Fifteen Minutes with Cornell Belcher

Cornell Belcher is the president of brilliant corners Research & Strategies, having previously served as Pollster for the Democratic National Committee under Howard Dean and on the polling team for Obama’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. Fifteen Minutes sat down with him to discuss the 2016 election, the future of polling, and more.

Fifteen Minutes: FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver—who has himself built a reputation on keen analysis of polling data—wrote an article in August of 2014 posing the question: “Is the Polling Industry in Stasis or in Crisis?” In it, he mentions a class of challenges facing polling today: poor response rates, fewer high-quality polls, herding and methodological shortcuts. What’s your take on that question—is the polling industry in stasis or in crisis?

Cornell Belcher: Well, you know, you have more than one industry. What a lot of you all see on the outside is public polling. The polling that I do for campaigns and for clients in the campaign or issue advocacy space you never see. And they’re different animals, to a certain degree. Public polling is usually done by your newspaper outlets or your television stations, and what I think is true in a lot of public polling is you have a client that is trying to do something as quick as possible, with as little expense as possible. And you also don’t have—in many of those instances—the wonderful resource that is a voter file. Especially if it’s a well-kept voter file that’s overlaid with a lot of different information on it, which the parties do keep and spend a lot of money on—it makes a big difference. And especially when you look at the tremendous resources that both parties have put into voter contact, and creating these platforms for voter contact, that’s different than what you have in the outside in public polling.

If you go back to 2008 and 2012, internally on the Obama campaign, our polling was fairly spot-on and our models were fairly spot-on. In fact, if you go back to the election night in 2012, when I was on CNN arguing with my Republican friends on the other side who were telling me in fact why we weren’t going to win, and I told them that we were in fact going to win every state that we won in 2008 except for maybe two.

They attacked me vigorously, but it is about having the resources of a voter file and then being able to build the modeling off the voter file. Nate is right in some ways, and in some ways it’s misleading, because good polling isn’t just about methodology, good polling is also about the art. You can know the methodology, you can know the science of polling, [but] that doesn’t make you a good pollster. Making a good pollster is understanding the art and the nuance that’s going on, it’s understanding that, for example, if you have a young and energetic candidate who can bring new people into the process, perhaps you shouldn’t have such a tight model on your likely voter screen. But that’s not something that the science is ever going to tell you—that’s something that the art of doing it and having experience at it tells you.

I push back a lot on some of these ideas now that polling is getting harder. Polling to me is getting better because of this—go back to 2004, for example, in 2004 someone your age, a young man walking around a campus anywhere in America, take that young man walking around the campus of the University of New Mexico, who may or may not vote. In 2004 my ability to connect to him, and understand where he is on issues, or understand his interest in participating, and understanding what he’s doing and how he’s using his time, is incredibly limited. I have very little ability to connect to that person. In 2008, 2012, we had an enormous amount of opportunity to reach that young man walking around that university, because of the technology, and because of the social media space, and because of this remarkable device called the smartphone. It’s not easy, but it’s not impossible—I can now reach a whole swathe of the electorate, particularly younger voters, particularly minority voters, particularly more transient voters, that a decade ago I had very little chance of reaching, which enriches my sample, enriches my poll.

In that way, I go the opposite direction. Is it easy? No. But now I think there are so many more opportunities to connect and reach transient voters and reach younger voters that a decade ago we just didn’t have.

FM: Let’s talk a little bit about that, about reaching out to millennials and bringing them into the electorate. One of the achievements of the Obama campaign in 2008 and 2012 was building a coalition of minority, millennial, and female voters—do you think that you can reassemble that coalition for 2016? And looking beyond 2016, how does the Democratic Party solve its voter turnout problem?

CB: Well that’s a really big question. And this ‘we’—I’m neutral, I’m not working for any of the presidential candidates this time around. But, look, campaigns are problem-solving vehicles. I mean, at its best—in my opinion—campaigns are vehicles for solving problems. If you have a problem, you build a campaign for solving that problem.

Part of what we knew we had to do in 2008 if Barack Obama was going to—not even talking about winning the general election, but if he was going to win the nomination, early on we had a conversation about how we had to expand the electorate. We had to change the face of the electorate, we had to bring more diversity into the electorate in order to change the face of the electorate. So you build a campaign to help solve for that, which means a lot of the traditional, conventional things that campaigns have been doing over and over again, we’re going to have to go in a different direction, we’re going to have to sound different, and we’re going to have to look different. This ideal that the president (then the senator) talked about was building a movement. Movement is not about a policy, movement is not about an issue, movement’s not even about politics. Movement is about something a lot larger than that. Movements are cultural, they’re about our values, they’re in some instances spiritual. So we had to build something larger in order to solve for that problem and we had target and look in different ways than other campaigns had.

For years I fought this fight about spending resources trying to communicate to young voters. And for years the conversation always went like this: “Cornell, we’re not going to spend resources on younger voters, because younger voters don’t work, alright?” And of course my comeback, my retort would be, “Well, of course they’re not voting, we’re not paying any attention to them, we’re not trying to target them, we’re not trying to move messaging that’s specifically aimed at them. So it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. We didn’t spend money going after younger people, so they didn’t turn out.

Well, something crazy happened in the Obama campaign. Guess what we started doing? We started doing research around younger voters and we started putting campaign resources behind we found in the research on how to target, how to reach, and how to narrowcast for younger voters. And the difference between 2008 and ’12 and 2010 and ’14 is this: in 2008 and 2012, younger voters made up a larger swathe of the electorate than did seniors; in 2010 and 2014, seniors made up a larger swathe of the electorate than did younger voters, which means in 2012 and 2008, Democrats do really well, both at the national level, but they also picked up House seats, picked up Senate seats. In 2010 and 2014, when seniors made up a large swathe of the electorate, Democrats got their asses kicked. So building campaigns to solve for that problem is important.

Now, did we have lightning in a bottle in 2008 and 2012 for Barack Obama? Some would make the argument that we did have lightning in a bottle. But some will also make the argument—because they made it to me—that I heard a lot in 2012 from a lot of my friends on the Republican side that, “Cornell, what you all did in 2008 was extraordinary, but there’s no way you can do that again. That energy and the history just isn’t there, so you’ll never see that turnout among young voters, you’ll never see that sort of turnout among millennial and minority voters again in 2012. You just won’t do it.” But you know what we did? We understood the ideal that you’ll never recapture the energy of 2008, so you build a campaign to solve for that. And while we didn’t have the energy of 2008—we probably will never see the energy of 2008 again in my lifetime—we replaced that with a determination among certain segments of the electorate that was different than it was in 2008. And we got the same sort of performance from that. So you build campaigns to solve for that. You know, whether or not whoever the Democratic nominee is, whether it be Bernie, or Hillary, or O’Malley, they’ll have to solve for that. Now, every candidate has to build their own coalition. Is there a pathway to victory for Democrats without large swathes of the Obama coalition? No, I don’t think there is. However, do they need to exactly replicate the Obama coalition? No, I don’t think they have to, because, for instance, Obama lost white women by 14 points. Will Hillary lose white women by 14 points? Well, first of all, she won’t win white women—if she wins white women it’s going to be a landslide of epic proportion, because no Democrat at the national level has won white voters—period—since LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act. So Democrats do really well when they get historically 45, 46 percent, although Obama didn’t get that but he over-indexed with minorities.

But will Hillary Clinton lose white women by 14 points? If she loses white women by just 12 points she doesn’t need the full Obama coalition, right? So it becomes a math game—she won’t win white women, but will she lose it by the same margin that Obama lost it by? I think most conventional wisdom would say that she won’t lose it by the same margin that Obama lost it by, so will she need all the exact elements of the Obama campaign? No, she probably won’t. But can she get there without large swathes of that coalition? No, she can’t.

But on the other side of that coin is what Republicans are missing. I think you see it in this primary season, with the Trumps and what have you, who are making very difficult to make inroads with minority voters. When you go on attack and push xenophobia and push these dog-whistle politics that you see—which, by the way, has historically been very successful. I mean, the Southern strategy as a strategy is probably the most successful strategy in the history of American politics, right? Perhaps in the history of all politics. But that’s debatable—that’d be a fun debate.

But I think Barack Obama showed that the country was at a tipping point—that coalition, that Southern strategy of winning by being divisive, doesn’t work anymore because of the tremendous changes in the demographics. If you look at Reagan’s winning map and his coalition then and look at the 2012 map, what you find is that Mitt Romney did a couple of points better among that segment of the white electorate than Ronald Reagan did. Ronald Reagan won a landslide—I think he won every state but three or four in ’80. But move ahead to 2012, Mitt Romney basically duplicated that coalition; in fact, bested it by a couple of points in the white vote, and it was an electoral landslide the other way.

So at the national level, are we at the tipping point for that sort of dog-whistle, Southern strategy politics? I think perhaps we are. But more importantly, what I think Republicans are missing—and again, not my Democrat hat, not a Republican hat, but just a democrat (little ‘d’) hat on, competition is healthy for our democracy—Republicans are missing something when they allow this dog-whistle politics to be front and center and foment within their party. Because here’s, again, the math: What happens if a Republican can win 20 percent of the black vote in Ohio? What happens if a Republican can win 25 percent of the black vote in Michigan or Pennsylvania? Not even running up the score, but getting twenties, those states become very difficult for Democrats to carry at that point.

So at some point, both parties are going to have to build strategies around realizing what the ascending America is becoming. In order for them to compete in this space, both parties are going to have to solve for that problem. I think the Democrats are further along on that pathway, I think there’s some internal struggle within the Republican party that’s going to—regardless of who comes out of the Democratic side, right now you’d have to argue they have a national advantage locked in because of this Tea Party Civil War that’s in the Republican party that benefits them. Because look, a state like Florida’s gone blue in two elections, largely on the backs of a growing minority population there in Florida. There’s not a lot of maps for a Republican that get you to the White House if you’re losing Florida.

FM: Many of the candidates you see leading the presidential race at the moment—Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders immediately come to mind—were, and still are, to some extent, considered unelectable. What does that say about the state of our political process?

CB: I’m just going to push back so hard on that, because I think that’s elitist. Us sitting here in the campuses of Harvard and such saying that candidates who have, whether we understand it or not, clearly ignited something in a group of people and quenched a thirst that’s in a group of people—us calling that person unelectable seems awfully elitist to me. And I don’t mean that in a sort of attacking way, but I think that’s part of the problem with both the “Washingtons” and the “New Yorks,” and to a certain extent the “Bostons” here, is that we have these people sitting up high raining down our values on these people.

Look, I don’t agree with anything Donald Trump says. However, at the same time, I don’t think that I have the right to call him unelectable, which to a certain extent, belittles the enormous swell of Republicans right now who are rallying around him as an outsider. I think that’s problematic, not only about our media, it’s problematic about too much of our political establishment. By the way, a lot of people the political establishment, particularly on the Republican side, called crazy and unelectable, they’ve been kicking the Republican establishment’s ass.

So I never want to belittle what’s bubbling up at the grassroots in such a way as to call him unelectable—I worked for a guy in 2007, 2008 who most people thought was unelectable. So I always push back on that, because—let’s not miss the movement. Again, just stepping back as a student of it, or as a science of it, we can belittle and devalue what’s happening in the grassroots by saying that. There’s a lot of people, especially in the US Congress right now, that ten years ago most of the establishment would say. “That person is unelectable.” So there’s something going on in the grassroots, especially on the right, that I don’t want to belittle. And I think a lot of Republicans are uncomfortable with it, but it is what it is. When you get people like Ted Cruz, who every Republican senator basically can’t stand, the establishment senators can’t stand, but he does have a following, and he does have something there that is resonating with a group of people who are frustrated—I just never want to belittle that. And so I always push back when people say they’re ‘unelectable.’ Who are we to say that? I think it happens too often. They’ve been saying Donald Trump is going to implode now for six months, and he hasn’t. Maybe the establishment and the elites are missing something—maybe Donald Trump is not missing anything at all.

FM: If you look at Jeb Bush’s new poll numbers right now—

CB: Right, Jeb Bush is unelectable! [laughs] But at the same time as a student of American politics, these are interesting times. They’re scary, but they’re also interesting times. Jeb Bush is not going to be the Republican nominee—I think I can safely say that. But go back five or six months ago, smart money was on Jeb. But their world is changing. The same sort of anxiousness and want for change on the left that allowed the rise of Barack Obama over the Clinton machine, I think you’re seeing a rise on the right that’s going to allow someone to overthrow the establishment machine that is Jeb Bush.

Jeb Bush is not going to be the Republican nominee—that is an incredible statement to say, but right now I think Jeb Bush is less electable—

FM: Than Donald Trump?

CB: Than Donald Trump.