Today was my last day at the polling firm GBAO. I spent six and a half years there. Just over ten total working in political polling, first at a smaller firm, then as polling and modeling director for the DCCC, and a good long run at GBAO. (See, not all millennials are chronic job-hoppers!)
I’m really glad I did it. I can say, with some confidence, that the work I did played a small part in making things better, and I’m proud of that. My clients have protected abortion rights, worked to house the homeless, made a deeply regressive tax code fairer and provided badly-needed school funding in the process, advocated for alternate forms of transportation even while governing car-dependent cities, and done their best to hold Trump accountable for inciting an insurrection and trying to stop a peaceful transition of power.
I’d also like to think I learned some useful skills, not just for my niche of political polling but as a worker and human. Often I found myself thrown into situations I didn’t think I was prepared to handle, with high stakes, and made it out well. I learned to carry myself with confidence and trust myself, despite lifelong anxiety and impostor syndrome. I know how to write well, how to listen to clients and turn a muddled mess of requests into a coherent product, how to analyze data and ensure its accuracy, how to give advice in a way that’s most likely to be listened to. (Though no one can guarantee the last one. Clients gonna client.)
I’m also tremendously grateful for the people I’ve met. Many of my closest friends are people I met from working in politics. Sometimes people who want to work in politics get stereotyped as power-hungry, but in my part of that world there isn’t much of that. (Let’s be real, there are for sure easier paths to power than working campaign hours in an often-anonymous role.) They’re people who care deeply about making the world a better place, so deeply that it’s worth throwing a normal life overboard, and those are my people and I love them. I’m so grateful to have met so many good people.
Of course, we need to talk about the “throwing a normal life overboard” part. A friend observed a while back that this industry can be particularly hard on people who have something they’re trying to escape. The idealists, the people-pleasers. For the most part, it’s not intentional. It’s just that there’s always more work to do, always something you can be doing to help a campaign or make your work better, and next to nothing in the way of guardrails to stop us from working insane hours, making the work our whole lives, and burning ourselves out. I tried to break out of this pattern as I got more experience in politics and started to recognize it, but I was bad about it in my early days. Working until 10 or 11 PM at night was not an uncommon occurence for me.
I do have to take some responsibility for that. Being a workaholic isn’t just about caring about your job too much and wanting to do it well, though that’s absolutely a part of it. In some ways, throwing everything into work was a convenient way to escape…well, everything else. No, it’s not that I’m scared to go on dates or see a therapist, that I’m not disciplined with a budget, that I hate cooking for myself and want to eat out all the time or eat processed easy-prep food, I just don’t have time, you see? I must have made that excuse to myself a million times over, for a thousand different things. I think it’ll be better for me to find work with better guardrails and culture, where burning oneself out is neither expected nor welcomed - but I also need to make the change within needed to take care of myself and achieve my non-work goals.
I also mentioned my incredible clients above, and I’ve worked with and for so many people who don’t just vote the right way but are genuinely good humans, in and out of politics. Sometimes, though, it hasn’t been like that. Working at the DCCC, where candidates run the gamut from saints on Earth to people that I don’t like or trust as people but will still vote better than the person they’re running against, was a hell of a way to learn that lesson. But former Senator Al Franken was the toughest one.
In 2014, Franken was my first major polling client. I didn’t know him well personally, though I got to know and adore many members of his fantastic team. I started in a support role and took over as lead analyst when a colleague left in spring 2014, as Franken was facing a potentially tough re-election. With his team and some good data, we figured out the right kind of campaign to run: leaning in on his accomplishments in making health care more affordable in a year when many other Democratic Senators seemed like they couldn’t run away from President Obama or the Affordable Care Act fast enough, while also holding his investment banker opponent accountable for the painful job losses his work had caused. Our strategic guidance was correct, my polling (I was trusted to weight it, a big deal for a young analyst) was steady and accurate, and Franken won re-election by a 10-point margin in an otherwise brutal year for Democrats. That was when I started to believe, despite a ton of insecurity and anxiety I carried (still do, tbh), that I was really good at this job, and that I’d done a good thing by re-electing this man who’d proven that he wasn’t just a Saturday Night Live comedian, he was a good Senator.
And then in the fall of 2017, eight different women accused Al Franken of groping or kissing them inappropriately. I believe those women. He resigned from the Senate.
Some people have second-guessed the push for him to resign. I am not one of them. He treated those women badly, whether he meant to or not, and deserved to be held accountable. His replacement, Tina Smith, has done an equally admirable job and managed not to grope anyone while doing it. There was a Senate election in Alabama where the Republican candidate, Roy Moore, was accused of far worse - including trying to sleep with so many underage girls that he was reportedly banned from a local mall - and though the two offenses aren’t the same, Republicans were pointing to Franken to say “see, Democrats do it too” to justify their own moral cowardice in sticking with Roy Moore. That lost a lot of its effect when it became clear that no, Democrats weren’t going to put up with this.
But it just fucking hurt. I remember crying at a bus stop one night leaving work when this was in the news, listening to Kesha’s album about breaking free of her own abuser (make fun of me if you want but it’s so good) and wondering what I was doing working in politics if this was who I was electing.
Eventually, I made my peace with it. I think everyone in politics learns this lesson the hard way with someone or other. (For example, my first boss in politics, a very cool guy, worked for John Edwards’ doomed presidential campaign.) The motivating factor in any of this work can’t be the people running for office - humans are fallible and make mistakes big and small. (Though I have run against the occasional monsters, people so prone to abuse authority they shouldn’t be put in charge of a Dairy Queen, and it’s fine to be motivated by that too.) It has to be the values underlying the work we do that drives us forward. The flawed humans we elect will, God willing, do the right thing and make our lives better, one small bit at a time. I think this is a good mindset to have as a labor lawyer as well. I’ll work for some brilliant, dedicated, model employees, some average employees, some employees who tend to slack off or aren’t the best at their jobs, and some employees who have done wrong. But all of them, in every category, have rights that need to be protected and deserve the best possible legal representation. That’s what I’ll be there for.
I also had moments when I second-guessed whether what I was doing was right or helpful. There’s a subset of political commentators, on Twitter mostly, that doubt whether political consulting is effective, and they were out in force in 2017-18, when I was struggling immensely with self-doubt after pollsters had a very rough go of it in 2016. Some of my work was inaccurate - one Republican spokesperson called a 2016 poll I conducted, which turned out to be very wrong, “a desperate ploy that no reputable pollster would even put their name on.” Some of it was very intensely scrutinized because it suggested a worse outcome than others were seeing and then, well. That died down a bit after 2018, but it led to some tough moments and soul-searching in the meantime, including leaving a watch party during a special election loss because I felt like I couldn’t relate to the people continuing to drink and have a good time.
There’s also a tendency for progressives and leftists to make pollsters the scapegoat for anything they don’t like about Democratic messaging, which was particularly acute after the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022. I spent so much time carefully conducting polling and looking at special election data, seeing how angry people were with their rights being under threat or taken away, and trying to convince my clients that they needed to vocally, unapologetically stand up for abortion rights…and then I’d see the likes of a sitting United States Senator blaming pollsters for candidates not talking enough about abortion.
Some of my colleagues are really, really good about shrugging that kind of thing off. I’m not one of them. I’m sensitive and an inveterate people-pleaser, and even when criticism comes from people I don’t know and who clearly don’t know what my job is like or what kind of role I play, I had a hard time not taking it personally. (I recognize that being a lawyer isn’t going to be better on this front.) But the answer to all of it was to look at the work I did and see what it led to - to good candidates winning, to good policies passing, to the groundwork being laid for future change even if the particular election wasn’t a winning one. When you look at open-ended responses and see people quoting ads back at you, saying that’s why they’ll vote for your candidate, no Twitter critic can take that away from you.
All in all, doing the work was more good than bad. I liked it, I was good at it, and I had some fun doing it. That’s all I can ask for in this world.
Let’s close this with an iconic scene from Mad Men - Peggy Olson giving her two weeks’ notice to Don Draper and walking out of the office. I’ve always loved this scene. Peggy, the shy, unstylish-at-first woman trying to get by in a sexist world and turning out to have an immense talent for copywriting and admaking, has always been one of my favorite characters. Here, after Don humiliated her earlier in the same episode, she holds all the power for once and she knows it - and she knows what she wants to do with it.
At the end, that little smile as she gets in the elevator and The Kinks starts blaring?
Yeah, those are the vibes right now.