Voter Data and Tech with Liz Walters of TargetSmart

Politics is like a music festival and our job is to keep the beach ball with our brand or our candidate in the air at all times across that music festival crowd. And we don't really have the ability to do that right now, right? And like that's what we have to figure out how to do. Hello, this is the Great Battlefield Podcast. I'm Nathaniel G. Perlman. A great political battle is being fought right now between progressives and the forces of reaction on the other side. This show is about the political entrepreneurs and other progressive leaders who are finding new or improved ways to fight. My guest today is Liz Walters. Liz is CEO of Target Smart, the voter data and technology services company that serves Democrats and allied organizations. Liz came to Target Smart after working in politics in Ohio. Among other things as political director, executive director, and eventually chair of the state Democratic Party, not to mention as a councilwoman in Summit County. I was happy to have the chance to get to know Liz, talk about Ohio politics, and understand better what Target Smart is doing of late. So first, my sponsor, then my interview with Liz Walters at Target Smart. This episode is brought to you by Graphicacy. Graphicacy is an analytic design firm that can help you advance the mission of your organization using your own real data and information. They are 21st century visual communicators who create interactive graphics, motion graphics, and data visualizations. You can find Graphicacy at Graphicacy.com. That is graphicycy.com. With Graphicacy's help, you can visualize a better world. Liz, would you mind introducing yourself and giving me a quick biography? Sure. My name is Liz Walters and I am currently the CEO of Target Smart. And I have been working in progressive politics, often on since 2007. And I always tell people Barack Obama president was my gateway drug into a life of politics, which as many people say as a bug, and once you catch it, you never lose it. So over the course of my career, I'm in Ohioan, a proud bug guy, currently live in Ohio, and spent most of my time in the political space of Ohio. Shared Brown alum worked for my hometown, Congresswoman Betty Sutton on the Hill for a brief fever dream is the last time I lived in worked in DC. Probably came back home as quickly as I could. Worked for the labor movement in Ohio, have worked in our progressive donor and C4 space. And most recently before joining Target Smart, I was the chair of the Ohio Democratic Party for five years. That is a career in progressive politics right there, for sure. Even though when you say 2007 as a start of a career, I think, oh my, you're very young. Thank you. I'm right at that age where I love to hear that. I get going in the 80s. Tell me about growing up. Give me a sense of you as a kid and going through school. I grew up in a small town in Summit County, Ohio called Caiho, Gifal's. It's right outside of Akron, which is the county seat. And still live there now. My mom is the oldest of seven girls. I have a very large Irish Catholic family and my parents divorced when I was pretty young and we moved in with my granddad and my grandma. And so I grew up in a multi-generational household that was kind of the hub for a very big extended family. So I am, my mom's only child, but I have dozen plus cousins and we're all very close. Most of my guy cousins are in the trades. Most of my girl cousins work in a variety of healthcare, education, spaces. I'm definitely an anomaly. The one person kind of doing politics. It's a working class community. We had a solidly, you know, working class childhood. We didn't really want for anything. We never went hungry. We participated in community sports and dance classes. But I think really what pushed me into politics was truly was an experience that I had within that family unit, which I think is true for a lot of working class families, which is when my granddad was battling cancer for the second time. He, this is before Medicare reforms and he wanted to stay home. He didn't want to pursue treatment. And my mom, who was a nurse, took unpaid time off. She didn't have a union, so she didn't have paid family leave and cared for him in our home and the cost of that care coupled with a lacking in income. Quickly pushed her into a bankruptcy when I was in college. And so that kind of experience of watching my family who, you know, you hear it, right? We all we worked hard played by the rules. My grandfather was a veteran. He worked for Firestone Tire, his whole career. But like a lot of working people, we were, it's very much a paycheck to paycheck subsistence and you're fine until you're not. That experience was really formative for me. It really caused me to step back. I had really never paid attention to politics. My family voted and like my mom occasionally dabbled in the legal women voters, but we were not a political household by any means. And that really caused me to step back and examine like, how did we get here? And I remember vividly sitting in my work study room at college. And this was right at the advent of like Google and Ask Jeives to date myself. First generation like use computers in your dorm room and googling it. Like I'm just being certain that we forgot to fill out a form or submit some paperwork and really quickly coming to find out like, no, this is what happens. Medicare doesn't in fact pay for everything. And particularly end of life care is instill a wildly underfunded, under supported, underinsured service for most Americans. And really what drove me into politics and drew me to it was Barack Obama listening to him talk about his mother's struggle with insurance companies at the end of her life. And I thought to myself, oh wow, this guy really gets it. I want to follow this guy. I was working, going to grad school in Cleveland, working nights at the same hospital my mother worked at to put myself through school as a unit clerk and through Kismet, what everyone would call it, the Obama office and 08 opened directly across the street from the hospital. And I was like, oh, that's that guy. And so I started going in before my shift to volunteer to make phone calls. And by the time the primary wrapped up, I had an offer to be an organizer and turned down like full-time government job. My parents were horrified. And they're like, you're going to, you're going to give up a government job with a pension to go do what for who? Like what's a field organizer? Who's Barack Obama? And that was it. So that's really a little bit more about my background. What was it about being a field organizer for Obama? Because you know, that is not for everybody. That's the truth. And I say this now to all the staff that I get to work with, the young staff especially. I don't know that I would be still doing this work if I had come of age in the Trump era, right? I think that the Obama campaign was this moment. And if the campaign experience, especially in08, was this magical time that brought people together across race and class. And it was so energetic. And the true community organizing ethos of the campaign empowered young people to be creative, to lead, to engage in deep meaningful relationships in neighborhoods. And we built these neighborhood teams and you got to know your volunteers. And I think coming from a, again, a big Irish Catholic family where that is core to our being. We are very close. We have all these different segments within the family, but pull together really well as a team in crisis or when we need to accomplish something. And I think I saw that reflected a lot in the spirit of the campaign. And so I just kind of took to it like a duck to water. I'm like, oh, I get this. I know this. And I also think it really helped me because, you know, not everybody stayed and did this work in their hometown. I was a bit of an outlier there being an organizer in my home county. And it really helped me fall in love with my community in a different way, getting to know different parts of it and different people from it. Can you sort of talk me through how your career led you to the higher democratic party? In the Oedo Obama campaign, I ended up over with a two county region. And one of our offices, we shared space with a frontline congresswoman, a woman named Betty Sutton. And so I got to meet the congresswoman a few times here and there throughout the course of the campaign. I mean, to be clear, like coming off the campaign, I didn't think to myself, I'm going to, I'm going to be a campaign person for the rest of my life. I was like, this works interesting. I got involved because I really care about healthcare policy. Like, where do I go from here? And the congresswoman was hiring for district staff. And this was right as the American Recovery Act was coming out. And so I got hired as a district representative in the home county and spent the first six months with her traversing the whole district, which spans across two counties at the time, helping to break down complex policy for mayors, for nonprofits, for community groups, particularly the American Recovery Act, because everybody wanted to know, how do we get some of this money to support our city needs, our nonprofit needs. And so it was really an interesting start of being able to take essentially what we're organizing skills and apply them taking, you know, a big goal and breaking it down into actionable chunks on a daily basis and then apply that to policy. And that really is what led me to going to DC coming back and her reelect in 2010, if you'll call, right? This was rough. Everyone had taken a hard votes, they had talked about immigration reform, cap and trade, the health care bill had passed at this point. And being a part of an official side operation, when your members, a frontline member, especially in that era, it's a lot. And so I ended up taking a leave to do part-time work and kind of embedding myself with the coordinated operation to help like the last few months get GOTV done. And that's really how I got to know folks at the Ohio Democratic Party more directly and how I got to know Senator Brown. And I worked as an employee of the party early in my career, first as a political director, that was in the senators reelect in 12 and then as the executive director. State party work is hard work. I know state parties tend to be a bit of a punching bag, but I will love them forever because it is a really hard job because everyone wants you to be everything to them and you really have to pick and choose what you focus your time and your money on. That's really how I got into it. I really never thought I would go back, but then as I was a part of the effort to really build out the Ohio ecosystem from the donor table side, from building infrastructure that worked year round that we needed to tackle, particularly speaking to suburban women or organizing underrepresented black voters in our urban core. It really became clear to me and I truly believe this, that we need strong state-based ecosystems that have what we call the three-legged stool. You need a strong independent side that is well-funded and that coordinates with voter registration and voter engagement. People that the party really can't reach or aren't the best speaker to. You need a strong state party that can run, accordinated, that can pool resources across different regulatory structures to run a big robust effort every two years to turn out voters. And then you need a strong candidate pain. And I think in Ohio, we had gotten very used to the last part. Senator Brown was there forever and he always had an incredibly strong operation, but our independent side in our state party had atrophied quite a bit. And so as we built up the independent side, it became clear that we needed to kind of go in and reinvent the state party. And kind of there's a lot of debt. We had to restructure some stuff. Long story short, the Senator asked is how I became the party chair. He needed somebody in there that could do that work. And the donor table director, who was a friend, was really encouraging. He was like, you got to go do this. And the other piece of this is I actually love a lot of the people you get to. I love talking to county chairs. I love working with caucuses. That's the kind of messy familial environment that can be difficult at times, but is really critical for us to maintain connection to both our grassroots donors and the people who power our grassroots action all the time, right? Ohio is one of a bunch of states that will move from purple to red. A few that went from blue to red. The story seems to mostly be white working class in a lot of places changing. But what do you see as what happened in your state? I think there's two key things here. One is, as you mentioned, it is around class. I mean, NAFTA and CAFTA killed this state. There's no way around it. And we can talk about the benefits of trade deals globally and the changing nature of the global economy. I get it. But like when you're a tire worker in Akron and your job goes to China, you don't really care, right? You're mad, understandably, the government makes you promises about retraining dollars and securing new jobs, and that never materializes. It gets really difficult to have a thoughtful policy conversation with that voter understandably. Because I think at heart, and I don't say this to minimize other social issues, but voters are fundamentally almost all of us are pocketbook voters. Because if we can't feed our families, if we can't maintain a level of economic dignity, all the other arguments kind of don't matter as much to us. And so I think that is real. And, you know, Republican and Democrat, both sides are guilty of really not living up to the commitments we've made to these voters. It's particularly profound in Appalachio, Ohio and Southeast Ohio communities along the river. It's one thing for Summit County to lose manufacturing jobs. Like that was harmful. It was hard. It made a huge impact. We lost a lot of population. But when you're living in Vinton County, population 13,000 and one plant closes, it's a different ballgame, right? Because it the trickle down to your school. And there's not the alternatives. Yeah. And there's not there is no other option, right? So I think I think that is real and that is hard. People have a tendency on both sides of the aisle to write these voters off as dumb or irrational. I don't think they're either, but I think we have none of us have figured out how to solve this yet because we don't have real solutions for their communities and they know it. So that's part one. I think compounding on that, and this is the part that's often missed and neglected to the national conversation, is the weaponization of the state government against voters. We are one of the hardest states to register to vote. We have some of the most arcane restrictive rules around voter registration. We have some of the most arcane restrictive rules about early voting access. Think about this, right? Rocco Balma won Ohio 2008 and 2012. 2012 was the last time we had same day voter registration in the state of Ohio. And after that in 2014, it's been death by a thousand paper cuts. We have a, you know, just a plethora of anti-voter legislation that has just made the barrier to success, particularly for Democrats much harder. And those structural barriers can be overcome, but we have to invest in bill program that reflects the reality on the ground, and we struggle to do that because it's hard to get donors to do sustained work in that front. You have this interim between executive director and chair of the Ohio Democratic Party. What were you doing during that time? The first thing I did was went home and worked for a refugee resettlement agency, which was an incredible experience. Fundamentally changed how I defined patriotism. And I was there when Trump was elected for the first time. You know, first order he wrote was the Muslim ban, which had a huge impact on our agency and our community. And within a month, we'd laid off half the staff. And I was like, okay, break over. Time to get back in the fight. And so I went on to work as a donor advisor to some folks in Northeast Ohio and work to really get into the weeds of rebuilding our Ohio based infrastructure. How did that go? The donor work? Good. I mean, good. I think we have, Ohio has a really an incredibly strong coalition of C3s and C4s and the state party, right? Have a shared vision that is rooted in data that talks about what do we have to do to build power over the long term? And none of us are no one's delusional. It's not a one one and done thing. It's not one cycle fight. This is a 10 to 15 year set of objectives. During this time, you're also holding the elected office. Yeah. How has that been? It's great. I love county government. It is super in the weeds and super nerdy. My brother's account was a county commissioner for two terms and now is a county attorney. So great. Some sense through that. Yeah. He knows it's you touch everything, right? The county government is the administrative arm of the federal and state government. So all those programs that come from the feds, all the programs that come down from the state, we're in charge of making sure people can access them and that those dollars get distributed equitably and abiding by all the laws. So whether it's storm water sewer or your snap benefits, the county plays a role. So it's been really a really interesting space to be in. Also a little bit of a mind vendor because it's even though I live in a blue county, we do have Republicans on the council. It is still a relatively nonpartisan space compared to other government because you know, I don't know how we inject partisanship into storm sewers. We haven't no one's figured that out yet. So we're still pretty civil. So during this political time in in Ohio, what was your experience with voter files and software based on voter files, analytics based on voter files, things like that? Yeah. Post entry level work. When you are leading any kind of political organization, whatever your legal status is, one of the core things you have to do is make case of why should we do this work? Why does it matter? What should the work be? And then what is that going to cost? And to do all of that decision making, you really have to be rooted in some fundamental like sets of data of who is our target? Where do they live? Who are they? Are they voters? Are they not? How do we get to them? And how much do we think it's going to cost to do all that work? And so whether you are in communications field, finance, all of that requires a set of understanding about how to look at data around voters and kind of make a plan, right? And so that's really, I think how most people start. The more you get into strategy and kind of ecosystem or infrastructure building, you expand into your kind of detailed understanding of what do we need to know here? And so in Ohio, we've worked to really kind of step back and say not just what happened in the last election, but what does the 10-year trend line tell us? What can we logically project into the future about what's going to happen? So kind of that old Wayne Gretzky quote, don't skate to where the puck is, skate to where it will be. And that's really what data can help you to do. Whether it's learning how to use the actual voter file most and most people in democratic politics acts as that through vote builder or or van and learning how to pull lists and create walk lists and phone lists and our things or actually stepping back and getting kind of into other sets of tools that allow you to build really comprehensive pictures about both backward looking voter data but then projecting forward like where do we go from here. I think that's really what most of my experience has been. What was your knowledge about sort of the different sources of voter data? There's been some drama over the years between catalyst and target smart, the DNC and the state parties and other backends and some other voter file companies that are in the independent area. What does you know about that sort of stuff before heading over to target smart? Most of it, right? You can't really be in a state based org and not kind of understand who all the different providers are and how it works. So one of the goals we always have before my time at target smart but also in this role of target smart is focus on the work and more importantly focus on client success or user success. And so whatever technical issues or other issues might exist in the background, it's really important that we not let that spill over into the practitioner world because they have more important things to do. Looking at where we are now, there's different versions of the file in terms of what history people keep on it, but we're all working from the same master set, which is the voter file released by all 50s, 51 states. And we're working on adding territories to that too. Like what is the underlying data set is like who is on the file and then what do we know about them? How do we categorize them, build models to help inform our clients ability to reach those people? And then what do we do with the folks who aren't on the file? That's a whole different consumption of data. And so if you want to run a voter registration program, you figure out pretty quickly working either with target smart or another data provider. Okay, how do we go figure out who those people are? Because it's a different B. So you start to put those things together. So how did the CEO ship of target smart come to you? Did you see something to apply for? Did they pick you and say, we know that you have some executive background and we're looking for someone to know something about politics? How did it happen? Yeah, so I think it really started before I even met, I think everyone in politics knows Tom Bonnier, like the nicest guy ever, right? But I really didn't know the founders drew and Jeff very well when I first started at his party chair. But one of the things I was trying to tackle as party chair was figuring out how state party, what are your state party candidate campaign? How do we actually start to build a digital footprint as infrastructure? Because up until now campaigns and committees have always thought about infrastructure as your volunteers, your canvassing capacity, your phone capacity. And that's still really important. But the other reality is that the majority of Americans are living a significant part of their life online, whether it's scrolling their phone, watching streaming now instead of broadcasts, etc, etc. And that's actually really hard for us to contemplate as a party of what is our presence? And how do we actually do more than just post it and hope for a few likes? And I think a person who did that really well, I think just through his own innate talent was Ben Wickler and was content. He was like a digital media behemoth, but like not all states have done that yet. And so I was trying to think through how do we do that? What tools are available? And at the time, right, we were also in the middle of a ballot measure, a couple ballot measure fights in Ohio. So this was into 23. We'd been grappling with a couple different vendors, trying some different tools. Nothing was really cutting it. And Target Smart in 23 had built the digital services platform to the media buying platform. That is really bespoke for democratic campaigns. And Drew and Tom brought this to a state party's meeting and we're asking for a beta tester. And my handshot up. I was like, oh yeah, let's go. Let's try it in Ohio. One, I have statewide campaigns, right? And two, they're not candidate campaigns. So no one's going to get mad at me if this thing doesn't work. So we can experiment without a lot of risk, right? And so this digital services platform allows us to do voter file based targeting in digital media. And that's always kind of been the missing magic sauce of how do you, because you know, the gold standard is knowing that you targeted a specific voter that you need to talk to. And that you completed some kind of action with them. And then being able to say at the end of the election, we did these things, this voter voted, right? And it's on that file that is not on what Target Smart had before. Well, we didn't have a DSP at all, right? And that's really the difference. And I think a core to Target Smart's mission and what I think was really innovative about what Drew, Jeff and Tom tackled is our mission is to help people connect with voters. And for the first 20 years, that was an evolution that went from landline and home address to email and cell phone. And now our extension of our mission now is into this online space. And you could target individuals online, but it was really hard to match that and coordinate that through the file and then be able to create a holistic picture that included doors, phones, mail, TV broadcasts, and digital, which is the fastest growing expenditure in politics. And so we tested it in Ohio on our August special and on our reproductive rights fight in very targeted audiences with very specific purpose. And our outcomes were pretty incredible and really did some interesting testing with audiences that we otherwise have a hard time reaching. So in some cases, black voters who were not necessarily being reached out to as a part of the broader campaign, but we felt we're important to mobilize as part of the democratic base in this fight. Some rural voters that like you just can't knock the doors in some of these communities. It's too hard, but we can target their smart TV, right? With very specific ads that were led by people in that community and really effective. And so I kind of became an evangelist for this and was taught, would always talk to my colleagues about this is a really valuable tool. It helps reduce your overall cost because we're doing it at a much like an economy of scale that isn't possible on the corporate platforms. And we've built in tools that just make your dollars go farther. So for example, right, we have an early vote button. So if somebody votes early, we can shut off their ad spend. We don't have to keep spending money on them online, even though they've already voted. And so I really got into it and got to know Tom and Drew and Jeff a lot better by giving my feedback and engaging with them and like how do we use this differently? How do we experiment with different things? And I think when the former CEO Lindsey, who was amazing decided she was going to step back and kind of spend her time doing some different stuff, they reached out and they're like, we have a crazy proposition for you. And so we had a long conversation about whether this was the right fit. I think most people would look at my background and my resume and be like, you're not a technologist. What is this? And that was my first thing to them is like, I was a history major. I want to be really clear. You want to start talking about Python and SQL. I know what those words are, but that's about the extent of my knowledge. Anyway, it was a good. You don't need to be a technologist to run a technology company. And you had that executive experience as an as an ED and a chair and a number of other things. But there are differences for profit world from a state party for sure. What do you think transferred well in your skill set and what do you think requires work as it does for all of us trying to complete? I think the most important thing that has transferred that I've brought with me to this role is I don't care whether you're a for profit company or a state party or a kina campaign. We all have three things that have limits, which is our time, our money, and our people. And how you manage those three things towards a set of priorities with discipline, you have to learn that skill because you have to kind of always bring people along or adjust your budget wherever those things are. And I think that was really important for target smart journey through this current moment and into the future is what are what are our priorities going to be right heading into the future? And how do we kind of ruthlessly prioritize that also because I think it's true with any provider in this space right now in politics. We're all very cognizant of this moment we're in. And the obligation we have to do our very best to be a partner in the fight with all of our clients. So I think that's number one. Number two is building a team. Building a team is a really important kind of experience that takes some. How big is target smart these days? We have 36 full time employees right now. And you're part of a group that owns you that has how many all told would you say? Oh man, I'm going to get in trouble. I would say two or about 150 across all the groups. Okay. I might be underestimating that a little bit. So but still at mid 30s, there's management involved. Of course, yes, absolutely. That's a big enough scale where you have to delegate and you have to have lieutenants that you can trust. And so tell me a little bit about your theory of running target smart or whatever. Yeah, look, I think that the number one core principle for us is we are the best in class voter data on the market on the left. And the number one most important thing we can do is not mess that up. Is not change that. And so everything, all of our management, right, all of our and all of our subsequent team, everything is oriented towards what do we need to do first? to prioritize the integrity of the file and the data and the commitments we've made to clients number one Number two, how are we helping clients access it and use it in the most successful way possible and so every Department kind of has that ethos in their mind of how do we do that and how do we ask those questions first and last? Let me ask you just on the best in class statement. Yeah, that might be contested by others. I don't know What would you say distinguishes what you have from your competition? I think it's three things which is total file size Right particularly for some of our competitors who come from the corporate space They're just not running a file at the same size So for example at the state level they may have two million less records than we do and that's a big gap Is that two million fewer Voters how how how how could they be missing voters if you're drawing from the same County data part of it's the how you put the data together right what's your kind of internal processes to create integrity and fidelity across Many years of data and for us right that we have 20 years worth of historical data And I think that is part of what sets us apart is the 20 years of consistent list management and updating so we're able to sometimes catch At the risk of getting too technical right all 51 states don't put out their file in the same format And so what's really important as you pull that in is to unify that into a Structured build that can catch differences that then could accidentally nullify records or keep you from being able to like visualize the entire file Or in some cases states only put out partial updates to their file right or they only update the file once a year It just depends. I mean one could have a larger number of people because you had still had the dead people are you sure that the That the size thing is a evidence of better and what other aspects of the file like the width of the file I would think the number the amount of data per voter would also be important and the accuracy of the file Yes, look we work off of the secretary of state file and so to your point Maybe there are people on the state file that don't live there anymore or have to see But like that is a government function to declare what we want to do is have the most integrity between what the state is working with and then what we provide to Our clients the other piece of this to your point about length of fields it some of that is driven by what's released by the state And then some of that is driven by data that we have historically captured or procured from outside vendors Most states they're not releasing a ton of data on voters nor should they You're enhancing it correct and 20 years of enhancement just has a different richness than you know five years 10 years what have you can I add one more thing yeah yeah The other piece of this right is our unique relationship with state parties and The only thing that it's true about the political system in all 50 states 51 states is that there's a state party and so through that mechanism we are Actually getting feedback on that voter data on a regular basis in the way that some other providers may not because they just don't have that that footprint I understand that target smart in this 20 years of existence has added Not just data to the file, but also services and other satellite uses Analytics tell me about the evolution of target smart over time Most people think of us as a voter file company and while that's true It's as you noted. It's only a part of what we do as the world evolves as technology involves as our ability to capture data evolves It's really important that we help our clients use it and in some cases it's by building models that get put on to the file for use we are And like any analytics firm you can hire us to build a model, but we also that we have that shot primarily to build models that are then used by Others in the work that they do that's not like for sale like it's put on to the file as a part of their subscription to us so like a national democratic score a turnout score that's just stuff we do but as Servants and catalyst has had that for example for a long time is there is there a A way to distinguish for a consumer of your product between what they do and what you do on that Well, I think it's important to note that it's unusual for a client to have both files Usually it's kind of one or the other and so in the same way that like we have that function So does catalyst and that makes sense for both of our companies, right At the end of the day when we think about Political data and analytics and things like that That usually ends up being pretty large-scale Committees and campaigns so if you're a U.S. Senate race you're probably buying your own model That's unique to your candidate While it's monetarily a huge part of politics But made number of campaigns and committees space. It's actually a very very very small amount and so there's this whole marketplace of state legislative candidates county commission candidates county parties who need tools to use And we are in a position to provide those at scale as a part of our services to our clients You know, let's folks just aren't going to have the resources to go out and buy a model for their dynasty So we try to create kind of Catch all tools that are functional and usable for people all across the ecosystem What other things are products and services that you own? So our core offerings right is our it's our data products business So this is things like poll samples digital audiences just straight up lists right people can export lists with different things on it And then our more advanced client services is our analytics our research so polling and then we have a strategic solutions department which helps To consult on various projects. So strategic solutions department for example I noted how you know in Ohio we built this like ongoing data analysis targets Mar is the partner in that data analysis And then the other piece in the newest evolution of the company is this media buying platform And how people can use that on top of the file to enhance their digital media There are a lot of media buying platforms in democratic politics Some that have been around a long time some that are housed in a particular firm Some that are new what's different about what targets mark has We are the only political digital services platform that sits directly on top of the bit stream Meaning there is no second or third party involved in executing the buy so to be clear the other companies are great We think they do really good work But we are very unique in that we've kind of cut out a bunch of middlemen to reduce cost for the consumer so How is the adoption going of your ad platform? Really good, you know our first so we we went to full like fully to market in like mid 24 And we did about 30 some million dollars on the platform That means 30 million dollars of ads were bought Is that like a commission for you on the buy? We have a flat platform fee that goes into any of those buys and that's the only fee associated with the platform So any of your data any of the features all the reporting are all baked into that flat fee And that is another thing that sets us apart is that on private I want to make sure I understand flat Is flat mean a percentage of the buy or does it mean okay? A percentage of the buy yeah a flat a flat fee on that That is one of the things that sets us apart is that on the you know all the different like corporate platforms You're paying a fee for data a fee for your reporting a fee for Audience refinement like anytime you have to update your audience So that all kind of does come baked in on our platform As well as some tools that are specific to the political space so for example Political districts are baked into the platform So on private platforms you kind of have to cobble it together with zip code files You can just get onto our platform and say I want to run a ad and Ohio's could 13 congressional district and it automatically Formats that for you based on the the district lines And then we also have other tools like I mentioned earlier the early vote option where you can set of buttons that anytime somebody votes early and that That gets released to us which in early vote periods can happen almost nightly They'll automatically get pulled out of your universe. So you're maximizing your spend on people who haven't voted yet You've been for a long time tightly tied to van as you've mentioned in the state party the van or vote builder Whatever it's called in different places hosts your data and There's kind of a deal with the state party to do that there are a bunch of people who are trying to make moves to replace van How would that affect your ability to deliver data? What do you think about the options that are out there at this point? We will work with anybody I want to I do want to name like van is a great partner to us and I want to tip my hats to them I think they are making really important investments and they are hearing this feedback from Folks in our space and really moving as fast as they can to add features Tweak things just refresh all the tools that people need I do want to name that and give them credit for that You know we work with a lot of different apps. So you know wouldn't be unique for us or new for us to do an data install for Anyone else in the space that's what we're here to do There are always these voter registration drives going on and there are all also voter file purges in different states where they try to clean up, remove some of the people that may have died or in certain cases some states take people off the roles. My state, if you don't vote every four years, you will get purged. Right. Is there any analysis that you guys provide of who is getting taken off that might indicate that it might be a little nefarious or not just based on some rule? Yeah, we can and we absolutely have done that in the past for clients. I will say historically this has been a space that the DNC has occupied and done very well. They do have like VR voter purge dashboards that they work on for each state in cycle where you can track by quarter who was purged, what are their demographics, what do we know about them, so we're able to kind of track those things and they're able to produce some lists for state parties to and campaigns to chase when voters have purged that they think are still eligible. Have you discovered anything that would surprise people about what's going on in the state? What do you mean by surprise? I mean that it is often. Yeah, there would come to the attention of the press that people give any examples. Yeah, in Ohio it will not shock you to know that the secretary of state has purged over 1.2 million people in the last seven years and a huge chunk of those people are urban voters of color. And getting those examples where you meet someone who's like I was purged and I'm a voter, that's real, it happens frequently. Voters often don't know that they've been purged until they go to cast their vote. I think the important thing to note is I don't know a state that hasn't pursued legal action on this, but kind of gets back to my point about the state being weaponized against voters when one party has total control of the constitutional voting mechanisms and the state legislature, it can be really hard to get any progress on that. Another thing that might be interesting to know right now is our say Hispanics registering at a lower rate or will they be voting at a lower rate because of ice and what's going on there. Is that anything that you guys could tell yet? It's hard to make those assumptions or those correlations without really robust polling across the space. I think there's kind of what our logic assumptions would be. And just generally in the congressional cycle we see voter participation really drop. That's true across most demographics. The primaries are in the specials that we've seen so far kind of pulled that up and that's true in the Hispanic community. I mean I think we can logically say it could impact it. I don't know that anybody has done really substantial polling to say for sure, but that's what's happening. You are part of this terror group, is it pronounced that way? Is there a connection between the different companies that are owned by that do they pass information around? Do you work on the same types of projects? Yeah, so sometimes we'll share projects like for example to the other companies one is called integral and it's a phone-based fundraising firm. So we don't necessarily share data but we will co-work with a client if you know they're doing a digital program but they also want to do phone fundraising. We can work across the space but they we really is separate two separate contracts or like with the digital space we have a company called TerraMedia that's the that does creative and manage services so they'll actually do the add-by for you. That's less common for us because most political entities already have their firm and know who they want to use but sometimes you'll get you know like a state legislative candidate or a state party who comes a month out and says hey we have one month can you help us just like get some creative together and get this up and that's when TerraMedia will step in and help out with us because you know for us target smart is a data company and that's really our priority and that is our focus. So while we want to have be able to help our clients access those services like we are in a media company right we're never going to be in that work of building creative and and doing really huge managed campaigns because that's not our strength but we do have an affiliate that we can point people to if they need it. There was a report number of years ago that some of the other companies in the group were serving the Republican Party and other aligned things what's the current state of things there? Well one that report was not true we have another company called Statera that services other people in the space that are not what I would call truly progressive so think like trade associations folks like that in the case of that story it was the National Realtors Association but we only work with clients on their work for Democratic candidates so just like you know I mean even the labor movement will support Republicans at the state level we don't help them with that we help them with their work for Democratic candidates but we do work with organizations that work on both sides the aisle for the sake of their membership. How is target smart doing as a business? Well I was doing well the thing that's interesting and important for all listeners to understand is like it's a pretty finite marketplace right other than startups we kind of know who we're working with who we're talking to there are two what I would say are specifically political data firms it's us and catalyst and then there's corporate data firms who dabble in politics and so between us and catalyst I think we are the most trusted providers in the space and for good reason it's because it's our specialty from a business perspective we are busier than ever I think that's true for for probably a lot of folks in the space and between the mid-decade redistricting and 2026 looming there's just a lot of activity happening and we're feeling really confident about about the path forward I think you know one thing I'll add here about it from a business perspective is we are continuing to make intentional choices as a company to evolve and make the right investments that will pay off for our clients in the long run so we are in the middle of a multi-million dollar tech modernization so we're moving into a cloud-based system we're moving to snowflake hopefully wrapping that up here soon but that's the kind of thing that will help us do big data faster better stronger well we've had a lot of snowflakes here in DC recently what is snowflake for those not in the know-alarmate it's a data platform that allows you to take big huge data sets and manipulate them as for lack of a better word it allows us to do big data query at a much faster speed and be able to do more with what we've got and to be able to kind of ingest more data that we can can help manage so to put this in context we have a platform called my target smart which is essentially a data query tool where any of our clients can go on and you know hey I want to know what Democrats voted over these four cycles in Ohio and it will produce a list for you and help you visualize that data depending on this size and the scope of it report could sometimes take you know 30 minutes to an hour to run depending on how many records were in it that time is going to come down to like 30 seconds on this new platform that can be really helpful when people are suffering on some platforms I think I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about Ohio politics in this midterm with your background characterize the key races there and how you think things are going so far this is such an interesting year in Ohio just because of the people who are like kind of on the chess board obviously the fact of the senator senator brown is running again for this seat I think it's hugely important for Ohio both from a ballot performance perspective but also from a national attention and investment perspective I don't think we could have a better candidate for the senate he's a true populist I think he could speak to this moment in a really important way especially with the way that the Trump trade tariffs are impacting the auto industry in Ohio and also how farmers have been devastated by these tariffs so the senator has a really he understands it he has relationships he's going to this is going to be a great race also on the ballot this year are all of our statewide constitutional office holders and we have this really unique match up between dr. Amy actin who led the state's COVID response and she's kind of this folk hero right she would do daily briefings from the podium she worked for governor Mike DeWine so she's a democrat who was working in our public administration and you saw all these little girls all across Ohio start to wear their white coats and be like dives dr. Amy's presentation and so she's got this really amazing kind of just imprint on the population of Ohio she's a unique candidate right she's not a politician she's running on issues that matter most to Ohioans around wages and schools and on the other side you have Vivek Ramaswami who is a first-time candidate was one of Trump's doge guys and literally came back to Ohio and the Republican party just cleared the field for him and all kissed the ring and he's been not doing well right the most recent thing is he gave an interview where he says he thinks medicated Medicare were a mistake and there's a huge contrast there and I think the question will be how the two the senate and the governorate kind of play off each other and what kind of investment they can attract to make their case but I think we're starting off the cycle in a really strong place and we also have three critical frontline congressional races to helping flip the house so to come back to the kind of target smart world I have not achieved clarity of understanding of the MIG-C part of the ecosystem, the data ecosystem. So these are kind of back end repositories that are aimed at moving data from one part of the world to another and various things like that. What's your understanding of that to help mine and my audiences? - Sure, so and I wanna be really clear too. I will tell you my experience of using them as kind of give you my perspective of why they're valuable and why they matter. And it's hard with DDX. So DDX, the Democratic data exchange, if you have it, you should talk to it. You should have Amanda on your column. That's the present. - I've been asking her, I've had her in the past and I know her. (laughing) I hope one of these days, yes. I like Amanda. - DDX is a way that helps the hard in this off side that are running campaigns visualized their data in a legal way that empowers us all to make the best use of our resources. So you can kind of log on to a map of your state and look at where activity is happening. You don't know who's doing it. You don't know a lot. We used to tweet about it and be like, "Oh, can't wait to Canvas in Ward 80." Impresing to 80 this week, I know it was just a way of trying to communicate to the whole ecosystem who's doing what. And this just empowers you to do it way better. And it helps you to move data that we otherwise would have to wait till the end of the cycle to look at closer to real time. And so that's part one. And that takes a substantial amount of like what I call like pipes to move all that data and then be able to visualize that data and track it. So that's DDX. Attached to this is the capacity that CTA and MIG have built. Again, to help move huge sets of data out of one platform and into another or out of one database and into another. - Those are separate organizations though, right? - Yeah. - And kind of like I think MIG like lives inside of CTA, I'm pretty sure. So it's kind of one thing. But this is the other thing I wanna name for practitioners, right? There's been a lot of debate over the years. And it's understandable and righteous about who should do this, who should own it, should there be private companies involved in this work, should they're not? And like that's all fair. But the reality is that the size of data that we are moving as a movement, it is beyond the scope of what the DNC or any one committee could probably handle staff and then pay to store. - And plus legalities. - Yeah, and you look at like DDX. If you combined the Amazon Cloud Services bill for like DDX, Target Smart and NDP van, that's probably like the DNC's whole budget for half the year. There's a cost that comes along with this that are really hard for a single entity in our ecosystem to maintain. So I think that's part of this, right? What drives the creation of these different groups too is. - I heard a rumor which I don't know if it's true or not that CTA had aligned or sub-encemi acquired by catalyst. Do you know about that? - Yeah, CTA is owned by catalyst. - Or their own catalyst is an investor. Does that matter to you or to the space? - I mean, and we work with CTA as a client, we work with them, we have a project with them called Election Pad. - If somebody who is a political entrepreneur in the tech space wants to build an application against a voter file, it doesn't make sense for someone to build their own back end. Could they locate it against yours directly or who has that capability, where would they look? - There's a cup, I mean, it's us. It's maybe CTA, I'm not sure if they do that, but I would say that would be an option, catalyst is an option, the private providers are an option, but the most important thing for a political tech startup to think about, and this is the thing that kind of often will distinguish for a consumer, whether that tech startup, whether anybody that is working on it ever worked on a campaign, because sometimes you get pitched things and you're like, I don't think you've ever worked in this space, which is what is their plan for long-term integration and adoption, because in order for that to happen, you need to have an API and for non-technical users and APIs and application programming interface, meaning what connects your app to that data set and to be able to be used, you need to have an API in a structure that the DNC would approve of, because ultimately to clarify this, the DNC does build their own file, and so that is the DNC's file, and that is what goes out to most candidates and campaigns all across the country. And so you need to be able to build an API that could integrate with the systems that the DNC is gonna use over the long run. So I would just name that, or folks. - People who I'm talking to who are in the tech and data space are finding a lot of applications for AI in their work, and it is allowing capabilities that were very difficult or impossible to require before, and it's also speeding up certain kinds of processes that can be automated. What's happening with you guys on that front? - Yeah, I think like everybody, we're trying to be really mindful of what are the best uses of AI, what are the ethical uses of AI, making sure we don't make any of our data or our clients vulnerable. Right now, like anyone else, right, where AI is an incredibly important tool for big data queries, that's really what is speeding up and making consumption just much different. We are contemplating how we're gonna use AI as an audit tool to ensure that there are no errors and file uploads or data sets so that we don't break a process or corrupted a data file. And then the other thing, the one we just released through one of our sister companies that I think is really interesting is an AI application called Swim, which stands for stop wasting your money. And that is specifically a tool that we're putting on our digital media platform, because again, we sit right on top of the bid stream, meaning anything that's for sale for digital advertising, we can see it and how are we helping our clients make sense of all of that available inventory and prioritize what inventory to buy based on the goals of their campaign. And that is an AI app that helps us sort through all the inventory and present options to clients that'll make the most of their buy. So that's a really smart way to do, but we're using it. - Do you know what that's built on? - What Swim is built on? - Yeah. - I don't. - I was talking to a professor at Michigan State recently who has a center there. And at the end of the conversation, he was asking me about the use of more campaign and political nonprofit data in academia. I know that you have people take polling samples and stuff sometimes academics, but what relationship do you guys have with the world of academics for studies or letting them use your data to figure things out about the world? - We work with academia in a couple different ways. In some cases, we are working with them on long-term experiments, whether that's on our digital media platform or other products to measure voter engagement or a voter behavior over time. We have a couple different clients we're doing that with. The other way is this partnership we have a CTA on election pad, which is a tool that allows people to visualize historical election data in a much faster, more efficient way, particularly for research. And so that's a partnership we launched with them that we've taken to kind of the, on the academic, you know, American society, a political scientist kind of circuit. So. - And you said CTA and that? - Yes, the partner. - But they're a partner on that. - Yeah. And how would someone get to use that? What do they have to be part of some license structure or how can you use election pad? - From an academic standpoint, if you're affiliated as a researcher with an academic institution, you can get a, for lack of a voter word, a subscription to it. If you're like an independent researcher, we would need to kind of understand. - Well, if I wanted to get to it, what would I- - Yeah, I mean, we could, I think we could do a demo for you. I don't know what that would look, who probably could. - Just curious. - Yeah. - You've a couple times mentioned how cognizant you are about the political time we're in, which is challenging and dangerous. How does that affect decision making at the head of a company that's an important part of the political data and text space on the democratic progressive side? - Not to oversimplify it, but as a company that is in this specific marketplace, we get approached all the time with ideas. And in some cases, what I would just call shiny things, that like, oh, this is really cool. And we always have to come back to the question of what do our clients really need? And yes, this fancy due dad could do this specific task and this specific subset of political data, but one is anyone really asking us for that. Two, even if we did it, would anybody know how to use it? And three, how much time, energy, and resource will that take away from us meeting our core mission, which is to have all these voter files ready to go and be timely in our, 'cause-- - Is that different than a standard business decision that you might make or is it? - I think so the answer to that's kind of yes, because it's one thing for us to have those conversations in January of an odd number year versus May of 2026. We have to kind of build in our own constraints on what changes or new things we want to bring the table for clients. based on a timeline. In our head, it's like, okay, everything's locked in May. And the only way we're bringing something different if it's client driven, and it has to be something they really need. But we are not changing our build process. We're not introducing these wild new data sets without true motivation that is driven by client need. It's too disruptive. Is there an area you would like to move the company into that it isn't in currently? I don't know that it would be a, how do we move into it so much as, and I think you will hear this from anybody working in the data text space and politics, which is just how do we expand and think about data collection? We are very driven right now by what we can consume back from mostly volunteer activity, and to some extent now digital activity. But there is so much more information available about voters. And I don't mean this in a creepy way. I mean it in a, they are telling us things. Because we are so structured and how we consume and categorize data, it is often hard for us to say, what do we do with that? How do we use that to inform strategic decision making? And so as we look to the future, and this is, I think, true across the ecosystem, as we think about the futures, like how do we get into a, kind of more every signal data collection mindset? And how do we work to tie that, either directly to the voter file, or into a data set of non-voters that helps us to engage more people in their democracy? And that's I think the challenge for all of us moving into the future. And it's a challenge for the whole party, right? How do we, how do we do that? And I think that's one of the things we're thinking about a lot. Either you're very good at conveying this, or it's true, that you seem to like this job from the way you respond to my questions. You seem like you have adapted to it and know what's going on. Is this something that you want to keep doing for a long time? Where do you see yourself taking your career going forward? You know what's funny is if you ask anyone that's ever worked for me, they will tell you that I always say I think five-year plans are bullshit, because they just don't work. But also, I'll say this, I do really like this job. And part of the reason why I like this job is because I've done, I've been in roles before, where inevitably you run into the limits of our technology and our capacity. And you get really frustrated, because when you're on the ground, trying to talk to voters for any amount of time, you can pretty quickly observe our deficiencies as a movement. And being at Target Smart in this moment in the evolution of our, like, political tactic space is really interesting to me. It's allowing me to go deep on a specific topic, versus having to kind of be a lightweight specialist in several. And I do really enjoy that. And I think one of the reasons why I'm so passionate about it is because when you grow up in the community I grew up in, you have the life experiences I've had, and that ultimately I made a politics, and then you do this as a career, I care deeply about policy, right? I care about this work because I want us to have real power that changes people's lives. But the gap between a campaign and real power that changes people's lives is vast. And there's so much that needs to go into how we get from point A to point B. And there's lots of really smart people working on it. But we need that evolution is never going to change. We always have to be in that work of, how do we actually win? And then when we win, I always tell people, like, I'm going to get people to office. And then I need a whole bunch of really smart people to hold people accountable to promises they made to us. But I'm in that middle space. That's where I like to be. I find it really interesting. I mean, you talked about noticing when you're on the ground, the deficits in, I'm assuming you mean the data, the apps, the processes. But you can tell me what you meant by that. My question really is, I think everybody who is steeped in democratic political technology and data knows that it's imperfect. Beyond target smart role, what would you like to see improved in the space? And how might we suggest that to others who might listen? Oh, man, I'm going to get myself in some trouble here. That's excellent. You're like, yeah. And this kind of gets actually to that exact point they made about UC deficiencies. And when I say that, I mean, like, you know, you go knock a door in Fairfield County, Ohio, and you will have a 20 minute conversation with a rational human about like, QAnon conspiracy shit. Right, excuse my French. And you're like, I see this human. A semi rational human. Yeah. Well, you're like, you seem normal, right? But like, in this kind of gets to my, but they're, but they're imbibing that through. Yeah. And I think that almost through, not even through an intention, but through how it's happened. The other side is kind of figured out they don't have to be right. They don't have to be accurate. It's an intention game. And it's an engagement game. I am not advocating that we are not accurate or that we are like actively lying to people. But I do think the attention in the engagement game is something that we have not figured out yet. So how does that play into political tech? Yeah. So I think from a long term perspective, like, what are the things I'd like to figure out and get into is, how do we cultivate both a shift in the ecosystem of our mentality of what is digital? And how do we change it? And I think that looks like evolving media buying from a tactics standpoint. It's an evolution of paid media analytics and organic media analytics, which were we don't have. And then evolving a set of tactics around that too. So here's a great example. I think one of the biggest mistakes now, I can say this. I didn't know it then that we've ever made is to kind of tell our volunteers, don't get in fights with people on the internet. And that's the end of it. That was a mistake because, and now the other side have bot farms, but we do need to engage in debate in the online space to, if nothing else, shift the algorithm performance of some of this right wing content. I'm not advocating. We just send people into that blind and say, good luck. Like, we actually need to develop kind of a theory of the case in some tactics and some best practices around that. And I think we can do that. And I think there's a lot of political tech in development that will help power volunteers to do that in a smart way and with an effective use of their time. So like that kind of development of digital, we are right for it. We need to do it. And I use this analogy. In the 90s, we did a evolution on field. We used to be that we just give people a neighborhood and be like, go knock those doors, let us know how it goes. And we became much more tactically oriented around how to have a good conversation. You got to go to these addresses and capture this information about the voter. And then we bought everybody together and trained them on how to do field this way. It is now the gold standard. The Oedo bomb campaign democratized data all the way down to the volunteer level. For the first time in our party's history, we were using a national unified file. And volunteer leaders understood why they had to use vote builder and why it was important that they document responses to questions and like use that as a tool throughout the campaign. And then that informed analytic and strategic decisions by campaign leadership. That evolution needs to happen in digital. I think that's it. I recent conversation with Yasmine at swing left. Is that a I like her? Oh, I do actually. Fun fact. Yasmine and I were organizers together in O.A. Wow. Yeah. She is talking about trying to rework canvassing because some of the regulatory changes and just because possibly we haven't been getting it right. Are you aware of that kind of effort and what needs to change in the tech? Because she is, I think, went off to different technology in order to accomplish what she wants. And this is a great example of where I think they are experimenting with AI in a really smart way. And I think this is true about all of our practices and politics is when we know better we have to do better. And so what we've done so far was really great. But now we have the ability to get way more richness out of a conversation with the voter than we had in the past that can inform other decisions we need to make about how to advertise to them, how to what male to send them what digital add to serve them, etc. And so I think that's really smart right there. They're having long form conversations at the door with the voter. And eight years ago if your volunteer would have come back with three paragraphs about every voter conversation be like, what am I supposed to do with this right there's no way to ingest this information like were they a one two three four or five like that's the ask. But we can get far more nuance to now with voters and that nuance matters especially online right because people. And I think this is the key difference with American or consumer behavior that is new. People used to consume news or consume content they go out and find it and consume it. Now they are getting served it, which I think is a very distinct difference. And so we have to be thinking about what should we be serving people when and how often. And we are not structured for that. And I think the work that Yasmin is doing is kind of the bridge between the old school door tactic which still matters like I still think doors matter. And that's what I think is a key difference between the old school door and the old school door. And that's the key difference between the old school door and the old school door. I think this is a key difference between the old school door and the old school door. And that's the key. across that music festival crowd. And we don't really have the ability to do that right now. Right? And like, that's what we have to figure out how to do. We need stronger fingers. Yes, stronger fingers. More energy. Little EDM house music to keep the beat going, you know? This sometimes I ask people about comparing our work in data and tech with the other side. Do you guys pay attention to that? Are you aware of what they have and how we stack up? Yeah, yeah. We definitely are. And we have very different approaches as a movement. Some ways we do, some ways we we have all kind of have some of the same struggles, which is who owns it, how does it get shared, how do we evolve in a world that is part, political party, part business environment. I think that's true across both movements. There's two things that they do differently that are key differences. One is they are not cute. They don't perl clutch about who they sell their data to. They sell to corporate America all day long and corporate America buys. And that's how they fund their data infrastructure. I'm not advocating that we do that. I actually think there's a lot of concerns there, but it's just it's notable. It's very different than our approach. We are very close and we take privacy and kind of efficacy to the movement very seriously. And that's true across all of our political tech space, I think. But number two is they and this is a little bit kind of tech adjacent, but it is a mentality that's really important, which is we are still relatively top down, right, where we want to control the message, the content, the delivery, the distribution from the top down. And especially in the digital world, like I'm not sure that that's sustainable. They cultivate content and distribution from the bottom up. You know, it's kind of like plan a thousand flowers. They do both. Yeah. Yeah. And they got a guy tweeting or. Yeah. Yeah, but they also like they don't again, this is very different. And I'm not sure there's some ways in which our movements are not apples to apples. So I'm not sure that this is transferable, but they let a bunch of people run wild online. And then they see what works. And then they put money behind what works. And they don't worry about the other things that don't work. Even if those other things are like blatantly racist or homophobic or transphobic, whatever. That may be a plus for them. Yeah. And it's very, we don't do that, right? We want a message tested, we want to A, B tested, and then we want everyone to distribute it downward. And that's difficult. What should I have asked you that he failed to? Ooh. I think we had a very long conversation, a very good one, very far reaching. I don't know. Well, I appreciate your time. Yeah, this is great. Anything else you want to say? No. That was Liz Walters. She is at targetsmart.com. This is Nathaniel G. Perlman with the Great Battlefield podcast. You can find us at greatbattlefield.com or by searching for Great Battlefield in places where podcasts are found. The Great Battlefield is now part of the Democracy Group podcast network. Visit democracygroup.org to learn more about other podcasts that cover democracy and civic engagement. You can also help me by leaving comments and good ratings on Apple podcasts or elsewhere and by sending me suggestions for great guests to [email protected]. 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