight with me. I know they disagree with me on
(20:45):
several issues, but I'm just going to act with complete integrity,
and I understand some people are going to be sneaky
around me, but my colleagues will see that. They'll see
that I act with integrity and they will trust me,
and down the line that will pay off. And he
was able to build relationships with people who were not
ideologically akin to him. Right. Susan Collins is a great
(21:06):
example of this. They don't agree on a lot, there
are a lot of issues where they go back and forth,
but they were always very straight with each other. He
really admired the way that she operated and the way
that she was very upfront and told people where she
was on things, and learned a lot from her. Conveyed
his gratitude to her for that, and as a result,
(21:27):
you know here in this confirmation fight when he sat
down and talked to her about certain nominees that carried
a lot of weight because she knew he wasn't lying.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
All right, That's a great example. Or you could be
a senator from many senators who they copied their colleagues bills,
they reintroduced them for themselves to claim credit for it
so they can get hits on right wing media. Then
they just write books endlessly in toward the books until
they do some other job, like, for a complete random example,
become the president of the University of Florida or something.
(21:57):
I don't know who knows, but yeah, this is a
great question to Paul blast One. How do you commnce
a good person run for office? And can you dissuade
a bad person who shouldn't be running for office? So
I'll say for bad people, I'll say sometimes the party
bosses or the powers that be or major donors can
sit there and they could say to them, we use
(22:18):
they use a carrot and say, listen, if you you know,
maybe you could run for a party delegate, maybe you
could have this position. Maybe you go to that position,
but don't run for the office you want to run
for it. Or they could use a stick and say,
if you do this, we're going to spend a gajillion
dollars against you and ruin you. So don't do it
like they could do. People do that. Can consultancy that
not really not so much. I mean I've never seen
(22:39):
it personally where a consultant can just bully somebody out
of running for office.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
Yeah, it's really hard. I mean, I think in general, though,
this is really asking the same question, which is how
do you motivate people in relation to public office? And
the reality is is that everybody who thinks about running
for office is ambitious. Right. They don't do this because
they don't want to win. And I think we have
a culture that treats ambition as a crime, and that's foolish.
(23:06):
They're ambitious, right, I mean, there's not a single person
who pulls papers for state legislator that doesn't think in
some dark moment in the back of his or her
mind about the oval office. Like they just all it's okay,
it's okay.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
Present the truth though, everyone. If you're running for like Dogcatcher,
you're thinking, I could be.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
Praising you know, I'm I'm three pitbulls away from state
selectmen and from selectman that I'm gonna run for that
state Senate district. I'm gonna jump over the lower House entirely,
and once I'm in the senate State Senate Andy Barley
dor because I'm going this rocket show. Yeah, that's true,
and you know what good good? Right? I mean, the
framers of the Constitution, founders of this country were utterly
(23:49):
unabashed about their desire for virtuous fame, right, for for
earned fame and and the you know they they talk
about it in speeches and their private ridings and their correspondence,
et cetera. The desire for ambition, the ambition for office, prominence, esteem, leadership, power, fine,
the hedonic treadmill is a universal. And so don't go
(24:11):
around looking for someone and saying, well, I don't like
this person because he's ambitious, but I do like this
person because she doesn't seem like she wants the office.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
Right right now. Usually they very rarely win if they
don't really want.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
Right Either you're misreading her and she's really actually quite ambitious,
or like she's just not going to put in time.
And that's fine, right, But don't try to dragoon somebody
into something they don't really want to do, because the
reality is they're going to put themselves and their family
and sometimes you through hell, but not nearly as much
as you will be putting them through. Help. Now, they're
(24:44):
also the principle, they're the candidate, and so it's to
them redounds the benefit, redounds, the fame and the power, etc.
You are a staff player, you're a bit player, you
are support, right, and don't ever forget.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
That that is so true. Consultant should never be more
popular than there candidates they work for. What is the
impact on a candidate's family and what should they expect
and how should they prepare for it.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
It's a really haution. Yeah, it's a great question. It's
really hard. So a lot gets demanded of the family
because simply absence is a big part of that, right,
I mean, when are prime campaigning times weekends when you
might be you know, going to games, uh, you know
some a while people are connunations exactly. So you know,
(25:32):
one thing is to be very clear with your family
up front, like hey, look, this is this is going
to cost us things, and have frank conversations as a consultant. Also,
you need to build a trusting relationship with the spouse,
all right, Like the spouse is never the problem, and
if the spouse is the problem, you need to get
out of a campaign because it's dysfunctional. But in a
(25:56):
situation where you can't just be like, oh he's being
unreason or oh she's being unrealistic, Like you're asking way
more of the spouse than is reasonable to ask of anyone,
even if you're running for like state legislature, if you're
having spouse problems, it's because you've failed to manage expectations
or you failed to execute. Now that's not a huge issue.
(26:18):
Just learn and get better and think about it in
that way. The best way to think about that is
the same way you think about a candidate. What are
the motivations and what are the aspirations? Right?
Speaker 1 (26:27):
And then what do you go into a marriage? When
I was thinking about like is this person you should know, like, oh,
my spouse is going to do something someday and I
have to be prepared for it.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Correct correct.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
If they have that fire in, then it's probably never
going to go away.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Yeah, And look like I ask every client I work with,
like have you had the talk? Where is missus or
mister X on this? And if mister and missus X
is not all in, then I tell them you really
shouldn't do this. You know. I know people who fresh
off a divorce want to run for office because it's
like I got to get some in my life. And
(27:01):
it's like, well, that's tritherapy in church, because this is
not a spiritual.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
Hospital you're listening to. It's a numbers game with Ryan Grodowski.
We'll be right back after this message, how in depth
are background checks? And when you want to run and
they bring in a consultant for background checks. Okay, so
background checks don't happen usually for local office. A lot
(27:28):
of times they don't happen, even for congressional offices. Remember
George Santos won his election without anyone knowing anything, and
well most people they don't know anything. No one picked
up on it. He could have been picked up on it.
Luke made a face, me, that's what. Yeah, But George
has had a million red flags flopping in the wind,
(27:48):
the size that you would see a flag you would
see a car dealership in like Midwest. That's how big
the flags were. And they were not picked up until
the until the New York Times brought it up trying
to write a puff piece about him and saying, oh wow,
nothing he says makes sense. So for local office, very
rarely to ever being picked up. Maybe if you're like
(28:10):
running from mayor or something like that, but very rarely.
Higher office it happens more. I mean, there are people
is very expensive to do big background checks some people,
but there are people to do it. It costs a
lot of money.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
Yeah, there are degrees of vulnerability study. Right, you should
pay somebody to run a Lexus Nexus whack on you
and just run your name and addresses through Lexus and Nexus. Yeah,
because that's not that expensive and that will That's eighty
five percent of what most opposition research is going to
look like.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
And for God's sakes, by the way, clear your social
media history. Clear it, I don't care what it is.
Download every picture of your face with it you want
to keep, and wipe it clean. Wipe everything clean. The
amount of candidates who lose because they were insane on
social media five six, seven, eight, nine years ago is
(29:00):
and it's sort clear your social media.
Speaker 2 (29:03):
Ryan, are you admitting that you have a New to
Africa account to it? Yeah? Exactly right. Well, the other
thing that's valuable here too is you know a lot
of times people don't understand what oppositional research is. They think, oh,
opposition research, it's going to be a PI going through
my trash to see if I'm cheating on my wife. Look,
if you're running in a competitive frontline senate district, yes
(29:25):
someone's going to ruffle your trash probably, but maybe not right.
The reality is is that most opposition research surfaces tendentious
things that can be spun a certain way. Oh, you
had a boundary dispute with your neighbor, very normal thing, right.
We weren't sure where the leans were. We couldn't figure
(29:45):
it out. We wound up going to court. Right. In
twenty fourteen was when I was at the NRSC. We
spent millions of dollars convincing islands, which was pretty easy
to do because it was true that Bruce Brayley, then
a congressman running for Senate against Junior, was an asshole
because he sued his neighbor over some chickens. Right now,
(30:08):
Bruce Brayley, if you ask him like, hey, are you
an asshole, He's gonna say no, I'm not an asshole. Okay,
But you run a lessis search on and you go
suit your neighbor over some chickens. Huh. Oh, that's gonna
leave a mark. I can write that, right. And so
it's often really pedestrian things that you wouldn't think about. Right. Oh,
I had somebody file a complaint against my insert small
(30:31):
business over insert totally normal thing. We disputed it, it
went away, et cetera. Right. Oh, you know, pregnant lady
in car accident left hung out to dry by Canada.
Why again, On the merit you can win these things
a lot, and in some cases, as I've done in
a few races, you can get takedown orders if they
try to put it on broadcast TV. But like you
(30:54):
want to know what those are so you can pre
butt them. And you know, sometimes these things happen live
on the fly and you can't anticipate what they're going
to be because they're just crazy, you know, the like
the Ohio Senate primary. I was, yeah, I was working
for Burning Marino Superpack and like, one of our opponents
(31:16):
was shopping this story that he had an adult FriendFinder
account that was like obviously a prank and obviously had
never been used. They shopped it and shopped and shopped it,
and like, I'm sure they were doing this on campaign
side as well. I was on the superpackside. We were
killing it over and over and over again. And then
a week before election day, the Associated Press runs the
story with glaring factual errors in it, like glaring factual errors,
(31:41):
but they just run the story and like, we were,
you know, we were prepared. We retaliated, We took it down.
We found the guy who built the initial database infrastructure
for adult friend Finder, and he was just like, yeah,
iPhones didn't exist in two thousand and sixty EIGHTIO. It's like,
this isn't Jeoe located. This is just a lat long
lookup table, which we could tell and we sort of
(32:01):
had that ready to go, but we needed an authority
to rebut the AP story because the AP had run
this thing and put it in print, which was insane. Yeah, anyway,
all this is a long witted way of saying, like,
there's some stuff that's just going to happen now if.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
You're not, it's not as in depth, especially for local office,
as you would think. I think that right now, that's
mostly a movie version of what running for office like
that is.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
Now, if you are addicted to drugs, if you have
a gambling habit and like eighteen extra marital relationships going on,
or really any extramarical relationships going on, first of all,
you have don't have the time to run for office.
You are already over committed. But like, just don't don't.
All right, this is not the place to work your
shit out. Okay, It's just not like America will be fine.
(32:43):
We don't need you in this capacity.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
Some men would rather run for office than get therapy
any such cases. Okay, well, it's three more questions really quick,
because I know it's been a while. So first, how
much better is internal polling compared to public polling? And
do the cam pagns know a lot more than the
news organizations? So I will say this one. It's not
about because a lot of people do public polls also
(33:08):
do internal polls. It is not a matter of necessarily
that they know more. It's kind of what kind of
polls are they doing. Is it a mixture of text
message and phone calls? Is a live call or is
it just internet? It's really about the polling organization than
necessarily who does it? Tony Fabrizio, who did President Trump's polls?
(33:29):
Any did Jadvance's US Senate polls? He also has polls
for the Wall Street Journal. They don't look very much
different than each other. He's not trying to hoax the
Wall Street Journal because he's given the good stuff over
to President Trump. It's also what kind of questions that
they ask. Campaigns will ask different types of questions, the
less persuasion questions like hey, if I talk about this,
(33:50):
or if my opponent is if no, my opponent believes this,
how will sway the election? Journalists or news organizations are
not going to ask those same type of questions. A
different style of question that they're going to ask.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
Yeah, I mean news as a general proposition, all things
being equal, private polling is better than media polling. Right.
In general, it's better because the campaigns are going to
spend more because it's going to guide strategic spending. They're
also going to better because they're gonna better written.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
Because most of news organizations, why, they do not pay
for any polling. I've learned that it's free. It's price
the publicity for the pollstar. Some do, some do, some
of most do not.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
Yeah, the uh, you know, just media is interested in
election anticipation polling. That's their goal. They want to know
who's popular, who's unpopular, how happier people with the country,
what's the ballot going to look like? Right, it's if
the election were held today. That's what they care about.
You know, when we're writing polls for a campaign, we're
(34:51):
thinking about our ad budget and we're thinking about what
segments the electorate do we need to work on, what
messages work with those people, What are the aspects of
us that we're not hitting on What are issues that
are really important? Are we messaging on them effectively? Where
are we getting bounced by our opponent? Et cetera, et cetera.
And you know, especially in primaries where structural factors don't
(35:15):
matter as much and strategy is more important. Sorry, that's
just the truth. You know, you can you can start
to see, like, okay, which parts of the party and
ideological tendencies or demographic tendencies are moving with, which person
who's really vulnerable, et cetera. You know, I'll use I'll
use another example from from the Ohio Senate race. You
(35:36):
know Frank Lrose, who I like. I've got a good
relationship with Frank. This is not a personal thing, this
is a professional thing. Frank was running against my client.
And you know, Frank had traditionally been if you had
done a poll on which parts of the party he
was most popular with, it would have been more moderates
versus very conservative voters. Ignizing that this was going to
be a problem in or Republican primary, he undertook projects
(35:58):
to bolst his conservative boat feet days. Totally normal candid behavior.
That's not cynical, that's politics, Like it's the smart right
thing to do, and it helped he drove up his
his fave on fave with very conservative voters. It damaged
him with his previous base of voters because they were like, Oh,
this isn't the guy I thought it was. Maybe I'm
not such a big fan of. And I saw this
(36:20):
in the polling Over time, as I looked at where
Frank was doing with tendencies, and I knew that I
had some messaging that would really undercut his stance with
social conservatives. I had, I had from the research and
et cetera. I had put together all this stuff, and
essentially what I found was that he was out on
a limb that I could cut off behind it. And
(36:42):
that's not me. You know, the ballot on any of
those polls, and even the fave on faves, they weren't
actually useful to me in and of themselves. It was
only who's he most popular with, who's the least popular with?
How did these issues resonate? Et cetera. And so it
was about putting together the combination of, you know, if
every campaign is a question time, territory and resource, right,
(37:04):
I had a pretty good sense of what my resource
was for money, I need to know what my ideological
resource was because or what my ideological territory was. And
then timing was just a matter of getting close to election.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
At what point do you tell your candidates, quote, homie,
shit is bad. That was one of my questions. So
it's a great question. It's a great question. So, like,
first of all, you need to be bluntly honest with
your with your clients, like in a very very normal,
not a normal way that you would do like your friends.
(37:38):
I had a client one time who I was being
very polite to and I was like, you need to
go before we take pictures to use everywhere. You need
to get your teeth cleaned because your teeth are orange.
Like I can't emphasize enough. You need like you need
to be so blunt with them and be like, no,
this is not this is not working at Like, you
need to do something with yourself. When the race is
coming down to the water, needed to sit there and
(38:01):
say something. You know, if it's a matter of winning
and losing. You also have to know your client. If
your client is just illusional, and I've had a few
of them and you're like, look, you're not living in
the world that I'm living in So if you're having
a good time, you're having a good time. But there
are people that you sit there and say you know
that you're like, you know it's a serious win or
lost thing. You need to sit there and say you
(38:22):
neither A invest more money or b stop investing money
because there's no amount of money. Did you as this
whole like you need to be out there to protect them,
and that's crucial. The perfect example from history was like
Susie Wilds in twenty sixteen telling Donald Trump, I think
she needed like a million or ten million more dollar.
I think it's ten million dollars to win Florida for him.
(38:43):
She's like, I need ten million more dollars cash from
you right now. And he screamed and he cursed. This
is in the political on or those organizations. But Susie
Wilde had a track record for winning this election. She
knew she could do it. But it was bluntly honest,
and he cut her the check and she she helped
win Florida in twenty sixteen by less than a point.
So it's a matter of really knowing knowing yourself, where
(39:05):
the state of the races, and then being confident with
your relationship with your client and unless they could fire
you is the worst they could do. But you that's like,
that is that's really where it is to understand where
they are. And and uh, there are some delusional clients.
A lot of them literally lives upins on nerves all
the time. And generally the clients who always think they're
(39:26):
going to lose what something, it's terrible, they are the
easier ones to deal with than the ones who are
confident they're always going to win.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
Yeah, I mean, I guess two bits of just tactical
advice here. One is you should never have the it's
bad talk when the client brings it to you. You
need to set the terms of that, decide when it's
going to happen, and you need to say, hey, we
need to have conversation because if they bring it to you,
(39:53):
they're just going to be spun up and like they
won't trust you, they won't feel like they will be
like wait, wait, you knew this and you didn't bring
it to So so if you think the gay things are bad,
like get it on the get it on the calendar,
and like get it on the calendar fast, and you
need to bring it to them, right, number one. Number two,
(40:13):
you know, if you're going to lose by more than
ten and the client doesn't know that, I mean, as
long as they're not spending their own money, like you
should be blunt with them. But it's not. You know,
obviously you don't want to hurt the family, you don't
want them to suffer embarrassment, et cetera. But you need
to have strategic conversations around that sort of thing. If
(40:33):
it's going to be a race that's going to be
within ten points either way, then the answer is and
then the answer is to you don't actually know if
they're going to win or lose, right, you just don't
be honest with yourself. And number two say to them, look,
you could win this or you could lose this. It's
close enough that no data that I provide you is
(40:54):
going to change your behavior either way. So just act
like you're down by five and go bleep bleep bl campaign.
Speaker 1 (41:01):
Right, Yeah, yeah, Last question, this is a good one.
What is the craziest thing you've ever seen in your
consulting career in a campaign?
Speaker 2 (41:09):
Found a dead body in Mississippi?
Speaker 1 (41:11):
Once you found a dead body in Mississippi, a dead
body where would you what campaign was that?
Speaker 2 (41:16):
That was the body? It's a Sad Cochrane for a
Missisippi centate campaign.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
The dead body was behind you, Thad Cochran from Misisippi.
Where did you? Where did you? Where did you stumble
on a dead body?
Speaker 2 (41:28):
It was in a It was in an exurban neighborhood.
I want to say, I don't remember where it was
Visa B. Jackson.
Speaker 1 (41:34):
Did they still sign the petition to get the count
on the ballot.
Speaker 2 (41:38):
During the un so they were already on the ballot.
I didn't. I called it in. There's a police reports.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
I did a campaign one time where it was really
eccentric guy, very wealthy guy in New Jersey who told
that one of the knocking on doors and kind of
more rural New Jersey and they said, you know, he said,
how can I earn your boat? And this old lady
was talking at the door and she said, you get
rid of the beehive, nest on behive on my roof.
(42:05):
And he climbed the roof, was stung a thousand times
and kicked off a beehive, and like I mean, was
being stung repeatedly. I've done a race in Ohio where
a man opened his trunk to put palm cottnap punk
cars door signs in it, and it was there was
a hamsters. It was not ferrous, it was you know,
(42:27):
it was Gerbils. It was gerbils. There were Gerbils in
the trunk of his car. And I said there, I said, sorry,
you have gerbils in your car, so oh you should
see my garage. They were all over the place as
if that was like the absolute normal response. I mean,
I've my favorite Luke Thompson story was one time you
did a camp. You were at it, you were in
West Virginia, western Maryland and doing a campaign, and you
(42:49):
said you were working on the you're working in the
door and someone started saying a conspiracy theory to you,
and then a second person came with an even crazier
conspiracy theory where the first conspiracy theory said, this is
too much. Was this guy's nuts?
Speaker 2 (43:01):
You know. It was in a polling place I had
I'd had somebody who'd gone into details about like and
I mean details about some chem trail stuff to me,
I mean details, and then somebody else came by and
unloaded like a whole other thing, and the kem trails
guy looked at me and I'm like, that guy's out
of here. Man, I don't know. I I once I
had a guy answer, uh, answer the door, shirtless but
(43:23):
packing heat and his pet rooster ran out and tried
to get my rental. That happened, and I have a
I have a toy rooster that the kids work on.
That campaign got me to commemorate that.
Speaker 1 (43:35):
Yeah, answer the door naked is actually startling.
Speaker 2 (43:38):
You see some wild ship. Like the number of people
who sit in their chairs shirtless, eating cereal out of
the box and just migrate directly to the door in
that state of affairs, It's like very high.
Speaker 1 (43:51):
Luke, thank you so much for being on this podcast.
I really appreciate it. Where can people go to find
your stuff that they want to see you on? Your
Twitter is really funny. It's a lot about Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
I mean, I guess lt Tompso on Twitter, No end
at the end is the best place to go, Ryan, Ryan,
you just go throw a retweet on there.
Speaker 1 (44:06):
And then I want to do it.
Speaker 2 (44:08):
To do it for sure, I've probably toned it down
a little bit as I've gotten older, But you know,
there's a few bangers out there.
Speaker 1 (44:15):
This saucy Yeah all right, Luke, thank you so much.
Thank you for listening. Yeah, thank you everyone for listening.
We will be back next week. Please like and subscribe
on iHeartRadio, app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get to
your podcasts.
Welcome back to a Numbers Game with Ryan Grodski. Thank
you for being here this week. As always, I'm one
of my listeners that all the data on this podcast
will be up on my substack and go read it
and go to nappopnewsletter dot com for thirty day free subscription.
So this week I would like to talk to you
guys about money in politics and politics in general. It's
a big conversation that we've had in the country because
(00:27):
it costs a lot of money to run for public office.
In the twenty one months the church along twenty twenty
three to the twenty twenty four campaign cycle, billions of
dollars run to the campaigns from the top of the
ballot to the bottom. Cannot's running for president alone, just
the presidency raised one point six two six billion dollars
and spent one point three two three billion. But that's
(00:50):
not all. Cants running for Congress raised three point two
seven billion dollars and spent two point seven seven billion.
Party committees raised two points one billion and spent one
point eight and super packs raised twelve point twenty five
billion and spent ten point nine billion. All together. That
means candidates and their respected committees and packs running for
(01:11):
federal office raised nineteen point twenty five billion and spent
sixteen point seven nine to three billion dollars. Now that
sounds like an insane number, and it is, but it's
actually less than Americans spent on Easter. Americans spent twenty
point billion dollars on Easter. But still a lot of money.
And it's just for federalists, not including the local races,
(01:31):
the governors that happened in twenty twenty four, the mayors,
the city councils, of the school boards, the state legislatures
which are a lot more. But it's still a lot
of money, and it's only going to go up over time,
especially people moving money to super PACs, which are allowed
to raise unlimited sums of money. Fundraising for presidential committees
actually hasn't gone up so much. In two thousand and eight,
that's when all the candidates running for president in both
(01:52):
the primary and the general and third parties raised one
point six billion dollars. Swell money in politics is very
intimidating to a lot of people who want to run
for office, even local office. They get scared. It's one
of the most frequently asked questions I get from people
who are curious about politics or the dream of running
for office, or just working in this career. People have
a lot of opinions about people who work in politics.
(02:13):
Some are fair and some aren't, but they want to
know more about the business side of politics. So that's
what this episode is going to be about. Now, a
little backsurround me. I've worked in politics since two thousand
and seven. My first job, when I was nineteen, was
working for the New York City Council. I worked for
a councilwoman who was a friend of a great aunt
of mine. She was one of those aunts who thought
(02:34):
I was brilliant at everything, even when I wasn't. And
the councilwoman had called her and said that her PR
guy had died unexpectedly, and she said, well, you have
to hire my nineteen year old nephew. He's so great
at everything. So thank you Ann Susie. That nepotism changed
my life. And then I worked odd jobs on different
campaigns I worked. I ended up being an intern for
the New York State Senator Tom Libis, who was the
(02:55):
deputy Minority leader at the time, A wonderful man. I
learned a lot from him. Sale died a couple of
years ago in prison. But actually my first two big
political mentors both went to jail. It was a very
New York story. I worked for as a low level
stabber for Michael Bloomberg's third mayoral campaign. I worked for
lots of local races, and in twenty ten, I wanted
(03:16):
to get a job working on a race I could
really prove myself. And I'd heard a man named Bob
Turner wanted to run for office against Anthony Meaner, and
so I said to myself, I have to find him.
I have to sit there and apply for this job. Somehow,
I didn't have the experience. I didn't know what he
even looked like, but I had heard he was going
to the New York State Party convention. I told people
in the crowd that I knew a little bit. I
(03:38):
was like twenty two years all at the time. I said,
you know, oh, I'm looking for Bob. Do you know
where he is? And then one person pointed him out.
I approached him cold and I said, my name is
Ryan Grodski. I know this district by the back of
my hand. I would like to work for your campaign.
Sold myself and within like maybe thirty minutes, he introduced
(03:58):
me as his feel director for his campaign, so it
was very exciting. He didn't end up winning the election,
but he did so well. You get over forty percent
against Anthony Minor, who was an entrenched incumbent in a
very democratic district. That when Anthony Minor left office like
a couple months later and there was a special election,
Bob was picked as the party nominee, and he was
the first Republican outside of Staten Island to hold a
(04:19):
seat in New York City in several decades. So it
was a lot to prove myself and be proud of myself.
Were but that's like the nature of politics in this
business is a lot of times if you're trying to
break into it to work in it, the best case
scenario is a major consultant or an elected official will
tell you you're my guy or you're my girl, and
they'll take you under their wings, and then you could
(04:40):
eventually branch off after working them and meeting all their
contacts and all the rest of that. That's what happened
to like the Ruthless Guys similar Ruthless Guys on that
podcast that they worked for McConnell. Being someone's guy or
someone's girl has a lot of benefits. The other way
of coming up is by just working every job possible
that is given to you. So after Turner, I did
(05:02):
a race for an upstart libertary named Thomas Massey. I
did his super pac, took a break, did media gigs
for a couple of years. I ended up working for
James o'keeff for a little while, which is another story
for a different time. I'm we're older. I ran the
super Pact for Chris Cobac when he ran for Senate
by just pitching one of his donors cold. The first
time I met him, I said, I want to I
(05:22):
want to run this guy's super pac. I know you're
supporting him. Fund the super Pack and bring me on.
And he did. And then through Twitter I met a
guy named Jadevance and when the Senate s he'd opened
in Ohio in twenty twenty one, I texted him. I said,
if you're running, I want to be on your team.
And then two years later Our Star packed for school
board elections nationwide at the seventeen seventy six Project Pack,
which is almost entirely funded by small dollar donors. It's
(05:43):
the most successful local government super pac right now in
the country. And that's how I kind of broke into
this business. And I say the whole story about my
life because working in politics is about taking chances. I
failed a ton of times. I've worked on insane races
that we never had a chance, that things everything that
could go wrong did go wrong, where I would have
(06:05):
to stay afterwards and clean the bathroom. And well, I
saw all the phones, volunteers made phone calls on I
mean I did it all. I knocked on doors, I
got petitions, every kind of odd job because no one
said Ryan, you're my guy. Like that never happened in
my entire life. People said, oh, Ryan's the last person here,
let's give him a break. I've was constantly the last
(06:25):
person picked for political dodgeball, but I just kept ongoing
and I still do today. It's just about trying to
open a door until someone lets you in. So last
week I sent out a tweet and I asked people
who don't work in policies what questions they had, what
they wanted to show with the business, and what they
want to know from consultants about what it's like to
run for office, run a race, run a campaign, and
if they aspire on for office one day, what they
(06:47):
should do. So I got my smartest consultant friend, and
we're going to answer them now. Luke Thompson is one
of my closest political operative friends. He is a stellar
track record of the last few year years working for
the super Packs for many people including Representative Riley Moore,
Representative Brandon Gill, Senator Bernie Marino, Senator Dave McCormick. And
(07:09):
he was my boss for the super Pac supporting jd Vance.
I have to Nudgeman said, he also worked for Jeb Bush.
But Luke Thompson, thank you for being here.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Great to be with you. Ryan. We we should get
together more often.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
Luke, I don't actually know what was your first campaign.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
My first campaign I was, I want to say, seven
years old. It would attempt to pass a bond issue
in my hometown to build a second high school because
we had far outgrown the old high school. But we lost.
My parents were pro mil Levy increase, I think the
only tax I've ever seen them be in favor of,
because literally the students were going to class in trailers
(07:48):
in the freezing cold.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
This uh y. So you were bred from this like
there was, there was no second choice.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
It's in the blood.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
Yeah. Okay. So I took questions from people on social
media and I'm going to ask them. We'll just talk,
you know, back and forth. So the first question we got,
which is the most frequent question I got, was how
much money does it cost to run for office? Even
a local one?
Speaker 2 (08:10):
And great question.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Yeah, I'll say this. It costs as much as it
does to reach all the voters in your target universe.
So if you're running for local office like city councilor
school board or even congress or state representative, you have
not everyone votes, a small select people actually go and vote.
The bigger the election, the more will vote, but you
(08:34):
have to spend as much money as it costs to
reach them. The rule I was always taught is you
had to touch a voter seven times. I doesn't mean
to speak to them seven times. It means if we
see a mailer to just see your name and newspapers
to make sure a voter remembers who you are, they
have to see your name seven different times.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of rules of thumb
out there about this, but I think another way to
think about it too, because a lot of people who
ask these questions are thinking about running themselves. Don't know
what mental illness takes them over and makes them want
to run for aufit. I'm grateful that it exists because, yeah,
make my living off of it. Yeah. But you know,
one other way to think about it too is like
(09:11):
how much money do you, as a candidate have to
put in or be able to put in to be
a credible candidate? And you know what's interesting about that is,
at a certain population level, everybody max is or should
if you're going to be a serious candidate, max is
out the one resource that everyone has under a sort
of universal communism, which is the clock. Like everybody has
(09:33):
the same amount of time per day, whether or not
you use it all for politics or you have a
personal life or things like that, those are separate considerations.
But you and your opponent, you know, at midnight of
a given day, will have the same amount of time,
and how you use this up to you. However, even
at the state legislative level, some state house races in
smaller states, you can just out hustle your opponent right
(09:56):
in a lot of places. Once you're even at the
state senate level. It's not possible to simply knock on
every single door enough times that everybody who might vote
knows you and has formed an opinion of you. And
so that's where money really enters. The equation is you
have to be able to talk to people by proxy
(10:16):
or through surrogate. The most primary surrogate mechanism is media.
Lower down, you're typically going to be, you know, having
volunteers have literature to leave it doors. Sometimes those are
the exact same thing that you mail. To save money,
you're going to want to get some phone banks. You
might want to get an office space or even a
like in a coworking space. You might want to have
(10:37):
a spot to drop things or a you know, a
storage unit. As you get a higher and higher up,
you know, say you want to run for congress. Now
you're talking about you will have a full time staffer
or several full time staffers, depending on the district you
will need. You may use your family car for everything.
You may want to lease a car for the term
of your your race because you're not going to be
the only person driving it. Probably or in fact, ideally,
(10:59):
you won't be driving at all because you'll be on
the phone calling who donors. Mostly the sort of rule
of thumb that I have for people as they think
about running for congressional district. Right, assume it's an open seat.
Assume it's you know, set aside whether or not from
a party standpoint, you you know you can win. Right.
(11:21):
What I say is, go home, go through your phone book,
go through your email, go through your classmates, et cetera.
Make a list of people who if they give you
the maximum that you can donate thirty five hundred dollars
right where you can get for three hundred. That's for
Congress or any federal office. Actually, where you can get
three hundred of those people, because the reality is is
you're going to think you're going to close. I'll close
(11:42):
ninety percent of them. You're going to be lucky if
you can close twenty five percent of right, Right, And
so you need to have a list of three hundred
people who you feel high degrees of congresence, not one
hundred percent, but seventy five percent or better. They'll cut
you a three thousand, five hundred dollars check. If you
can't do that or you don't know that many people
with that kind of disposable income. The reality is it's
(12:03):
going to be really really hard. Now you can compensate
for that by use it, putting your personal means in play.
But now you're talking about, well, how much do I
want to spend? How liquid am I what percentage of
that liquidity do I want to spend? I have two kids.
My kids I would like to go to nice school someday,
and so you know, I got to pay for that. Also,
(12:24):
they might need braces. I got to pay for that too, right,
And so you know, those are the kinds of ways
people should think about this and have really hard conversations,
because if you can't raise from your network, a solid
doesn't have to be mid six figures, but a solid
six figure chunk, right, you know, quarter million dollars between
(12:45):
what you know of people you call, or if you're
not able to cut a check that's bigger than that,
you're really going to have hard time hitting this sort
of level of seriousness that's necessary. Now. The good news is,
as you go through politics, you will meet people and
they will give your work. Of people, you'll be connected,
some of those people with donors, some will be affected
(13:06):
interest groups, et cetera. And so you can start knocking
doors and work your way up. Riley Moore friend and
client of mine who you mentioned. You know I ran
his congressional campaign in this cycle, the first thing I
did for Riley. We were friends before he entered politics.
In twenty sixteen, he sent me an email saying, Hey,
I want to run for House Delegates in West Virginia.
I've got you know, there's going to be five thousand voters.
(13:29):
Here's the voter file. Can you tell me which doors
to knock on and which phone owners to call? Did
a little bit of math and set it back to him.
He worked that list like crazy, and it wasn't a
money question that got him that election. He won it
by about one hundred and fifty votes, I think, and
maybe misrememory it may have been a little bigger than that,
but you know, it's not a huge margin, and it
was a hustle margin. Right now, he's a member of
(13:51):
House leadership as a freshman. So you can build it
on a foundation of hard work, but it's a building
block over time.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
And you can I mean money. When Luke was talking
about money that's for federal levels. For local elections, you
can get by on less money. It's not necessary. You
can do the hard work. I remember I did a
race for state Assembly from a guy his name is Thematas,
very very nice guy, very wealthy guy, would not put
(14:19):
the work in. He only wanted to work on Sundays
because he didn't want to spend any time from his business.
This man could so sell snowballs and snowstorms, but I
couldn't get in front of voters ever, and we ended
up losing. He did extremely well, shockingly well, but he
just he just putting the man hours in for a
(14:40):
local office is super essential. So okay, how does a
candidate feed their families while running for office? Do they
love of a savings or they spend campaign dollars as
a substitute.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
So it's really hard. I would like a political culture
that would sort of hate this word, but normalize people
you paying themselves out of paying a salary out of
the campaign, because I think if you're a donor to
camp to a campaign, you should want the candidate to
be working at that full time, not distracted by a job.
(15:12):
Right on the flip side, donors get really unhappy about
you paying yourself a nomenal salary out of your campaign
for federal races. It's completely legal, you know, it's I
think I don't know exactly what the amount is you
have to disclose it. Most people don't do it because
they feel like the political blowback is going to be
worse than the upside.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
And so most you can pay for like meals, if
your team is going out for McDonald's or something, you
can pay for that the campaign funds or total.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Yeah. Yeah, nobody's going to be mad if they see
some meals and some gasoline. Now, people will to be clear.
This is also where danger lies because you'll see, especially
bad candidates will over itemize things, right, So it just
makes their compliance really hard and it winds up costing
them more to sort their compliance that would to just
eat the light bulbs for three dollars that they paid for. Right.
(16:01):
The flip side also is you will see people who
will do things like buy gas cards and all of
a sudden they're kind of using the campaign as petty cash, right,
and that's where you can get in real truck.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Okay, this is a great consulting question. How do consultants
have the good judgment to know who to work for,
who will be a strong cant running for office for
the right reasons, or who is an egomaniac who you
won't follow your advice. I have worked for many an
egomaniac that will not follow my advice. I've only ever
quit one campaign my whole life from a state senator
(16:36):
who was out of control and like abusage to the staff.
As far as like a good judgment. When you're for
a lot of consultants, it's about who's going to hire you, right,
because it's it is a you only are ever really
working for two years if you're working on just campaigns.
It's important realize people who work on campaigns don't always
(16:56):
go to work for Congress or work in the state legislature,
for the govern or, whatever you're doing. It happens a lot,
but a lot of people like Luke and I work
for campaigns. We just do campaigns a year after year
after year. So if that's your life, just the campaign hustle,
you're always both looking for new work while doing work
with the expectation that your job is only a year
(17:17):
to two years long.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
I mean, that's why I do so many super PACs,
is so that I don't have to deal with the candidate.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
That is true, and you work with soup Bac, you
have a lot less anxiety moments.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
Yeah, yeah, well there's the anxiety is more donor related.
Are they going to give? They're not going to give.
I know they won't come through now, I look, it's
a really hard question. And the reality is when you're
starting out in this business, you just have to hustle
for everything right, and you can wind up working with
(17:50):
some real freaks and some real losers. And you know,
the trick is not to get stuck there, and that
requires a kind of I think moral discipline to say, yes,
I know Smith sucks, I know he's not going to win,
and thank god he's not going to win, but damn it,
John Smith, for you know, select campaign is going to
be the best damn Selectman campaign anyone's ever seen. And
(18:11):
in my experience, you know, when you do a good campaign,
people will notice. Not always, but sometimes they will notice.
And you know, so you can a campaign can transcend
its canon. The other thing you can do is just
you know, do what I do and convince your friends
to run for office. You know they do.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
I have to, Luke, No, not really, okay, I guess
I have to run.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
Exactly well, it's this is the bait and switch I
pull as I spend years convincing them they should run
for offs. Then when they finally sit down with me
and they're like, I'm ready to have the talk, the
first thing I say is, you don't want run for offs?
It's stupid. Why do you want to run for office?
You have a great life. Your life is good, your
your spouse likes you, You're doing well in business, you
see your children every day. What are you out of
your mind? What do you want to run a like
low grade fever for the next fifteen months. You want
(19:00):
to hear the same joke fifty five times? You want
to five hundred to sell the Times? Yeah, tell the
same story. Yeah, yeah, but no. I think you know
one thing to keep in mind, and this is especially true.
I think as the millennial population boom enters into sort
(19:21):
of middle age, there's no definition of who a candidate
is or what a candidate looks like. The barriers to
entry that I enumerated are very real, right, to be clear,
they're very real. On the other hand, they're not fatal
right that they can be overcome if you're strategic and so,
you know, go out and meet people, meet people who volunteer,
(19:42):
meet people who knock on doors. Assess whether you think
they're good people, whether they're smart people, whether they're thoughtful people,
whether they're hard working and honest people. You know, politics
could be a business with a fair amount of deceit
in it, but both within a legislature and I think
within a campaign, honesty is the current and see that
you have above all else. And as long as you
(20:03):
have an honest relationship with your client as a consultant,
and as long as you instill in your client that,
especially if going into a legislature, you cannot lie to
your colleagues because they will never trust you and never
forgive you and isolate you and make you miserable. Well,
(20:23):
I'll use an affirmative example. You know, I when when
our mutual friend Vice President Vance was then maybe Senator Advance. Uh,
you know, he went into the Senate as something of
a hot shot, well known entity, you know, conservative firebrand,
et cetera. But his attitude towards the Senate. We talked
about this a lot, was like, I'm going to be
straight with me. I know they disagree with me on
(20:45):
several issues, but I'm just going to act with complete integrity,
and I understand some people are going to be sneaky
around me, but my colleagues will see that. They'll see
that I act with integrity and they will trust me,
and down the line that will pay off. And he
was able to build relationships with people who were not
ideologically akin to him. Right. Susan Collins is a great
(21:06):
example of this. They don't agree on a lot, there
are a lot of issues where they go back and forth,
but they were always very straight with each other. He
really admired the way that she operated and the way
that she was very upfront and told people where she
was on things, and learned a lot from her. Conveyed
his gratitude to her for that, and as a result,
(21:27):
you know here in this confirmation fight when he sat
down and talked to her about certain nominees that carried
a lot of weight because she knew he wasn't lying.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
All right, That's a great example. Or you could be
a senator from many senators who they copied their colleagues bills,
they reintroduced them for themselves to claim credit for it
so they can get hits on right wing media. Then
they just write books endlessly in toward the books until
they do some other job, like, for a complete random example,
become the president of the University of Florida or something.
(21:57):
I don't know who knows, but yeah, this is a
great question to Paul blast One. How do you commnce
a good person run for office? And can you dissuade
a bad person who shouldn't be running for office? So
I'll say for bad people, I'll say sometimes the party
bosses or the powers that be or major donors can
sit there and they could say to them, we use
(22:18):
they use a carrot and say, listen, if you you know,
maybe you could run for a party delegate, maybe you
could have this position. Maybe you go to that position,
but don't run for the office you want to run
for it. Or they could use a stick and say,
if you do this, we're going to spend a gajillion
dollars against you and ruin you. So don't do it
like they could do. People do that. Can consultancy that
not really not so much. I mean I've never seen
(22:39):
it personally where a consultant can just bully somebody out
of running for office.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
Yeah, it's really hard. I mean, I think in general, though,
this is really asking the same question, which is how
do you motivate people in relation to public office? And
the reality is is that everybody who thinks about running
for office is ambitious. Right. They don't do this because
they don't want to win. And I think we have
a culture that treats ambition as a crime, and that's foolish.
(23:06):
They're ambitious, right, I mean, there's not a single person
who pulls papers for state legislator that doesn't think in
some dark moment in the back of his or her
mind about the oval office. Like they just all it's okay,
it's okay.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
Present the truth though, everyone. If you're running for like Dogcatcher,
you're thinking, I could be.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
Praising you know, I'm I'm three pitbulls away from state
selectmen and from selectman that I'm gonna run for that
state Senate district. I'm gonna jump over the lower House entirely,
and once I'm in the senate State Senate Andy Barley
dor because I'm going this rocket show. Yeah, that's true,
and you know what good good? Right? I mean, the
framers of the Constitution, founders of this country were utterly
(23:49):
unabashed about their desire for virtuous fame, right, for for
earned fame and and the you know they they talk
about it in speeches and their private ridings and their correspondence,
et cetera. The desire for ambition, the ambition for office, prominence, esteem, leadership, power, fine,
the hedonic treadmill is a universal. And so don't go
(24:11):
around looking for someone and saying, well, I don't like
this person because he's ambitious, but I do like this
person because she doesn't seem like she wants the office.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
Right right now. Usually they very rarely win if they
don't really want.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
Right Either you're misreading her and she's really actually quite ambitious,
or like she's just not going to put in time.
And that's fine, right, But don't try to dragoon somebody
into something they don't really want to do, because the
reality is they're going to put themselves and their family
and sometimes you through hell, but not nearly as much
as you will be putting them through. Help. Now, they're
(24:44):
also the principle, they're the candidate, and so it's to
them redounds the benefit, redounds, the fame and the power, etc.
You are a staff player, you're a bit player, you
are support, right, and don't ever forget.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
That that is so true. Consultant should never be more
popular than there candidates they work for. What is the
impact on a candidate's family and what should they expect
and how should they prepare for it.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
It's a really haution. Yeah, it's a great question. It's
really hard. So a lot gets demanded of the family
because simply absence is a big part of that, right,
I mean, when are prime campaigning times weekends when you
might be you know, going to games, uh, you know
some a while people are connunations exactly. So you know,
(25:32):
one thing is to be very clear with your family
up front, like hey, look, this is this is going
to cost us things, and have frank conversations as a consultant. Also,
you need to build a trusting relationship with the spouse,
all right, Like the spouse is never the problem, and
if the spouse is the problem, you need to get
out of a campaign because it's dysfunctional. But in a
(25:56):
situation where you can't just be like, oh he's being
unreason or oh she's being unrealistic, Like you're asking way
more of the spouse than is reasonable to ask of anyone,
even if you're running for like state legislature, if you're
having spouse problems, it's because you've failed to manage expectations
or you failed to execute. Now that's not a huge issue.
(26:18):
Just learn and get better and think about it in
that way. The best way to think about that is
the same way you think about a candidate. What are
the motivations and what are the aspirations? Right?
Speaker 1 (26:27):
And then what do you go into a marriage? When
I was thinking about like is this person you should know, like, oh,
my spouse is going to do something someday and I
have to be prepared for it.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Correct correct.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
If they have that fire in, then it's probably never
going to go away.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Yeah, And look like I ask every client I work with,
like have you had the talk? Where is missus or
mister X on this? And if mister and missus X
is not all in, then I tell them you really
shouldn't do this. You know. I know people who fresh
off a divorce want to run for office because it's
like I got to get some in my life. And
(27:01):
it's like, well, that's tritherapy in church, because this is
not a spiritual.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
Hospital you're listening to. It's a numbers game with Ryan Grodowski.
We'll be right back after this message, how in depth
are background checks? And when you want to run and
they bring in a consultant for background checks. Okay, so
background checks don't happen usually for local office. A lot
(27:28):
of times they don't happen, even for congressional offices. Remember
George Santos won his election without anyone knowing anything, and
well most people they don't know anything. No one picked
up on it. He could have been picked up on it.
Luke made a face, me, that's what. Yeah, But George
has had a million red flags flopping in the wind,
(27:48):
the size that you would see a flag you would
see a car dealership in like Midwest. That's how big
the flags were. And they were not picked up until
the until the New York Times brought it up trying
to write a puff piece about him and saying, oh wow,
nothing he says makes sense. So for local office, very
rarely to ever being picked up. Maybe if you're like
(28:10):
running from mayor or something like that, but very rarely.
Higher office it happens more. I mean, there are people
is very expensive to do big background checks some people,
but there are people to do it. It costs a
lot of money.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
Yeah, there are degrees of vulnerability study. Right, you should
pay somebody to run a Lexus Nexus whack on you
and just run your name and addresses through Lexus and Nexus. Yeah,
because that's not that expensive and that will That's eighty
five percent of what most opposition research is going to
look like.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
And for God's sakes, by the way, clear your social
media history. Clear it, I don't care what it is.
Download every picture of your face with it you want
to keep, and wipe it clean. Wipe everything clean. The
amount of candidates who lose because they were insane on
social media five six, seven, eight, nine years ago is
(29:00):
and it's sort clear your social media.
Speaker 2 (29:03):
Ryan, are you admitting that you have a New to
Africa account to it? Yeah? Exactly right. Well, the other
thing that's valuable here too is you know a lot
of times people don't understand what oppositional research is. They think, oh,
opposition research, it's going to be a PI going through
my trash to see if I'm cheating on my wife. Look,
if you're running in a competitive frontline senate district, yes
(29:25):
someone's going to ruffle your trash probably, but maybe not right.
The reality is is that most opposition research surfaces tendentious
things that can be spun a certain way. Oh, you
had a boundary dispute with your neighbor, very normal thing, right.
We weren't sure where the leans were. We couldn't figure
(29:45):
it out. We wound up going to court. Right. In
twenty fourteen was when I was at the NRSC. We
spent millions of dollars convincing islands, which was pretty easy
to do because it was true that Bruce Brayley, then
a congressman running for Senate against Junior, was an asshole
because he sued his neighbor over some chickens. Right now,
(30:08):
Bruce Brayley, if you ask him like, hey, are you
an asshole, He's gonna say no, I'm not an asshole. Okay,
But you run a lessis search on and you go
suit your neighbor over some chickens. Huh. Oh, that's gonna
leave a mark. I can write that, right. And so
it's often really pedestrian things that you wouldn't think about. Right. Oh,
I had somebody file a complaint against my insert small
(30:31):
business over insert totally normal thing. We disputed it, it
went away, et cetera. Right. Oh, you know, pregnant lady
in car accident left hung out to dry by Canada.
Why again, On the merit you can win these things
a lot, and in some cases, as I've done in
a few races, you can get takedown orders if they
try to put it on broadcast TV. But like you
(30:54):
want to know what those are so you can pre
butt them. And you know, sometimes these things happen live
on the fly and you can't anticipate what they're going
to be because they're just crazy, you know, the like
the Ohio Senate primary. I was, yeah, I was working
for Burning Marino Superpack and like, one of our opponents
(31:16):
was shopping this story that he had an adult FriendFinder
account that was like obviously a prank and obviously had
never been used. They shopped it and shopped and shopped it,
and like, I'm sure they were doing this on campaign
side as well. I was on the superpackside. We were
killing it over and over and over again. And then
a week before election day, the Associated Press runs the
story with glaring factual errors in it, like glaring factual errors,
(31:41):
but they just run the story and like, we were,
you know, we were prepared. We retaliated, We took it down.
We found the guy who built the initial database infrastructure
for adult friend Finder, and he was just like, yeah,
iPhones didn't exist in two thousand and sixty EIGHTIO. It's like,
this isn't Jeoe located. This is just a lat long
lookup table, which we could tell and we sort of
(32:01):
had that ready to go, but we needed an authority
to rebut the AP story because the AP had run
this thing and put it in print, which was insane. Yeah, anyway,
all this is a long witted way of saying, like,
there's some stuff that's just going to happen now if.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
You're not, it's not as in depth, especially for local office,
as you would think. I think that right now, that's
mostly a movie version of what running for office like
that is.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
Now, if you are addicted to drugs, if you have
a gambling habit and like eighteen extra marital relationships going on,
or really any extramarical relationships going on, first of all,
you have don't have the time to run for office.
You are already over committed. But like, just don't don't.
All right, this is not the place to work your
shit out. Okay, It's just not like America will be fine.
(32:43):
We don't need you in this capacity.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
Some men would rather run for office than get therapy
any such cases. Okay, well, it's three more questions really quick,
because I know it's been a while. So first, how
much better is internal polling compared to public polling? And
do the cam pagns know a lot more than the
news organizations? So I will say this one. It's not
about because a lot of people do public polls also
(33:08):
do internal polls. It is not a matter of necessarily
that they know more. It's kind of what kind of
polls are they doing. Is it a mixture of text
message and phone calls? Is a live call or is
it just internet? It's really about the polling organization than
necessarily who does it? Tony Fabrizio, who did President Trump's polls?
(33:29):
Any did Jadvance's US Senate polls? He also has polls
for the Wall Street Journal. They don't look very much
different than each other. He's not trying to hoax the
Wall Street Journal because he's given the good stuff over
to President Trump. It's also what kind of questions that
they ask. Campaigns will ask different types of questions, the
less persuasion questions like hey, if I talk about this,
(33:50):
or if my opponent is if no, my opponent believes this,
how will sway the election? Journalists or news organizations are
not going to ask those same type of questions. A
different style of question that they're going to ask.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
Yeah, I mean news as a general proposition, all things
being equal, private polling is better than media polling. Right.
In general, it's better because the campaigns are going to
spend more because it's going to guide strategic spending. They're
also going to better because they're gonna better written.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
Because most of news organizations, why, they do not pay
for any polling. I've learned that it's free. It's price
the publicity for the pollstar. Some do, some do, some
of most do not.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
Yeah, the uh, you know, just media is interested in
election anticipation polling. That's their goal. They want to know
who's popular, who's unpopular, how happier people with the country,
what's the ballot going to look like? Right, it's if
the election were held today. That's what they care about.
You know, when we're writing polls for a campaign, we're
(34:51):
thinking about our ad budget and we're thinking about what
segments the electorate do we need to work on, what
messages work with those people, What are the aspects of
us that we're not hitting on What are issues that
are really important? Are we messaging on them effectively? Where
are we getting bounced by our opponent? Et cetera, et cetera.
And you know, especially in primaries where structural factors don't
(35:15):
matter as much and strategy is more important. Sorry, that's
just the truth. You know, you can you can start
to see, like, okay, which parts of the party and
ideological tendencies or demographic tendencies are moving with, which person
who's really vulnerable, et cetera. You know, I'll use I'll
use another example from from the Ohio Senate race. You
(35:36):
know Frank Lrose, who I like. I've got a good
relationship with Frank. This is not a personal thing, this
is a professional thing. Frank was running against my client.
And you know, Frank had traditionally been if you had
done a poll on which parts of the party he
was most popular with, it would have been more moderates
versus very conservative voters. Ignizing that this was going to
be a problem in or Republican primary, he undertook projects
(35:58):
to bolst his conservative boat feet days. Totally normal candid behavior.
That's not cynical, that's politics, Like it's the smart right
thing to do, and it helped he drove up his
his fave on fave with very conservative voters. It damaged
him with his previous base of voters because they were like, Oh,
this isn't the guy I thought it was. Maybe I'm
not such a big fan of. And I saw this
(36:20):
in the polling Over time, as I looked at where
Frank was doing with tendencies, and I knew that I
had some messaging that would really undercut his stance with
social conservatives. I had, I had from the research and
et cetera. I had put together all this stuff, and
essentially what I found was that he was out on
a limb that I could cut off behind it. And
(36:42):
that's not me. You know, the ballot on any of
those polls, and even the fave on faves, they weren't
actually useful to me in and of themselves. It was
only who's he most popular with, who's the least popular with?
How did these issues resonate? Et cetera. And so it
was about putting together the combination of, you know, if
every campaign is a question time, territory and resource, right,
(37:04):
I had a pretty good sense of what my resource
was for money, I need to know what my ideological
resource was because or what my ideological territory was. And
then timing was just a matter of getting close to election.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
At what point do you tell your candidates, quote, homie,
shit is bad. That was one of my questions. So
it's a great question. It's a great question. So, like,
first of all, you need to be bluntly honest with
your with your clients, like in a very very normal,
not a normal way that you would do like your friends.
(37:38):
I had a client one time who I was being
very polite to and I was like, you need to
go before we take pictures to use everywhere. You need
to get your teeth cleaned because your teeth are orange.
Like I can't emphasize enough. You need like you need
to be so blunt with them and be like, no,
this is not this is not working at Like, you
need to do something with yourself. When the race is
coming down to the water, needed to sit there and
(38:01):
say something. You know, if it's a matter of winning
and losing. You also have to know your client. If
your client is just illusional, and I've had a few
of them and you're like, look, you're not living in
the world that I'm living in So if you're having
a good time, you're having a good time. But there
are people that you sit there and say you know
that you're like, you know it's a serious win or
lost thing. You need to sit there and say you
(38:22):
neither A invest more money or b stop investing money
because there's no amount of money. Did you as this
whole like you need to be out there to protect them,
and that's crucial. The perfect example from history was like
Susie Wilds in twenty sixteen telling Donald Trump, I think
she needed like a million or ten million more dollar.
I think it's ten million dollars to win Florida for him.
(38:43):
She's like, I need ten million more dollars cash from
you right now. And he screamed and he cursed. This
is in the political on or those organizations. But Susie
Wilde had a track record for winning this election. She
knew she could do it. But it was bluntly honest,
and he cut her the check and she she helped
win Florida in twenty sixteen by less than a point.
So it's a matter of really knowing knowing yourself, where
(39:05):
the state of the races, and then being confident with
your relationship with your client and unless they could fire
you is the worst they could do. But you that's like,
that is that's really where it is to understand where
they are. And and uh, there are some delusional clients.
A lot of them literally lives upins on nerves all
the time. And generally the clients who always think they're
(39:26):
going to lose what something, it's terrible, they are the
easier ones to deal with than the ones who are
confident they're always going to win.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
Yeah, I mean, I guess two bits of just tactical
advice here. One is you should never have the it's
bad talk when the client brings it to you. You
need to set the terms of that, decide when it's
going to happen, and you need to say, hey, we
need to have conversation because if they bring it to you,
(39:53):
they're just going to be spun up and like they
won't trust you, they won't feel like they will be
like wait, wait, you knew this and you didn't bring
it to So so if you think the gay things are bad,
like get it on the get it on the calendar,
and like get it on the calendar fast, and you
need to bring it to them, right, number one. Number two,
(40:13):
you know, if you're going to lose by more than
ten and the client doesn't know that, I mean, as
long as they're not spending their own money, like you
should be blunt with them. But it's not. You know,
obviously you don't want to hurt the family, you don't
want them to suffer embarrassment, et cetera. But you need
to have strategic conversations around that sort of thing. If
(40:33):
it's going to be a race that's going to be
within ten points either way, then the answer is and
then the answer is to you don't actually know if
they're going to win or lose, right, you just don't
be honest with yourself. And number two say to them, look,
you could win this or you could lose this. It's
close enough that no data that I provide you is
(40:54):
going to change your behavior either way. So just act
like you're down by five and go bleep bleep bl campaign.
Speaker 1 (41:01):
Right, Yeah, yeah, Last question, this is a good one.
What is the craziest thing you've ever seen in your
consulting career in a campaign?
Speaker 2 (41:09):
Found a dead body in Mississippi?
Speaker 1 (41:11):
Once you found a dead body in Mississippi, a dead
body where would you what campaign was that?
Speaker 2 (41:16):
That was the body? It's a Sad Cochrane for a
Missisippi centate campaign.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
The dead body was behind you, Thad Cochran from Misisippi.
Where did you? Where did you? Where did you stumble
on a dead body?
Speaker 2 (41:28):
It was in a It was in an exurban neighborhood.
I want to say, I don't remember where it was
Visa B. Jackson.
Speaker 1 (41:34):
Did they still sign the petition to get the count
on the ballot.
Speaker 2 (41:38):
During the un so they were already on the ballot.
I didn't. I called it in. There's a police reports.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
I did a campaign one time where it was really
eccentric guy, very wealthy guy in New Jersey who told
that one of the knocking on doors and kind of
more rural New Jersey and they said, you know, he said,
how can I earn your boat? And this old lady
was talking at the door and she said, you get
rid of the beehive, nest on behive on my roof.
(42:05):
And he climbed the roof, was stung a thousand times
and kicked off a beehive, and like I mean, was
being stung repeatedly. I've done a race in Ohio where
a man opened his trunk to put palm cottnap punk
cars door signs in it, and it was there was
a hamsters. It was not ferrous, it was you know,
(42:27):
it was Gerbils. It was gerbils. There were Gerbils in
the trunk of his car. And I said there, I said, sorry,
you have gerbils in your car, so oh you should
see my garage. They were all over the place as
if that was like the absolute normal response. I mean,
I've my favorite Luke Thompson story was one time you
did a camp. You were at it, you were in
West Virginia, western Maryland and doing a campaign, and you
(42:49):
said you were working on the you're working in the
door and someone started saying a conspiracy theory to you,
and then a second person came with an even crazier
conspiracy theory where the first conspiracy theory said, this is
too much. Was this guy's nuts?
Speaker 2 (43:01):
You know. It was in a polling place I had
I'd had somebody who'd gone into details about like and
I mean details about some chem trail stuff to me,
I mean details, and then somebody else came by and
unloaded like a whole other thing, and the kem trails
guy looked at me and I'm like, that guy's out
of here. Man, I don't know. I I once I
had a guy answer, uh, answer the door, shirtless but
(43:23):
packing heat and his pet rooster ran out and tried
to get my rental. That happened, and I have a
I have a toy rooster that the kids work on.
That campaign got me to commemorate that.
Speaker 1 (43:35):
Yeah, answer the door naked is actually startling.
Speaker 2 (43:38):
You see some wild ship. Like the number of people
who sit in their chairs shirtless, eating cereal out of
the box and just migrate directly to the door in
that state of affairs, It's like very high.
Speaker 1 (43:51):
Luke, thank you so much for being on this podcast.
I really appreciate it. Where can people go to find
your stuff that they want to see you on? Your
Twitter is really funny. It's a lot about Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
I mean, I guess lt Tompso on Twitter, No end
at the end is the best place to go, Ryan, Ryan,
you just go throw a retweet on there.
Speaker 1 (44:06):
And then I want to do it.
Speaker 2 (44:08):
To do it for sure, I've probably toned it down
a little bit as I've gotten older, But you know,
there's a few bangers out there.
Speaker 1 (44:15):
This saucy Yeah all right, Luke, thank you so much.
Thank you for listening. Yeah, thank you everyone for listening.
We will be back next week. Please like and subscribe
on iHeartRadio, app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get to
your podcasts.
Host
Gill Alexander
Popular Podcasts
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy And Charlamagne Tha God!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Decisions, Decisions
Welcome to "Decisions, Decisions," the podcast where boundaries are pushed, and conversations get candid! Join your favorite hosts, Mandii B and WeezyWTF, as they dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often-taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love. Every Monday, Mandii and Weezy invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability, and authenticity, they share their personal journeys navigating their 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engaging in thought-provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations. From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that resonate with your experiences, "Decisions, Decisions" is your go-to source for open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world. Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections—tune in and join the conversation!