Normally, a profile of Sean McElwee would report from one of his well-known weekly happy hours for progressives in New York City. But when I got a chance to talk to McElwee, the 29-year-old president of the polling firm Data for Progress (DFP), it was early August and the COVID-19 pandemic was ravaging the city. So instead I fumbled with my recording equipment, laptop, and phone in a makeshift home office. Over our Zoom call, Julian Noisecat, Data for Progress’s Vice President, chowed down on his dinner. And, although he’s too polite to say anything, I can tell that McElwee is becoming increasingly frustrated with my spotty cell phone service.
But even with a pandemic, things were still very much churning along for the young socialist data wizards at DFP. We spoke on the phone this summer the morning after Black Lives Matter activist Cori Bush’s shocking primary victory over 25-year incumbent Congressman William Lacy Clay. That same night, “Squad” member Rashida Tlaib delivered a commanding win in her Democratic primary, while Missouri became the latest deep-red state to pass Medicaid expansion via referendum.
McElwee was (and remains) nerdy but colorful, rarely pulling punches—to his right or his left—and talked at times more like a Silicon Valley startup guru than a progressive activist. He is both confident in his success and annoyed at his critics, especially when he sees so many potential victories on the horizon.
In our interview, McElwee discussed his vision for the young organization (it's young in more ways than one: At the time of our interview, Data for Progress employed no one over the age of 30), his advice for other progressive wonks, his annoyance with certain ways of thinking that permeate within the left, and his thoughts on the future of Democratic politics.
The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
BT: What would you say is different about you guys as compared to other think tanks or public policy organizations?
SM: Take a think tank like Demos, where I used to work - wonderful think tank. [Blue Tent founder David Callahan was also a co-founder of Demos] They have an idea, we want to do X: debt-free college, right? So they’ve got their policy nerd that comes up with debt-free college. And then they’re like, we’ve got to show this is popular, so Chuck Schumer will let Democrats run on it when they’re running for the senate. So they call up [longtime Democratic pollster] Celinda Lake, and they say, “Celinda Lake, tell us our shit’s popular,” and she’s like “Alright, give me $80,000.” And it’s like, okay, here’s $80,000, Celinda Lake says it’s popular, oh okay, Celinda Lake can you help us tell The New York Times that our idea’s popular? And Celinda says “fuck off, I just do the poll.”
And then Demos goes “Okay, we’ve gotta hire [public affairs firm] SKDK. SKDKnickerbocker, can you help us tell The New York Times that this is a popular idea?” and they say “Yes we can, that’ll be $10,000 a month retainer, and then an extra $5,000 every time I pick up the phone with The New York Times.”
So what we’ve done is we’ve vertically integrated all of that. Julian has access, at his fingertips to more polling capacity than probably anybody except fifteen, twenty motherfuckers in this country. Anything he wants polled at any geography, he can have a result within five days of when he comes up with it. So when he and his climate team are thinking about policy development, they can be thinking about the polling.
And then when we want to pitch stuff, I don’t have to hire an SKDK. If you hire SKDK, they write a column in The Hill. I always say, if I ever need a column in The Hill, I’ll hire SKDK, until then I’m fine with The New York Times. Also, it’s just inefficient. I was a policy analyst at Demos—we had an SKDK person pitch. Reporters said I’ve got some methodological questions, SKDK person takes me the methodological questions, I give them responses back on the methodology, like, why do we have this middle man instead of me building an authentic relationship with a reporter, becoming a real source for them?
If you actually want your issues to get across the finish line, you have to convince people who are running for office to support your policy program. What makes us different, what sets us apart, is that vertical integration. It’s not just about having good ideas. Lots of people have good ideas. It’s about getting those ideas into the hands of candidates who are running and winning hard elections and believe that your ideas are things that connect with their voters and allow them to win those elections.
BT: So how do you go about trying to build those relationships with candidates?
SM: I’ll be honest, it’s a lot of trial and error. Our polling is very good. We were the number one most accurate pollster of the Democratic primary. We were the only pollster that correctly predicted that Biden was going to win Texas in a surprise upset victory. And so that makes our product something that campaigns are interested in; they always want to know how they’re doing, they always want to know what issues can play in their district. And we’ve done a lot of work to build up trust with candidates.
So an example is that in this swing state poll we did. We didn’t just say, “Do you support moving the United States to clean electricity in 2035?” The reason is because if you ask people that, most people say yes. It’s something we call in the political science field “acquiescence bias.” What we did was we said, “What comes closer to you, the United States should move to clean energy entirely by 2035, or the United States should continue using coal, oil, and natural gas if it keeps energy prices low?” And then, when we do that, we’re actually simulating the battle of ideas that these Senate candidates are going to experience. And they see that you’re not taking for granted their election and their electorate. And that really helps build trust.
BT: What kind of advice would you give to people who want to start their own think tanks and projects like this, in terms of getting off the ground, especially funding wise?
SM: It took us a long time to figure out that polling was our thing. People don’t remember this, but we did a lot of different data stuff, that was broadly in the data world. We did a study for Run for Something on what words predicted candidate emergence in intake forms. We did a project for a group called Freedom to Prosper that measured the burden of student debt by every congressional district in the country. And it turned out that the thing we kept coming back to was polling, polling, polling.
It takes a long time to build, it takes a lot of work. We actually built up faster than other organizations, but it still took more than two years from just being three data scientists doing stuff in their free time to this whole organization. A lot of people come up with stuff and think it’s an idea, and they sort of will pitch it around, and they’ll realize that there’s already ten other people who’ve had this idea and there are reasons it didn’t work.
You’ve gotta understand you’re gonna have to throw a ton of stuff against the wall before you figure out actual things you can iterate on and operate on. We kept coming back to polling and we kept finding that there was no other peer organization who had iterated on that.
BT: What are the big goals you have for Data for Progress long term, say in the next five to ten years?
SM: I really see us being a key player on the hill, trusted by offices from Schumer, to Pelosi, to AOC, and Warren, obviously, to give our honest assessment of policy and where the public stands on that and we want to build up those relationships even further. We’d like to be a key part of climate legislation passing in 2021. Mostly I want to see a sort of public policy and polling firm that is a utility.
We don’t have any interest in working for corporate clients. In fact, one of the reasons we are in this business is because I think that we’re at war with certain forces that are arrayed against racial justice, climate justice in this country. And to me, the idea of a firm working for both sides of that war is like an arms dealer dealing on both sides of an arms race. We, like every progressive group, have access to polling that is done by organizations accountable first and foremost to the progressive movement and often does not seek to profit from business interests.
And I will say, as of now, there is no polling firm that has reached scale with that model. I think it may be fair to say that there was not sufficient consumer demand to reach scale with that model in the past, but we believe we can scale to reach demand sustainably. I think five to ten years from now if Data for Progress has 40 employees and 50 movement partner-clients, I’ll say we’ve done a very big service to the progressive movement.
BT: I was asking around to people who work in Progressive World telling them I’m going to interview you, asking them what should I ask about. Almost everybody I talked to said, “you’ve gotta ask about Abolish ICE.” Primarily, it was kind of this big thing for a while, from what I’ve cursory looked at on Twitter, you haven’t really tweeted about it in quite a while, and I haven’t seen a lot of stuff on the DFP website about it. What is the status of that campaign?
SM: We worked with United We Dream on including undocumented folks in the stimulus. We did polling on that, that was circulated to Speaker Pelosi’s office. That ended up making it into HEROES. We’ve worked with immigrants rights groups on unethical detention practices during the coronavirus pandemic. I continue to signal boost the work of groups like United We Dream, and who as I just noted, we work with on a polling relationship.
Fundamentally, what these groups want depends on what is currently alive at the moment, at Congress, at the Supreme Court, or at the state and local level. At one point it was including undocumented folks in the stimulus, it’s also been DACA, but fundamentally I don’t believe that the priorities of the immigration rights movement should be driven by people on Twitter. I mostly signal boost the work that they’re doing, and Data for Progress has worked with those immigrants’ rights groups on what their priorities are, to get those across the finish line.
BT: You guys spend a lot of time talking about how the progressive agenda is very popular. Abolish ICE is a good example of one of these things that polled not very well. How much time do you think the left should be spending trying to drive issues into popularity as opposed to trying to focus on the ones that are already popular?
SM: Well, Abolish ICE was always an Overton Window play that came with the addendum that it was not intended to be popular. I think that the thing that is the problem for progressives is the collapsing of the electoral and the movement politics. So we were working with the Movement for Black Lives recently on some polling, and the focus was not to get any politician to support it, and to be honest, from Bernie to Biden, there isn’t a Democratic politician who supports abolishing the police. And that’s actually really freeing because what happens too often these days, I think you saw it with Julian Castro in the border decriminalization, is that we have a lot of policies stemming from really big ideas that are difficult to grasp.
So from my perspective, the realm of electoral politics is played within the public opinion, and movement politics is designed to shape what is possible within electoral politics. So they’re both approaching public opinion from markedly different ways.
But electoral politics is a chess game: you can choose to play the game, or you can choose to not to. But if you sit down to play chess, a knight moves in a fuckin’ L, and a bishop moves in a fuckin’ V, and you can’t really fuckin’ change that. But if you don’t want to play the chess game, you can do something else, and there are different sets of rules and different options available to you, and I think movement politics is a part of, through change, the realm of public opinion we’re dealing with.
BT: There’s been a lot of talk about a lot of these young new progressives, where people are immediately starting to jump to “what’s their next thing?” So for instance, AOC running against Chuck Schumer when he’s up. Do you think that people like her should be trying to gun for bigger jobs, or do you think they should focus on where they’re at and building up power there?
SM: It’s not one size fits all. There’s a lot of power to be built in congress, there’s a lot to be built outside of congress. I think Ocasio-Cortez has done a sterling job for herself in the first two years in Congress, far for me to backseat-quarterback her.
Progressives have not won any Senate primaries this cycle, if anything we may lose one in Massachusetts. [Incumbent Ed Markey won the race discussed here shortly after our interview with McElewee.] We’ve won a lot of House races, that’s just because when you’re dealing withSsenate races you’re dealing with, in some cases, an order of magnitude more voters. You’re moving from, you know AOC I think wins with 20,000 votes, Bowman wins with 60,000 votes, Bush wins with 80,000 votes, and Booker loses with 500,000 votes. Each time you’re dealing with that, you’re dealing with a whole lot more money that needs to be moved to the right place at the right time.
Fundamentally I think that it’s always good to press those limits, see where you’re at, see what you’re capable of doing. But I think a lot of those questions about people like AOC are going to depend on what sort of capacity is there for money, what sort of capacity is there to run the block and tackle movement to win that. But right now I think the threat of her has made Chuck Schumer a lot more sympathetic to a lot of progressive ideas and I think that we can use that tactically to move stuff strategically across the finish line.
