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Podcast Transcript:
William Fotter: Alright! So, I’m William Fotter and I’m here with the Georgetown Public Policy Review podcast. Here I have Liz Smith, one of our GU Politics fellows and a political communications whiz. So, I guess my first question would be if you want to introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about yourself, as well as how you got to where you currently are.
Lis Smith: Yeah! And thank you for having me, it’s exciting to be here. My name is Lis Smith, I am a lifer in politics. I’ve worked on about 20 campaigns over the years. I started getting involved in politics while I was in college at Dartmouth and I’ve worked on U.S. Senate, gubernatorial, mayoral, district attorney, Presidential races—some people you might know are Governors Andrew Cuomo and Terry McAuliffe, Senator Claire McCaskill, President Barack Obama. Most recently I was a senior adviser to Pete Buttigieg’s 2020. So, you know, I’ve traveled and lived all over the country doing this for the last 15 years.
Fotter: That’s great! I love Claire McCaskill. Kind of going off your most recent experience, you were seen as kind of visionary for implementing the “go anywhere” media strategy that kind of took [Pete] from being the mayor of South Bend to being a prominent national political figure, just by going and agreeing to talk on any media outlet. So, how much of this strategy was specific to Pete? Or do you think it’s just a good idea in general? You know, for example, say someone sticks their foot in their mouth on a regular basis. Do you think [a “go anywhere” strategy] would necessarily still be a good idea?
Smith: Well, you know, that’s where it does have some value. And I’ll get to that point in a second. But look, with Pete it was a no-brainer. He’s someone who is very thoughtful, very smart, very quick on his feet. He’s someone who can dominate a three-minute TV interview as well as a one-hour long podcast. And he can speak on a number of different subjects. He’s not someone who has to be overly scripted or who needs a big set of talking points in front of him—you know, his brain I think just operates at a faster speed than most mortals. And he really likes doing media stuff, and I think that really comes through. A lot of candidates do not. So that was certainly a benefit and being able to be a compelling and smart communicator was really central to Pete’s success in that race, and certainly central to our media strategy. In terms of whether it works for everyone, no it doesn’t. I don’t think that just any candidate could go out and employ the same media strategy that he did. But in terms of the gaffes, I actually think that if you do have a go everywhere strategy, if you do a fair amount of media and keep your name in the news, it can actually help minimize the impact of gaffes over time. If you think about Donald Trump, on a daily basis he says so many crazy things. He says so many things that otherwise would-be major news, that would be a week-long news cycle in a normal White House, but because he overloads us all the time with so much content—with all the crazy tweets, with all of his crazy press conferences, with all of this—none of it ends up sticking. And so, he’s somehow figured out a way, as a complete gaffe machine, to basically make gaffes not even matter because our brains are overloaded. If you are the type of person [to make frequent gaffes], if you are doing a lot of media, if you make a gaffe at 9 but you have an interview scheduled at 12, you can clean it up there. Whereas if you’re someone more like Hillary Clinton in 2016, who went 300 days without a press conference, every time you poke your head up and make a gaffe, that’s what people are going to remember. That’s what’s going to stay in the news for a long time.
Fotter: Yeah, that’s a really good point. I don’t know if you remember when Trump said that Biden wanted to harm God, or kill God or something, but I was telling my friend about it, and she just hadn’t heard about it at all. And I was like, “no this was a major news cycle for a couple hours on Twitter!” I mean, that doesn’t mean anything, but…
Smith: Yeah exactly! And I find that, you know, over the summer I wasn’t on social media—I deleted Twitter from my phone just to give my brain some time off—and a couple days later I would hear about 10 different things that I missed, and then you sort of realize how none of it matters. And how if you’re not on Twitter all the time, then you’re just not seeing this. So, I think it’s a good perspective to have in that way too.
Fotter: Yeah, Biden was very smart to just not ever go on Twitter. But kind of on a similar note, how much of political communications is tailoring your strategy towards a specific candidate advantages and weaknesses, versus just following universal guidelines or universal truths? You mentioned Secretary Clinton not having a press conference for 300 days. Obviously, that would be seen as a [universal] bad move, but how much of it is just individual?
Smith: It’s got to be a good mixture of the two, right? Unless you are a gazillionaire and can just carpet-bomb the airwaves with millions and millions and millions of dollars of ads, you’ve got to play the game a bit, right? You’ve got to play the media game. One of the few people I know who has been successful without doing that was Rick Scott during his 2010 governor’s race in Florida. He basically said “F-U, I don’t need to meet with the media, I don’t need to meet with editorial boards, I’m just going to buy this election.” And to some extent, that’s what Mike Bloomberg was trying to do in the 2020 primary. But then of course, once he does start allowing access, once he went on that debate stage and completely imploded, and you clearly saw that he hadn’t put any thought into any of this—clearly did not even show the American people the respect of figuring why he was going to run for President, or how to explain away bad business decisions he’s made in the past or workplace issues he’s had—he imploded. So, I do think you need to have some kind of baseline of engagement with the media that every candidate needs to have. But you absolutely do need to tailor it candidate-by-candidate. And so, if some isn’t, you know, the deepest person, the most thoughtful person, someone with a vivid internal life? You shouldn’t put them on an intellectual podcast where they’re going to be asked who their favorite philosophers are or whatever. If someone is just really not quick on their feet—if someone is really smart but just really not quick on their feet—maybe don’t put them in tough TV interviews where someone is going to be antagonist or they’re going to have to respond quickly. If someone just isn’t comfortable in front of a TV camera, then just focus more on radio, focus more on print. And I think there are different ways you can sort of balance all these things out.
Fotter: Gotcha. Yeah, one thing I really noticed during the primary was that all of the candidates who were kind of successful in the long-run kind of had a clear narrative for why they were running and just tailored it to their specific communications strengths.
Smith: Yeah, I mean, sometimes. I think for—let me just use the example of Pete, right. He was trying to run to be a different type of candidate, a next-generation type of candidate, a candidate who could also bring people together. You know: Democrats, Independents, Republicans. So, our communications strategy sort of mirrored that, right? Because he was one of the few Democratic candidates who would go on Fox News, that would go on right-wing radio and do interviews with people like Hugh Hewitt. Which also reinforces the message that he’s going to bring people together and isn’t just going to hide in his partisan silo. It also underscored how he is the next generation by the fact that he’s going on nontraditional TV shows, nontraditional interviews, ones that were geared more towards Gen Z voters. And so, in that sense, our communications strategy sort of underscored our narrative. I think with some of the other candidates you didn’t have it synced out quite that way, right? They just sort of had a playbook that they were working off of. Like “oh, we’re supposed to go on Meet the Press,” or “we’re supposed to talk to the New York Times.” And they’re not being thoughtful in how your tactics and your strategy can actually reinforce your message. And, you know, just sort of stuck in a rut of doing the same thing people always do.
Fotter: Yeah! So, I want to go back to something you mentioned just now about Pete kind of going on traditionally conservative outlets like Fox News, I guess increasingly as of late, and why you seem to think this is a good idea. I mean I don’t even think it’s really specific to Pete. I follow Matt Yglesias a lot and I noticed that after his book came out, he went on the Ben Shapiro Show and all these other right-wing outlets. And I think he explained it as kind of meeting people where they are.
Smith: Exactly.
Fotter: Yeah, so if you just to kind of touch on why you think that’s important, or when it might not be a good idea, or…
Smith: Yeah. So, look, I think it’s important for a few different reasons. One, you know—let me just use Fox as an example so I can dig in on this—Fox has a massive audience. And yeah, the audience is generally a bit right-leaning, but a lot of Democrats watch Fox too. And sort of the argument on the left sometimes, or among these media watchdog groups, is that you’re legitimizing propaganda or propping up a propaganda arm of the right-wing. Because you know, they just go out on air and say these awful things about Democrats. But we have two options: we could just let them go and say all these awful things about Democrats on-air and distort what we say, or we could just go and speak directly to their audience and make sure that they’re hearing directly from us. So that’s part of the philosophy—to break through there, you’ve got to actually go on there and talk to people. There’s also just the idea of “are some of their hosts operating in bad faith?” Is Laura Ingraham, is Tucker Carlson operating in bad faith? Yeah, but a lot of people who tune in aren’t. They just want the news. To them they’re not overthinking “oh, you know, propaganda” or “is what they’re saying true or not?” They just want to tune into the news. Fox News is what their neighbors watch. It’s what they talk about at the workplace. So that’s what they’re going to watch. And so why then, would we say, “No we’re too good for you, we’re not going to talk to you, we’re not going to meet you where you are”? And how then are they ever going to hear our message? They’re not going to seek out a 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana; they’re only going to hear about him if he’s speaking to them directly through the news outlet [they watch]. And then there’s a third thing here that I think people sometimes don’t think about: sometimes the audience when you go on Fox News are Democrats seeing that you’re able to go on Fox News. Or they’re people who don’t watch Fox News but are like, “Wow, this guy can really go toe-to-toe with these hosts. He’s really impressive, and maybe that’s the type of guy that we could elect President. That’s the type of candidate that could beat a Republican. That’s the type of candidate that can build a coalition.” So those are sort of—well that’s a long answer but it’s something I’ve thought about a lot over time, and it’s more complex than what a lot of the opponents of our strategy would like you to think it is.
Fotter: Yeah absolutely. And I mean I think there are definitely people in the right-wing media ecosystem who are just solely operating in bad faith that you maybe should not engage with—OAN and stuff like that—but like you mentioned, Fox just has a huge audience. If you’re not able to connect with these people as you’re directly talking to them, how are you going to win a general election, you know?
Smith: Yeah, exactly. And so yeah, don’t go on Laura Ingraham’s show. Don’t go on Tucker Carlson’s show. But Chris Wallace is one of the best political journalists in American political journalism, right? And there are a number of, I think, straight, fair news people, and yeah, I think it’s totally fine to talk to them.
Fotter: So, kind of going back to speaking directly to the audience—part of the 2018 [Democratic] successes kind of seemed to be because Democratic House candidates generally didn’t run on a referendum on Trump as much as they ran on their district, issues specific to their district, speaking to their constituencies. And it seems—I mean, 2020 was obviously a referendum on Trump and they [the Democrats] lost several House seats—so do you kind of feel that the issue is nationalized House races, nationalized Senate races, or how do we kind of get back to focusing on those district and state-wide issues? Or just kind of what are your thoughts on that?
Smith: Yeah, that’s a really smart observation, it’s a smart question, and it’s something that Democrats are going to have to reckon with and come to terms with, you know, in the post-Trump era, to the extent that we can ever be post-Trump. But one thing that we learned in 2018 was exactly what you said, that it wasn’t a referendum on Trump. Trump wasn’t in these campaign ads. He wasn’t in these mailers. How Democrats won, whether it was in the suburbs of Chicago, or Dallas, or Oklahoma City, it was almost by stiff-arming Trump. And by talking instead about, you know, primarily about healthcare, which is the number on issue for a lot of people. And by talking about the economy, by talking about local issues. Every community is different. You know, even though you always see economic concerns, healthcare costs, and [healthcare] access at the top, there are going to be a bunch of different things that voters care about based on the area. And those strategies worked, because then it just doesn’t become a tradition D versus R thing. That’s going force a lot of R’s and Republicans to just sort of stick with their tribe and be a little bit more tribal in their voting behaviors. And that was something that I think was really smart about what Biden did campaign, was that he didn’t make it all about Donald Trump, right? If you look at his ads most of them are pretty positive and focused just on Joe Biden. And when he did run ads about Donald Trump, they weren’t hair-on-fire type things. It’s like bar owners talking about how Trump’s policies closed down their small business. It’s not like, “this guy’s a racist, misogynist, worst human being ever,” type of thing. And just like the smart thing that smart Democrats have learned is that just talking about Trump generally just turns people off. Like the easiest choice anyone can make in an election is just not to vote. It’s not to choose between a Democrat and a Republican, it’s to say, “I’m not going to vote.” And no one quite has the ability to turn political skeptics off like Donald Trump. And so just the mere image of him in an ad can just get people to change the channel and be like “screw this, I’m just going to watch the game, I’m not going to follow this stuff right now.” So, the more that we can—for Democrats going forward—the more that we can localize races, make them specific to the states, specific to the districts, and really just talk about the things that affect people’s lives day-to-day, it’s going to be much more effective than just running a referendum on Trump.
Fotter: You know, for Joe Biden to win the general election he had to pull off some Trump voters, and then if you constantly talk about how this guy is a racist, a misogynist—I mean, even if it’s true—you’re going to make them feel like they are associated with it, which is not appealing.
Smith: Yeah exactly. Exactly. Obviously, I have strong feelings on whether Trump is those things. But yeah, people have heard that. You know, it’s either gotten through or it hasn’t. People have an opinion on Donald Trump. But the question is, do they have an opinion on you? And do they know what you stand for? I mean, everyone knows who he is. Everyone knows what he stands for or doesn’t stand for. So, if you’re just talking about him, you’re missing the opportunity to talk about what you stand for.
Fotter: Yeah, that’s really good. So, I guess one final question: I feel like for the past four years we’ve had columnists going to diners and reading Hillbilly Elegy and doing their [2016] post-mortems based on that. And I feel like that’s going to shift to Laredo and Miami-Dade now—so better food for pundits, which I guess is good. But if you want to kind of opine on that and what you see as the shift in—I mean one big failure was that Latinos aren’t a uniform vote—but what you see as kind of that failure in Democratic messaging [to Latinos].
Smith: Yeah, well look, I think a big story of 2020 and the thing that people have got to look into—on the positive side for Democrats—is the massive shift that we saw in the suburban vote, right? That Democrats were able to—Biden especially—were able to win over moderates, independents, Republicans, former Republicans, whatever you want to call them. And so, it’s going to be interesting to examine whether that phenomenon is permanent or whether it’s just about Trump, that folks in the suburbs are just so repulsed by him. Because there’s no doubt that the suburban vote was really critical to how we won Georgia, how we won Michigan, how we won Pennsylvania, how we won Wisconsin. And even just kind of down the margins there, in more Republican sort of suburbs [this] was really f important. But yeah, I do think that we’re going to need to go—and reporters should, and campaigns should—dig deep into some of the issues, the undeniable issues that we had with the Latino community. And I hate sometimes talking about Latino voters because it’s like making the assumption that, you know, Cuban-Americans are the same as Mexican Americans are the same as Puerto Ricans are the same as Dominicans are the same as Venezuelans, and they’re just not. And it’s foolish and short-sighted of the Democrats to think that outreach to the Latino community starts and ends with talking about immigration. Clearly the economy, you know, as with any other [group], is the top issue. Healthcare costs, top issue. Education, public safety, all of those things matter. And we can’t just sort of have a one-dimensional approach to trying to win over the Latino community. We’ve got to also understand that it’s very diverse, right? The Mexican Americans living along the border, they’re living in sort of more rural, more culturally conservative areas, and they’re going to have different attitudes than Puerto Ricans in New York, or in Pennsylvania, whatever. And so, we’ve got to have a much more nuanced way of reaching out to that. And I think the media itself has sometimes just written about the Latino community as a monolithic entity, and thinking that, you know, immigration is all that folks in the Latino community care about when clearly that’s not the case.
Fotter: Yeah, I think amongst Hispanic people immigration actually ranks like fourth [in terms of policy priorities].
Smith: Yeah, I know, it’s nuts.
Fotter: Anyway, I know our time is just about up, but that’s about all I had. If you have any concluding thoughts—or again, it was just really great to have you on. Thank you.
Smith: Yeah, no thank you! This was really, really fun. And great to talk with you. I’ve really, really enjoyed my time at Georgetown and getting to learn myself from a lot of the students here.
