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Many voters “roll off” their ballots after voting at the top of the ticket, leaving races at the bottom empty. Host Maya Rupert talks to Sister District co-founder Gaby Goldstein about how those lost votes can make all the difference in state legislative races – some of which have been decided by razor thin margins. And how the fight for the things we care about – abortion rights, environmental justice, LGBTQ+ issues – are happening in state legislatures.
This episode is created in partnership with Sister District. To learn more and take action with Sister District, go to sisterdistrict.com.
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Transcript
SPEAKERS
Gaby Goldstein, Maya Rupert
Maya Rupert 01:16
Hello and welcome to Good Things. I’m your host, Maya Rupert, we are deep in election season, and we’re going to spend the next two episodes talking about a big problem getting Americans to vote in every race on the ballot. Many people, even when they turn out to vote, will only vote in races at the top of the ticket and not in the state legislative races further down. Today, we’re talking to Gaby Goldstein with Sister district about why state legislatures matter and why, despite what many voters believe, every vote truly does count. Gaby is co founder and Senior Vice President for Strategic Initiatives of sister district. Sister district does amazing work to build progressive power in state legislatures. How well in a number of ways, they have endorsed candidates in 177 races across many states, the majority of whom have won and have gone on to fight for progressive issues in their state legislatures. They have raised close to $8 million in donations directly for their candidates and grassroots organizations doing year round work. Sister District has grown to over 70,000 volunteers across the country, and their organizing efforts have reached out to millions of voters through phones, texts, postcards and door knocks now they’re helping to ensure voters leave no box unticked, that’s a lot of good things happening. Gaby, welcome to Good Things.
Gaby Goldstein 02:50
Maya, thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be with you.
Maya Rupert 02:53
I’m so excited for this conversation. Thank you for being here. I’m really eager to talk about how crucial state legislatures are to our everyday lives and the problem of people not voting down the entire ballot. First, I’d love to learn a little bit about what brought you specifically to this work.
Gaby Goldstein 03:13
Yeah, absolutely. So. Flashback to 2016 I was a bioethics lawyer in San Francisco and finishing my dissertation in health policy, when something happened that November, we might remember, but after the Trump election, I came together with a group of other women in The Bay Area to start to brainstorm, to think, what could we do? What had been overlooked? Was there anything that where we could have a really outsized impact? And we came to understand the importance and the incredibly overlooked nature of our state legislatures, when we first started looking into it, we thought, oh, Surely there must be a lot of organizations working to build power at this level of government. But what we found was that there was a really big gap in organizing capacity and resources going to folks running for this level of government and serving at this level of government, at least on our side, I always say that progressives are tardy to the party when it comes to paying attention to state legislatures, because conservatives have just been masterful for so many decades, generations, really, at building regressive power in our state legislatures and using those venues as a as a way to replicate across the country policies that are really out of step with what voters want and and not what we need to move the country forward. So the idea for Sister District comes from the idea of a sister city. What if we. Were able to harness the energy and the resources from folks in one place and direct those resources and that energy towards specific, winnable, strategic state legislative races somewhere else where we could make a big impact. And here we are, eight years later, none of my co founders or I thought, you know, we all fell backwards into politics. We all had other plans for our lives, but the needs of the moment called and here we are, eight years later, still doing the work, and it’s more important than ever.
Maya Rupert 05:33
Absolutely, so I got a chance to speak with one of your colleagues just recently, la, la, woo, to hear a little bit more about what you all are are doing. And it’s such incredible work. And one of the things that struck me when you, both of you spoke about this, is the role that 2016 played in this decision. And it’s such an interesting connection. Because I think I remember that moment very vividly, and the first thing I thought was not, how are we building better in the states to get there? And I think that how you all are sort of connecting those dots for people is really important. But I wonder if you can talk a little bit about, sort of exactly what that is like, how does this work impact us on a daily basis? We all know how the federal landscape really impacts us. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about how this work really just plays out for people on an everyday basis.
Gaby Goldstein 06:27
Yeah, I think you speak to such an important point, which is that I think on our side, the progressive imagination is really preoccupied, I would say, with federal solutions, federal candidates, federal ideas, right? And that’s not new. This goes back, I think, all the way back to the founding of the country. We’ve done a lot of research to better understand how conservatives and liberals think about states and the federal government, and what we found is that conservatives have a really deep seated emotional connection to states right, right, states rights and the importance of states, and we do not there’s a just a big fat blank in our imagination about the power of states, the promise of states. You know, we tend to think of states as second best, as a backup plan if we don’t have power in DC. And I think that that’s just really the wrong way to think about it. Having healthy democracies in our states is necessary it to achieve the progressive goals that we want at any level. So your question was, you know, how do states impact our daily lives? Why is this work so important? And when we started this, this organization, eight years ago, we knew states were important. I don’t know that even we foresaw how much more important they would become over the next decade. And here we are, and part of why states are growing in power, in our estimation, is a reflection of this long term power building exercise that the right has put into place over generations to narrow federal protections and expand state power. This is like, you know, when you hear about the Federalist Society and you hear about, you know, Alec and these organizations on the right, they really have a very clear goal. Their goal is government bad. Government needs to be small. And what that tends to mean is that there are judges and lawmakers in our states and in our federal judiciary. Right? Just look at the Supreme Court that want to dismantle federal protections and make states more powerful. So of course, we see this in abortion policy, right? The fall of Roe being a really good example where the right to safe and legal abortion access has been turned back to states. Right? That’s one example of how we’re seeing states grow in power. This is also the case when we look at environmental policy, environmental justice policies, we see our Supreme Court and other federal courts chipping away at the power of the Environmental Protection Agency and other ways that we have federal protections for our environment. We see this in every area of policy that touches every part of our lives, and it makes building our own power at the state level more important than ever, right.
Maya Rupert 09:40
Right, thank you so much for that, because I think you you touched on so much of what people wonder when they’re when we talk about these issues. There’s one thing though that I want to see if we can get a little bit of clarity on. Just take a step back. Because, to your point, I think a lot of people just don’t follow this stuff as closely. So I was wondering if you could, just as a. Initial point, tell us, what are state legislatures like? What does that body really entail?
Gaby Goldstein 10:05
Yeah, absolutely. So, just like our Federal Congress represents everyone in the country through representatives, right our congress people and our senators, each state also has a body like that, a legislature, and almost all of them have an upper and a lower chamber, just like in Federal Congress, there’s one state that has a unitary legislature, and they get together at a very different schedule for each of them, Texas, for instance, only meets every other year, versus, you know, California and Michigan that have year round state legislatures, very different when it comes to staffing and capacity and resources going to our state legislatures. They come together and they write and pass laws that govern what happens within the state. So everything you can imagine, from housing policies for the state to the state’s minimum wage to whether or not abortion is legal and accessible in the state, to whether folks can use the bathroom with the symbol on it that matches their identity. Those are all issues that are decided by our state legislatures. And so they go through a session, and they pass some laws, and then all of those bills go to the governor’s desk to either be signed by the governor if the governor agrees that those should go into law or vetoed if the governor decides that a particular law shouldn’t go into effect, depending on the state, if there are enough people from one political party in the legislature, they can actually override the governor’s veto. And the great example of that is, well, it’s not great. The terrible example is in North Carolina, where we have a Democratic governor, but the legislature has enough Republicans in it that they can just override the governor’s veto, and this happened around abortion access. So the legislature very Republican. They have a super majority. They passed restrictions around abortion, and our Democratic governor vetoed it. He said, nope, we’re not putting that law into effect. We’re not going to restrict abortion further in North Carolina, but there were enough Republican legislators to say, nope. We’re overriding the veto. Those abortion restrictions are going into effect, even though the governor doesn’t want them, right? So the composition of our legislative chambers matters a lot, and this is the kind of work that our legislatures do. Every issue you can imagine comes before the legislature in our states, and many people don’t even know who their state legislators are, right or what they do, and so these bodies get to fly under the public’s radar because folks don’t follow them, but they have huge, huge power, and they impact every part of our lives.
Maya Rupert 13:17
We’re going to take a quick break, but we’ll be right back with more on Good Things.
Maya Rupert 13:35
So we’re in the midst of, obviously, a big election season, and so much of our conversation politically, political media, the coverage, is really, really focusing on, you know, we’re voting on President like we’re we’re hearing some about Congress, we’re hearing about some of the Senate races, but obviously there are state legislature races. There are judicial elections. Many states are going to have various ballot measures or propositions on the ballot right during the presidential election years, these ballots tend to be bigger and longer, but what sometimes happens when voters go to the ballot box or they get their ballot by mail, and they see all of those races, if we’re only hearing about a few of them, there’s a lot of stuff on there people haven’t really paid that much attention to. So can you just talk a little bit about what this is, right? Can you explain down ballot roll off, and then we’ll get into this on deeper level on the next episode, and really the work you all are doing on it. But can you just give us kind of a high level summary on it?
Gaby Goldstein 16:25
Yeah, I hear you. I’m in California, and my ballot is so long, my ballot comes in the mail, and when I tell you it’s 20 pages long, you know, it’s it’s a real thing, and it can be overwhelming for folks, right? And what we see is that on both sides of the aisle, you know, Republicans and Democrats, we both have, we both have trouble filling the boxes all the way down the ballot, but it’s a much bigger problem for Democrats than it is for Republicans, which is really, really interesting. So our research team has been investigating this phenomenon for a few years. This idea of ballot roll off. They click the box at the top of the ticket, but they roll off their ballot and don’t vote at the bottom, particularly for state legislature. And we’ve been looking at this a few different ways over the past few years. But what we noticed is that when we started doing this work, we started to notice that these races at the state legislative level are won and lost by razor thin margins. Our very first year as an organization, in 2017 our very first set of elections. We’re in Virginia because Virginia, along with just a handful, very small number of other states, holds their state led elections in odd years. It’s actually a voter suppression tactic, not a surprise. It’s Virginia, Louisiana, Mississippi, but these odd year elections, and so that was our first year was we were thrown into the Virginia elections for state legislature, and to everyone’s surprise, Democrats got within striking distance. We were down 15 seats. We thought there’s no way we got within striking distance of flipping the entire chamber. And it came down to, if you can believe it, a tie in one single district. Shelly Simons shout out to Shelly. Love you so much. And it came down to a tie in that district. And it’s not just this was the district that would have delivered Democrats control of the entire chamber came down to a tie in one district, and unfortunately, the way that Virginia handles a tie breaker is that you put two the two names into a ceramic bowl. And unfortunately, was not Shelley’s name that came out of the bowl, which is crazy to this day, it’s okay she went on to run and win the next year, but, but that, you know, really kicked it off. Off for us to realize that the not just races, but entire legislative chambers, come down to tiny, tiny margins. We also started to notice that there was a really big gap between the top of the ticket vote totals and state leg right, at least on our side, sometimes half a million or more people would vote for president and not vote for their state legislative candidates. So that’s what led us to study ballot roll off. The bottom line being that these tiny margins have huge consequences, and that it happens much more frequently and profoundly on on the Democratic side than the Republicans. Republicans do tend to click all the boxes. The R is enough for them. But you know, for reasons we can talk about our voters don’t know, don’t behave the same way.
Maya Rupert 20:01
I would love to talk about that, that ideological divide, because it seems like it, it this seems like an issue that should impact voters across the board. But it’s interesting that you found that that the divide exists based on party. Can you talk a little bit about why you think that’s happening?
Gaby Goldstein 20:18
Yeah, absolutely. So the first way we started to unwrap the onion here around roll off was just a look at descriptively how often it happened, right? And so over 10 years worth of data, we looked in eight battleground states, and we found that Democrats running for State Legislature experienced ballot roll off about 80% of the time, but Republicans running for State leg in the same period of time experience roll off less than 40% of the time. So we knew going in that this was there was a huge partisan skew to roll off. But what we didn’t know is who’s rolling off their ballot and why? Why is this happening? So we did, we’ve undertaken this year a really big project to better understand who rolls off their ballot and why. The bottom line in terms of who is, it’s really, really clear in the data, it’s women, it’s voters of color, it’s young voters, those folks are most likely to roll off their ballots to vote for president but not vote down ballot, then the question is, why? Right? Why is this? Why is that the case? And we found a few really interesting things, and I think we’ll talk about some of them more. One is around this idea that our voters don’t feel confident, and they don’t voting down ballot, and they don’t feel like their votes in state legislative elections matter. They told us this in the data we asked this question, why don’t you vote down ballot? I don’t think my vote for state legislature matters, which is wild, right? Because we’re talking about these tiny margins.
Maya Rupert 22:01
Couldn’t be further from the truth.
Gaby Goldstein 22:02
Yeah, right, but that’s not the voters fault. We need to we need to show them. And it’s not enough to just say your vote matters. Our message Testing has shown that when we give an example like one vote would have flipped the entire Virginia Chamber. That does move our voters to feel more confident, to feel more agency, that their vote actually could matter. One thing that we learned Maya, that you just asked about, is ideology, and so what we found in our survey work is that conservatives and liberals have really different feelings and beliefs. Here’s one example we asked, is it your civic duty to vote down ballot? Conservatives said it’s their civic duty to vote down ballot no matter what their that’s their civic duty is to vote their whole ballot. And liberal voters said that it was their civic duty only to vote in in races where they knew a lot about the candidate or the issues, and so just there, you can see how we end up with differential roll off if we don’t know much about folks down ballot, and we think it’s our civic duty to only vote if we know a lot, and they think it’s their civic duty to vote regardless. So you know, the other thing I would say on ideology is we asked some questions around where voters think power should be, and overwhelmingly conservatives responded that they think Pat more power should be vested in the States than the federal government, and it’s the Mirror Image opposite for our voters, right? Our voters feel that the federal government is where most power should be. And so when you have those beliefs and those feelings and that those emotions, you can see where we end up having much more voters not complete their ballots for state positions because they don’t think it matters. They don’t think this is where decisions should be made anyways. They don’t know a lot, and they feel like they should only vote if they know a lot. And so here we are.
Maya Rupert 24:15
Okay, hold tight everyone. We’re going to take one more quick break, and we’ll be back with more Good Things.
Maya Rupert 24:49
I remember being a young person. I remember my first time voting. I was so excited, and I had done research, right? Like I was into this stuff, so I went, and I remember being shocked at how quickly my research ran out, and there were a lot of names at the bottom of the ticket. I didn’t know, and I did exactly what you’re describing, which is, I said I shouldn’t vote. I don’t know these people, and what if, and my fear, which I think is maybe common among progressives, was that this person could do a lot of damage. So there was that sense of I could be voting for the wrong person, and that was so powerful that it stopped me from voting on a lot of those people.
Gaby Goldstein 27:10
Yeah, it’s totally understandable. It’s totally understandable. The thing that’s so interesting is that conservatives don’t feel that way, and so what I think is that this research gives us a ton of avenues for exploration, to find messages and find frameworks and find ways to talk to our voters that help them feel more confident, that help them feel more of a sense of agency, that their vote really does matter, that they Do know enough. The last thing I’d share about that that I think is also really, really actionable is around knowledge. And so as I mentioned, nobody knows a ton about what state legislatures do. That’s fine, right? Totally get it. It’s been really off the radar, and part of that is the decline in local media, right? And the fact that state houses don’t have any reporters anymore, and all the news that we consume is national news. Very hard to get local news about what’s happening in our state. So I totally understand, but part of what I thought was really interesting is that our voters it’s not just that they don’t know what state legislatures do. They don’t know that state legislatures control the issues that they care the most about. And so one example there is around abortion. And what’s really interesting is that we did this research two years after Dobbs decision, right? Or year and a half after Dobbs, where in our minds, you know, we think everybody knows that you know. The consequence of Dobbs is that states control abortion access. Well, it turns out that a lot of our voters don’t know that. We asked the question, you know, a year and a half after Dobbs, which level of government has more authority over abortion access for you, the federal government or your state legislature? And lots and lots of our voters still said the federal government and so that, again, gives us data about how to increase knowledge, not just in general, about your state legislature passes a budget and blah, blah, blah, but really connect the issues that we know people care so much about, abortion, environmental issues, LGBTQIA issues, all of these rights and protections that we need. Connecting that directly to our states can be really, really powerful, and we saw that in our message testing when we’re able to, you know, share with our voters that it is your state legislature that decides whether or not you can have a safe access to a safe and legal abortion, not the federal government, that actually moves our voters in the direction of voting for state ledge more, right? Once you know, then you know. So I think that that’s that’s all really, really helpful for us to help build up the confidence and the agency of our voters, especially women voters of college. And young voters who are the most likely to roll off their ballots.
Maya Rupert 30:03
Right, that’s huge. Do you have a sense you said you’ve done some of this message testing. I wonder if you can preview some of the messages that you found to be the most impactful?
Gaby Goldstein 30:14
Yes, and they are available. All of our research is available. White Label. Just use it. You know, we’re just making it available for for our friends and allies on our website, sisterdistrict.com/rolloff and in so we’ve developed a couple of ads and so forth again, all all available for free. Just want to get it out there and curb roll off in this important presidential year, but two of the frameworks that we found the most persuasive for our voters are around this idea of every vote counts, giving, giving an example. So a little bit of the did you know 63 votes flipped the entire house in Pennsylvania in 2023 please vote right. And also around, no surprise, abortion access right and reproductive health and but specifically tying the control over this, those issues to state legislatures. And we have an ad, which I think is really powerful. I mean, we’re showing big movement for our voters where we have, you know, sort of a grid of obscured, you know, old white men, basically. You know, a grid of them in suits and ties with the voiceover of, did you know it’s your state legislature that decides whether you have access to safe and legal abortion. And the truth is fantastic. You know, that sort of framework really helps our voters understand, no, I didn’t realize that. And oh yeah, that is what my legislature looks like. Whole conversation Maya about the composition of our legislatures and how unrepresentative they are, and how that affects all of these issues, very important stuff there as well.
Maya Rupert 32:08
Well, I can imagine if a lot of them only meet every other year, and people aren’t working full time and they aren’t being compensated, it already is going to massively limit the pool of people that you can choose from.
Gaby Goldstein 32:21
Oh, my goodness, where to even start on this? I mean, I think part of the good news is we are making strides toward toward a more reflective democracy in our states. Right? If you look back 50 years, nary a woman to be found, right, in any legislature, nary a black person to be found in your legislature. You know, we’re still electing historic firsts. But the truth is, just as you said, many of these are part time legislatures. They’re not full time jobs. And you can imagine, is really hard imagine the kind of job that you could have, the kind of person you’d have to be to be able to take two or three months off every year, or every two years to just completely piece out of your job for three months. By the way, it’s then a part time job after legislative session a whole year you have to attend meetings and be in the community and do all the things, all in addition to your like a day job, normal job. This is why we, you know, the system was set up this way to keep women out of running right, to keep folks, folks from non traditional backgrounds, working class folks, from being able to serve right. Designed this way on purpose. These structural barriers exist for a reason, and most of our legislatures do not pay a living wage, right? New Mexico, for instance, they don’t pay their state legislators a dime, $0 $0 New Mexico, which, by the way, is a blue trifecta. I mean, come on, if we can get that done in New Mexico, we have control of both branches and the governorship, but, but even states like Virginia, you know, $17,000 a year to be a legislator, well, we need to get our lawmakers paid like appropriately for the 21st century. These are important jobs. I mean, they control life and death for us, right? And we are asking folks to do a job that that they need to be reasonably compensated for, and that’s especially important for, you know, for women, for for elected leaders of color, for non traditional folks from non traditional backgrounds, working class folks, all the rest, we need to provide much more support financially and otherwise, in order to get our legislatures to actually look like the communities in our, you know, in our towns and cities and states.
Maya Rupert 34:47
Absolutely, so we’re going to get a chance to keep talking about a lot of this, which I’m really excited about. But for closing today, what are you hoping people will take away from in this conversation?
Gaby Goldstein 35:02
It’s such a great question. I mean, here we are, less than 60 days to an incredibly important, historic presidential election, which, by the way, having Kamala at the top of the ticket is really good for us down ballot. Really, really good for us down ballot. You know, she’s running a really strong coordinated campaign, and we at the state ledge level, we rely on those, quote, coordinated campaigns that the presidential candidates run. We rely on them to turn out and to talk to base voters, and so we can do our job of helping persuade folks to vote for us, but it’s just such good news. So I want folks to feel like there’s enthusiasm and momentum. There really is, we’re crushing it in terms of money compared to the Republicans running for State ledge. So we’re in really good shape, is the first thing. And also these are going to be tiny margins, tiny, tiny margins. And truly, every vote counts, and it’s going to make a huge difference, regardless of who wins in November, our states are going to continue to be incredibly important and passing laws that impact our lives every day. And so I would love for folks to take a little time to think down ballot, to work down ballot, to, you know, throw a few dollars at some state legislative candidates, do a little phone banking and canvassing and all the rest. Um, truly, you know, at sister district, we routinely talk to more voters in in a district that we’re working in than the margin of victory. Happens all the time, right? And so you can have a huge impact on these tiny races. A little bit goes a really long way, and it’s going to make a huge difference this year.
Maya Rupert 36:51
Thank you. Thank you for this. Thank you for the work you’re doing. I’m so looking forward to the next part of this conversation. I’m just so grateful to you all, seriously.
Gaby Goldstein 37:01
Thanks so much for having me.
CREDITS 37:09
Thanks for listening to Good Things. Next week, we’ll get even deeper into the issue of down ballot roll off. In the meantime, to get involved with Sister District and help make a difference this election. Check out sisterdistrict.com/volunteer. This episode is created in partnership with Sister District. I’m your host, Maya Rupert. This series is produced by Hannah Boomershine and Lisa Phu our supervising producer is Muna Danish, mixing and Sound Design by Noah Smith. Steve Nelson is our SVP of weekly content. Executive Producers are Stephanie Wittels Wachs, and Jessica Cordova Kramer. Help others find our show by leaving us a rating and writing a review. Thanks so much for listening. We’ll see you next week. Follow Good Things wherever you get your podcasts and listen ad free on Amazon music with your Prime membership.
