STATE SPENDING & EXPOSING THE FLOW OF MONEY IN POLITICS

Pasha Moore

You always start with, who's the incumbent? You want to make sure you keep the seat, number one. Going from being an attorney in a firm to being a judge is an adjustment.

There's a lot that goes into training to become a really good judge like your demeanor, the way you approach a case. Because you're not arguing a case anymore.

It's such a shift in how you've operated your entire career. And it's also a shift of like, “Man, I always practice this one type of law. And now I have to hear cases on all of these types of law.”

It's a lot of getting up to speed. I know one of the things that is out in the universe right now in the Texas Legislature is starting a board specialization. There's always all those boards like, “Oh, family law.” Or international law or a million others.

There's all these very official, very specific, you have to study for a test board specialization. And we are looking at moving that legislation through that judges would be required to have a special board specialization themselves, which I think is great.

Robert Hansen

What would it look like? What sort of specialization are you referring to?

Pasha Moore

What it is to be a judge, how you actually do it. And making sure that judges are equipped and trained as effectively and efficiently as possible to do the job as well as they can possibly do it. Because that is what the judicial system deserves.

Robert Hansen

It seems like that would be the bar association to handle that.

Pasha Moore

Oh yeah. There's a board of specialization that administers all of those in our state and the other 49 states. But it has its own entity out there. It would be very official. It has to be set through the legislature.

Robert Hansen

The idea then would be, this is the right way to not legislate from the bench.

Pasha Moore

Yeah, that's an important component to it. I don't know if that's going to be a topic of this. I have no idea what's going to actually be in the boards or anything like that. I haven't asked.

Robert Hansen

It would be interesting to know.

Pasha Moore

Whether it's somebody that I agree with on most of my values or somebody I disagree with on most of my values, I don't want anyone legislating from the bench. It's not their job, it's the legislators job.

You don't like the law, go to your state rep and tell him about it. Don't go to District Court 344 or whatever and try to get somebody to change the constitution from the bench.

Expectation setting is the most important thing in the world. It’s why we're trained from age five on that there's a course syllabus. We all want a course syllabus and all things in life.

There are a few things that can guarantee us that. And that is adhering to the laws and norms and codes of constitution, whether it's the Texas Constitution, the US Constitution, etc.

Robert Hansen

I keep thinking there's some technology that could be built. I wanted to pass it by you just out of curiosity. Right now, we have red versus blue on maps. You have districts that are primarily blue or primarily red or whatever.

It seems like you could overlay those two and come up with a gradient, more black means more contested or more white means more contested or whatever direction you wanted to do that.

Pasha Moore

A lot of the pollsters actually do it that way.

Robert Hansen

Oh, do they?

Pasha Moore

Yeah, there's different shades of red. Some of them are pink, some of them are really dark red. I've seen a lot of maps like that.

Robert Hansen

It seems to me what you're really trying to do is find places that are contested and have heavy donors.

Pasha Moore

Not necessarily. There are donors in California that give a ton of money to people in Mississippi running for office. It's because they just care about the ecosystem and the overall sum of things.

Robert Hansen

So it doesn't matter where they're located?

Pasha Moore

Yeah, it doesn't. Are you going to get 95% of your money from your backyard? Sure. At least the state in which you reside? Sure.

Robert Hansen

Yeah. Especially local district stuff, I would imagine.

Pasha Moore

Yeah, especially when it comes to Congress and Senate, US Congress and all of that. Everybody has out-of-state donors on that because they care about the body as a whole.

Robert Hansen

How does that work? Do you have to get them to fly in? Or you cold-call them remotely?

Pasha Moore

It's usually a mix of phone calls. You see them at some gathering that one of the committees hosts. Or you are like, “Okay, cool. I'm going to go do a bunch of meetings in the Bay Area over these two days. We're going to have an event. I'm going to do all these in-person meetings.” Yeah, it's part of it.

Robert Hansen

Okay. How do you get people to actually donate? They've got them in the room. Theoretically, they are on your team, whatever team that is. And now you're going to get them to hand over their money.

Pasha Moore

What did I tell you just like 10 minutes ago?

Robert Hansen

How does that work?

Pasha Moore

What is the important piece to all of this?

Robert Hansen

Values but specifically how-

Pasha Moore

No, what is the important piece of how you get people to give you money?

Robert Hansen

Relationships?

Pasha Moore

No, keep going. What is it?

Robert Hansen

I don’t know. You tell me.

Pasha Moore

You ask them to give you money.

Robert Hansen

Oh, you just ask?

Pasha Moore

You just ask. They're obviously in the room. They've learned about you. They're sitting there thinking like, “Cool, all right.” They're expecting to be asked for money. So when you don't ask them for money, it’s like, “This guy might be stupid.” I think that.

Robert Hansen

That's it?

Pasha Moore

Getting them in the room is 90% of it. Getting them on the phone is 90% of it. You sell yourself, and then you make the ask. And you know what, you're going to get one of two answers, yes or no. Because no one's going to give you a maybe.

Robert Hansen

How do you get closer to a yes? Are there any tactics you use?

Pasha Moore

I can't talk about that. I don't want to give away myself. Everybody's different. Every donor is different. Every candidate is different. Every client's different. There are so many times I've been in a situation particularly with organizations where it’s like, “This aligns so perfectly.” And just for whatever it's like, “No, for this grant cycle, this budget doesn't work.” Or, “We're too heavy on that. We've invested so much like-minded money over here. We're going to let it cook and see what happens with it and revisit in a year.”

There's a lot of reasons why people won't give you money. They are all actually valid and good. And it's not just like, “I didn't like him.” Or, “I don't think she'll win.” That is some of it, too.

People who are perennial donors to political campaigns usually have a pretty good nose for who's a winner and who's a loser. People are going to be like, “Yeah, I don't see where this dogfight’s going. I'm staying out. I’m not going to give money.”

Robert Hansen

What about as an experience, they show up in the room and they're given drinks or whatever? I've read a lot of studies on things. If they smell vanilla, they're more likely to feel at home.

Pasha Moore

Yeah, I don't do any of that.

Robert Hansen

You don't do any of that.

Pasha Moore

Some of the fundraising events I do is so like, “Get in and hand me that check and get out.” It is very important to me, personally, that you are a good steward of your donors' dollars.

I think back to the fact of how many times in my first job, which was President Bush, opening up direct mail pieces. You get the letter in the mail and it's all like, “Oh, can you chip in $10, $20, even $50 to give us mail?”

Those are very geared towards grassroots donors, people who traditionally give less than $100. You'd get this $5 bill back in the mail with this spindly handwriting note, and it's some 88-year-old grandmother who's on Social Security.

She tells you, “I can only afford to give you $5. But I love President Bush, and I wanted to do something to help.” If people are like, “Here's a $5 million check.” and don’t bat an eye, I always think about that lady who gave the $5. And I'm like, “We have to be really good stewards of her money.”

Spending a bunch of money on a top shelf bar, people are going to stay at your party for an hour or all kinds of food that no one's going to eat and all these bells and whistles and spend $20,000 when you're trying to raise $70 out of a city or whatever because there's limits on what you can give federally and all that. But it's like, “I’m not being a good steward of these people's money.”

Robert Hansen

Interesting. But it seems like whatever experience you're going to have to put in front of somebody who is going to get $5 million is probably not going to be-

Pasha Moore

You'd be surprised. It all depends on where they come from in life. Truly. There is no one-size-fits-all with this stuff. Yeah, there's like, “Oh yeah, this list of tactics, like your checklist you had for your podcast.”

Sure, I bet you a lot of podcasts have a checklist that are similar to that. There's some table stakes things like, “Make sure the camera’s rolling.”

Robert Hansen

Chris, you hear that? It should be rolling.

Producer Chris

Oh, I didn’t know that. Oh my god.

Pasha Moore

I hope we hit that button.

Producer Chris

So sorry, let's turn them on now.

Pasha Moore

Again, so much just comes back to, who is the candidate? Who is the donor? Who has the relationship? Then it does bells and whistles, almost like you're trying to fake them out or fool them into like, “Oh, we've brought you to Shangri-La. And you should open your wallet.”

People who are traditionally in this space as donors are giving money because they want something to happen or to not happen legislatively, politically, policy wise, what have you.

They want to make sure we have control of Congress or we have a Republican in the White House or whatever it is. They don't necessarily want to be like, “Cool, I don't want to spend more than 45 minutes to this thing. I'll drink half a glass of that somewhat crappy Chardonnay. The check’s already been mailed. I'm going to shake his hand. And that's going to be that.”

Robert Hansen

I've definitely been to fundraisers.

Pasha Moore

Sorry, I just cut you off.

Robert Hansen

Yeah, go ahead.

Pasha Moore

Then there are some people that, I don't know if I can say that. I'm trying to think of a nice way to say something.

Robert Hansen

Allegedly.

Pasha Moore

There are some people who, just for whatever reason, operate differently. They might be new to the political giving world at a high level. And so they do want the bells and whistles. But you can figure out who those people are. And you can give them that.

Robert Hansen

I have been to very different types of political meetings where some amount of donation was appreciated. Some were just at a Mexican restaurant, and you get one plate of random Mexican food. Probably grand total of $1 worth of food. And others that are very experiential.

You're meeting this incredible person who's not even the candidate, just this other incredible person who has this big experience. The delta between those experiences are so vast, it's hard to put them on the same gradient even. But it also seems like the people that they invited were very different. And so that's where I was going with that question.

Pasha Moore

You have a specific audience for everything that you do. It's like, “There's this type of donor.” In Houston, there's 72 different types of donors because it's so huge. And there's money there.

In New York, you would never do an event like you would do in Houston. You have to just know. And if you don't know, if you're like, “Oh, gosh, we really need to go to Grand Rapids, Michigan.” You find through your network a local fundraiser and hire them to help you.

Robert Hansen

Really? So you actually partner up with local fundraisers?

Pasha Moore

Oh yeah, I do that a lot.

Robert Hansen

Interesting. I didn’t know that. They do it with you, I'm assuming, if they're flying in and they're like, “I would like to meet your donors in this neighborhood.”

Pasha Moore

No, you pay them to help you with where you are going because they're local.

Robert Hansen

I'm saying if they were flying into Austin, let's say, you’d do the same thing.

Pasha Moore

Sure. Yeah.

Robert Hansen

Interesting. I have run into at least a couple of people who have said if you're going to certain locations, you have to spin this message entirely differently than another place.

For instance, if you're going to go near the border, you're not going to want to talk about border security to a Hispanic group. But you might want to talk about marriage and family values, let's say. You go up in Dallas, and you definitely want to talk about border security. Do you coach the people there?

Pasha Moore

Yeah, you have to. You’re never just going to be like, “All right, there's the door. Hit it.”

Robert Hansen

Throw them out on stage.

Pasha Moore

Yeah, I know you're not going to do that. There's the amount of briefing materials and papers and conversations and stuff. You as a fundraiser, a lot of times, are only as successful as your client. So you want to set them up for success as much as possible.

It’s the same as if you're lobbying or you're working for a candidate or you're working for a large group. You always want to put your best foot forward. I'm sorry. But you just want to do that in life in general, put your best foot forward.

It's why my grandmother always told us, “Don't go to the grocery store without putting something on your face.” Because you don't know who you're going to run into. It's the same thing, always be prepared.

Robert Hansen

Do you end up with dossiers on the potential donors?

Pasha Moore

Sure.

Robert Hansen

Then you'll share that or the parts that are relevant anyway.

Pasha Moore

Sometimes you tell them stuff that doesn't seem particularly relevant because they can be conversation starters.

Robert Hansen

Interesting. So you know this person has a couple of kids and you're like, “Oh, you should talk to him about the kids.” Or they're having some health problems, “Hey, you should really talk to him about healthcare stuff.”

Pasha Moore

Or you should avoid. Sometimes there are some things to avoid. It's different to do some of this type of stuff with the organizations I work for. And that's where I really spend the majority of my time these days.

Raising money is just for organizations. So I don't have to do these candidate dossiers and fly out and all this stuff, as much as I used to, which is great.

Robert Hansen

Do you have somebody to do that for you, then?

Pasha Moore

No, I just don't take on that work.

Robert Hansen

You just don't bother?

Pasha Moore

It’s time-consuming. There’s other interests I have in life.

Robert Hansen

I remember the first time someone showed me a dossier that they had made on a friend of mine, not on me.

Pasha Moore

Did it creep you out?

Robert Hansen

It was pretty terrifying because it was pretty accurate. There was one small error.

Pasha Moore

You know what's funny? Your friend put all that information out himself online.

Robert Hansen

Oh yeah, absolutely. He’s a security guy too, which is even more terrifying.

Pasha Moore

And he’s great at stuff, that's crazy.

Robert Hansen

I asked the same guy, “You don't have one of those on my company, do you?” Because it was on his company, the entire company. But he's the CEO of the company. “Do you have one of those on my company?” He’s like, “No, but I do have one on you.” And I thought that was rather terrifying.

Pasha Moore

We’ve done it to ourselves.

Robert Hansen

I know. We really have put enough information out there.

Pasha Moore

Thank God, we know that you once were eating and drinking your favorite Margarita at Matt's El Rancho. We've all been guilty of posting stupid crap we shouldn't post on social media. But it's a goldmine for people who need information.

Robert Hansen

Well, that certainly helps when they're walking around the room shaking hands. They already know what people look like.

Pasha Moore

It's really helpful, especially because there are so many elected officials that have been elected multiple times, years and years and years of it. They meet so many people, and they never want to ever make somebody who's been so generous with their help and support feel like it's the first time they've ever met them. You have to also give it like, “Oh, don't forget they gave you a check last year.”

Robert Hansen

It feels a little like a parlor trick when you're there like, “Oh, that was so funny that last time you talked about whatever.” They’re like, “Wow, what a great memory.”

Pasha Moore

A little bit. Yes. It's copious notes. It's also in building that home, “These people are always helpful. Don't forget about them.” Thank-you notes, number one, are easy to write. The fact that people don't write them, you're horrible. Probably ninth level of hell is where you're headed.

Robert Hansen

They have to be handwritten then?

Pasha Moore

Yeah.

Robert Hansen

You can't do it by email?

Pasha Moore

No, I always mail them and stuff. But the amount of people who don't send thank-you notes anymore that is like, “I gave that dude a check, and I didn't get anything in the mail.” And so that's another thing that can now set people apart, too.

It’s like, “Oh my gosh, this guy wrote me a handwritten thank-you note.” It doesn't take that long. I set aside time on every Friday and write thank-you notes for whatever I have to thank people for for the week. It's not that big of a deal.

It is a deal. But the work itself is just like, “Don't you feel the gratitude?” It should be easy to pan out three quick sentences of how grateful you are that somebody did something nice for you. That's all. Easy.

Robert Hansen

That is definitely an art that is lost.

Pasha Moore

It is and sad.

Robert Hansen

Yeah, that is a little sad.

Pasha Moore

It's just like, “I'm sorry, but a text thank you is just not sufficient.”

Robert Hansen

There's a lot of talk about the tax incentive aspect of giving.

Pasha Moore

Not-for-profit giving. You do know that there is no tax incentive whatsoever for political giving?

Robert Hansen

Well, there is the concept of putting money into companies. And those companies can have some loss associated with them. There's ways that you can shell the money around.

Pasha Moore

I don't think I understand your line of thinking.

Robert Hansen

What I was really going at was the Citizens United case versus FEC.

Pasha Moore

Dragging it all out from old school.

Robert Hansen

Well, it’s a landmark case.

Pasha Moore

Where it said that corporations are people, too?

Robert Hansen

Yeah, effectively.

Pasha Moore

Effectively, yeah.

Robert Hansen

I'm not exactly sure the amount of implications that has had on American society, but I guarantee it’s not zero. So just for the audience's sake, it might be worth explaining what that whole thing was, if you can do it.

Pasha Moore

Okay, let me muster up for my memory. FTC versus Citizens United, God, this was so long ago. I think basically Citizens United raised and spent money that was potentially a no-no under the FEC rules. FEC, for those of you out in the audience, Federal Election Commission.

The commissioners are always appointed by whoever is president, but they serve certain terms. So there's always a mix of Republicans and Democrats on the commission.

Anyway, it's where members of Congress, both House and Senate and the president and anyone running for those offices files their reports of how we know who gave them money, how much money they gave them, when they gave them that money.

Then on the flip side of that, how the campaigns or organizations spent the money, who they spent the money with, how much they spent, and when they spent it.

Essentially, at that time, there was zero corporate dollars in federal politics. And federal politics only encompasses US House, US Senate, and the presidency. Just a fun fact, the whole reason that corporate dollars were taken out of politics, it actually happened under Teddy Roosevelt who, for those of you listening at home, is my number one favorite president ever.

Robert Hansen

Interesting. I have to know why.

Pasha Moore

We can get to that, no problem. I will tell you my top three. Anyway, he, JP Morgan, and John Rockefeller and all these names you see on buildings from all those years ago were brought up in the same circles because Teddy Roosevelt was affluent in New York and all that and from an affluent family.

Anyway, he just got tired of them trying to tell him what to do and always try to use their money to get what they wanted out of politicians. And so he was the one behind pushing through Congress the bill to take corporate dollars out. It’s interesting. He just thumbed his finger at the man. I always appreciated that.

I don't know how I feel about corporate dollar. I don't know if I actually really care about how the money is because one way or another, we'll figure it out. If people want to spend money on something, they're going to figure out how to spend money on it. It's one thing I have learned, whether it's buying things for themselves or contributing it somewhere.

Citizens United actually made the distinction in the US Supreme Court that corporations are actually under the constitution and under the federal code that has to do with federal elections and how they raise their money. A corporation is the equivalent of a person. Only in respect to being a third party donor to help assist campaigns.

Still to this day, you cannot as Walmart write a check to Chip Roy who's a member of Congress. Here where we're sitting, I think it's his. It might be Lloyd Doggett, though.

Walmart can't just write a, “Here's a check from our corporate account to your coffers.” That can't happen. I'm about to get super into the weeds, so bear with me.

Robert Hansen

That’s fine. Go ahead.

Pasha Moore

There are a couple places that corporate dollars actually have a place in politics. And that is through what's called a super PAC. It's a specialized PAC that you don't spend money directly with a campaign who's running for Senate or House or president.

You spend money about them. I can't even really say on behalf of them because there can be no coordination whatsoever between what the campaign is doing and what the super PAC is doing. But it does help raise big ticket dollar items.

TV commercials are expensive, and they're particularly expensive in the month of October in an even-numbered year especially in swing states. TV stations aren't stupid. They're going to charge more for their commercials when they know they got a bunch of people competing to have the time.

It's really smart to have a super PAC run a bunch of political ads for you. You're grateful for that to happen. Now, the other time that there can be corporate dollars in politics on the federal side is, there's the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee.

They have things that are boring to pay for like the mortgage on their headquarters or the light bill or the water bill. There's a special fund that can be used to help offset the costs of that, out of corporate. It's not that sweet 88-year-old woman who gave us the $5. Her $5 isn't necessarily going to the electric bill. It can actually be spent on campaigns.

Robert Hansen

My understanding of the Citizens United bill or case-

Pasha Moore

I hadn't thought about that forever. It has been this way in so long, actually.

Robert Hansen

I just went back and just looked at it just so I was somewhat fresh on it.

Pasha Moore

I'm glad you're fresh. I'm not.

Robert Hansen

Somewhat. I'm not a constitutional lawyer.

Pasha Moore

I am not either, just for your awareness. I am not a financial adviser. Don't take my advice on stocks.

Robert Hansen

Initially, I was a little against the idea of any concept of companies having any real rights as a person. That seems very odd to me. But then I went and actually read the details of that case.

It seemed like what was really happening is they made a movie or something. And they were trying to put this movie out I think two months before the elections.

Pasha Moore

Yeah. I forgot about the movie part of it. Again, this has been forever.

Robert Hansen

Yeah, it's a weird sub part of the case. But it ended up being a First Amendment issue. We should be able to have the same rights to have the First Amendment. We should be able to talk about whatever we want to talk about.

That's why it had similar carve-outs as companies. That's how they said it's close enough to being a person that should have the same rights as a person and the concept of being able to talk about things.

In that context, I actually do agree that it's a good case law. But it had this trickle down of saying that companies can donate. Interesting.

Pasha Moore

Yeah, it's a fascinating thing. It's been fascinating too to watch. Where I started in all of this, Citizens United hadn't happened yet, of course. And super PACs were not a thing. We barely had websites. We definitely didn't have Facebook and all this stuff when I started.

We talked about, “Oh, should we have something on the website so people can donate?” Nobody used that. It’s so funny to think how far we've come on so many things in just 20 years.

Robert Hansen

Everything was Myspace.

Pasha Moore

Yeah. I didn't even have Myspace.

Robert Hansen

I'm just teasing. Friendster maybe.

Pasha Moore

No, we didn't do any of that crap. None of that crap. I barely texted at that point.

Robert Hansen

Rewinding the tape further and further here.

Pasha Moore

Yeah. It’s just like, “Whatever. Who knows? I'm really not that old, I promise.” But it's interesting to see, though, how everything was so rigid back then. And now we just have so many different avenues to use as I like to spread the good word.

Of course, here's the thing about it. And this is where everybody needs to just take a deep breath and calm down. Anything the opposition to you and your interest and your party can do, you can do it too. Everything's equal on that front.

Maybe you figured out your donor spends more money than your opponents’ donors, great. Whatever. Maybe your opponents’ donors spend more money than you.

You still have to spend the money smartly. You still have to make good decisions in the strategy of how you're going to get somebody elected or some ballot initiative passed or whatever the heck you're trying to do.

Maybe until this year, but most of the time you actually do have to have a legitimately good candidate on the ballot. You can't have some bozo.

Robert Hansen

We will get to candidates in a second.

Pasha Moore

Yeah, I don't know. But at the end of the day, though, where people I think get themselves so tripped up on being upset or being so elated about Citizens United case is the fact, okay, well, it didn't just weigh heavier for one party over the other. We all are equal with this.

Robert Hansen

Yeah. To your point, Republicans had a lot of large corporations. But the Democrats had unions.

Pasha Moore

Yeah, and that was where there was equality in a way.

Robert Hansen

In a way.

Pasha Moore

Yeah. I could say some really hateful things right now, and I'm not going to do it.

Robert Hansen

You could do it. Why not? This is your time. You can say anything you want.

Pasha Moore

No, let’s not. Let’s keep going.

Robert Hansen

Fair enough. If you were to try to steelman the argument for why corporation should be able to donate, what would that be? Is it just that it's equal? Is there any real upside?

Pasha Moore

That question is just totally different from the discord decision. That's where the equality comes from. It’s the fact that just like, “Okay, well, Democrat campaign.” Or you can have super PACs just the same as Republicans can.

The same as independent groups or libertarians or Green Party, everyone can have a super PAC. No one's being cut out from having that. That's where I'm coming to, equality. But the overall thought of corporations being able to do that, I don't really care. It doesn't matter to me.

Robert Hansen

Do you feel like someone would care and say, “This is the reason we should have it.” Is there a moral high ground there to say, “This is a good idea, and we should definitely have it.”

Pasha Moore

You know what, I think if you wanted to really think about moral high ground on it, think about the amount of franchise and insurance and property and various other taxes corporations pay that is a huge part of the overall money going into a state.

This is a little bit of a different argument because anyway, state dollars, federal dollars when it comes to campaigns are different. But corporations pay a lot of money in various forms of taxes. And so to me, it seems like they're a taxpayer just like I’m a taxpayer. So why wouldn't they?

Robert Hansen

That's interesting. I had not heard that argument in a long time.

Pasha Moore

I think what is the split here in Texas on property tax is individual homeowners pay what is the equivalent of 40% of all the property tax generated in a calendar year. That means that corporations pay 60%.

Yeah, they get incentives and all that. But they're paying in. So why don't they get some say? We're not going to be like, “Okay, Walmart, here's your one vote. You get to vote now. Here's the ballot box. Your precinct number is this.”

I don't think that. But again, anyone can spend corporate dollars now on a super PAC. It's all equal as to, who can have one? I guess if you don't have any rich friends or anyone that wants to support you, man, it sucks. But you still have the option to have one.

Robert Hansen

Along the same vein, how do you feel about PACs?

Pasha Moore

PACs are awesome.

Robert Hansen

Are they the right vehicle for the future?

Pasha Moore

PACs have been around since the beginning of time, some version of them.

Robert Hansen

Yeah. But do you think that's the right thing? And if so, why specifically PACs?

Pasha Moore

What would you replace a PAC with?

Robert Hansen

Well, just direct donations.

Pasha Moore

Oh no. I like the way that it's all separated out.

Robert Hansen

Why’s that?

Pasha Moore

Well, I think it's helpful. I think it's another pot of money for a candidate to have access to and to spend and to make sure that they're doing the right thing in regards to their campaigning and whatnot and being able to keep their job or take a new job in regards to what they get elected to. I think they're very helpful.

We've talked a lot about federal law. I'd like to talk a little bit more about Texas, if that's okay. Texas is different. Every state has their own laws when it comes to their political giving and who can take what and when they can take it and all that.

In Texas, we're fortunate the law says that individuals can give unlimited amounts of personal money to candidates on the ballot. Great. No corporate dollars whatsoever can be spent on a campaign in this state.

If you're running for state rep, you can't have a corporate super PAC because the state law obviously supersedes the federal. PACs here are very specific in regards to this industry or this industry’s association or our aligned values around this or we feel like we should be a free enterprise or we're pro-choice. Whatever.

There's thousands and thousands of them that are registered in the state. They actually make a difference in campaigns. They make a huge difference in campaigns.

They do it not because they want, “Oh, we're going to control everything and tell everyone what to do.” No, they want good people that align with their values and have similar goals as they have to be elected to office who are making decisions. Simple.

It's a great way though for donors themselves to go, “Cool. I'm going to be a part of this association. I'm going to give money to this PAC because I've got 50 other people that are like-minded to me and my interest. And if we pool our money, we are more effective.”

Robert Hansen

Yeah. It increases the odds of any specific group being able to move the needle politically. A buddy of mine came up with this idea a while ago about the idea of a centralist PAC.

Let's say you have two people on one extreme or the other, doesn't really matter. But one is slightly more in the center than the other. Instead of arbitrarily saying, “I like one candidate versus the other.” or saying, “I like their politics.” just say, “Whichever one is closer to the center, that's where the money is going to go.”

The idea would be to bring more and more people into a more centrist view of the world. What's your feelings on that?

Pasha Moore

That sounds silly. No offense to your friend.

Robert Hansen

Why is that?

Pasha Moore

It seems like a reality show. It doesn't seem serious.

Robert Hansen

He was quite serious.

Pasha Moore

I’m certain he was. There's a lot of people very serious about things. Again, no offense to your friend. But I don't see anyone that would want to fund that. Maybe you should re-explain it.

Robert Hansen

Okay, sure. It seems like both parties are moving more and more extreme.

Pasha Moore

Well, they are and they aren't. But keep going. On both ends of the extremities are the loudest voices.

Robert Hansen

Right. Then they race to the middle as soon as they get past the primaries.

Pasha Moore

Sure, there’s some of that. But again, though, the loudest voices are the crazy ones on both sides.

Robert Hansen

Right. His idea would be, let's try to circle whoever's closer to the center. Not necessarily the center. That's not the goal. Let's say we have two people who are total wackadoos in either direction, just way out of left field, in some dimension. But one of them is closer to the center.

Whoever's closer to the center is the one who gets the money, just trying to drive people more to a more moderate way of looking at things.

Pasha Moore

Money doesn't change people's minds.

Robert Hansen

You're saying that donating money to a political campaign doesn't actually help them change people's minds?

Pasha Moore

No, not at all.

Robert Hansen

What's the money for, then?

Pasha Moore

To make sure that somebody who agrees with you 80% of the time gets elected.

Robert Hansen

We might be talking past each other.

Pasha Moore

Let me throw some facts down on you. Giving someone a $5,000 PAC check from the UPS PAC or whatever is never going to make somebody go, “Well, damn, they gave me $5,000. Every time they come to me with, ‘You need to vote this way or this other way.’ I have to listen to them because they gave me $5,000.”

Zero. That's not going to happen. Second of all, no one should be expected that they could A, buy somebody's vote with a PAC check. Or B, that anyone should sit there and say, “Yeah, my votes for sale.” for a $5,000 PAC check. That's not going to happen.

Robert Hansen

I don't think that's what he was suggesting.

Pasha Moore

Let's throw some fake names at this. We've got John Doe, and we've got Jane Doe. And they're both really far right people. Out of 10 of the last votes, John took 10 straight up wackadoo votes. But Jane only took the position of nine straight up wackadoo votes.

We consider her to be the more reasonable of the two. And so we're the US Chamber of Commerce. We have our PAC. And we think if we give Jane a $5,000 PAC check that she will now vote less wackadoo than she has before because she's like, “Great, people like me.”

Robert Hansen

That’s not what he was suggesting.

Pasha Moore

Okay, please explain.

Robert Hansen

He wouldn't be suggesting that the candidates would suddenly change who they are. No. He's saying that giving them the $5,000 is more likely to get them elected because now they can spend it on more campaigns.

Obviously, there'll be a lot between here and there. But if this took off and it actually was working, you'd have a lot more people getting elected in the center which might say, “Well, yes, the people who are very crazy and loud and they make good headlines, they're getting a lot of publicity for free. But they don't get elected.”

It turns out people who are closer to the middle get elected because they get more of these dollars from the centrist PAC.

Pasha Moore

The thing that you are forgetting and your friend is forgetting is all the people that sit in the House chamber represent different areas with different voters. Jane Doe and John Doe don't represent the same place. So they have two separate groups of voters.

Robert Hansen

Yeah, I'm talking about in the exact same location. In the same district, let's say.

Pasha Moore

Okay, well, you're not going to have two elected officials in the same district. So there will never be a head to head comparison like that.

Robert Hansen

Well, you would if it's at the primaries. It’s really what we're talking about.

Pasha Moore

Well, but we're talking about things that they might do or things they might not do and what have you when you're talking about primary. Sure, give money to the more centrist.

You got to think about who turns out on both sides of the aisle, whether you’re D’s or R’s. Who turns out in a primary? The most faithful of the party. So a lot of times, what ends up happening is the wacky one who will get elected out of a primary will win the primary.

Robert Hansen

If that's the case, is there any sense at all in spending money on a centrist if you are a centrist candidate? And I don't mean centrist, in the center. I mean slightly less crazy.

Pasha Moore

Yeah, there is, depending on what the numbers are and who you turn out to vote in a primary. Sure.

Robert Hansen

Okay, it's not just that the R’s are going to vote for the most radical R.

Pasha Moore

No, I vote in a Republican primary. And I never vote for the radical person.

Robert Hansen

Okay. All right.

Pasha Moore

It's just making people like me remember, “Oh, it's primary day. And I need to go vote.” That's it.

Robert Hansen

Yeah. And so if the more centrist candidate is the one that reminds you and is in your inbox or whatever-

Pasha Moore

Yet you've learned about and you're excited about or whatever, sure, yeah. Every primary’s different, of course. But sometimes you have to attack your primary opponent like, “This person's nuts. We shouldn't elect this person.”

Sometimes you just want to make it all positive like, “When I get to the state legislature, here's the three things I'm going to do; cut property taxes and love dogs.” and whatever they're going to do.

Robert Hansen

One other thing he wanted to do with this is, once you get past the primaries, now, there's just one on each side, one R, one D. Whichever one is closer to being the center, then you back that person. So you might actually flip sides.

Pasha Moore

If you're a corporate PAC, yeah, sure. If you're Walmart's PAC or whatever, a lot of where these PAC checks come from has to do with the fact of like, “Oh, we have all these operations in this part of this district.” Everybody has a different reason for giving.

Or they'll look and be like, “Cool, leadership is solidly R. The chamber’s not going to flip. We're going to support more R’s because we have an agenda we need to get pushed through. And if we don't support mainly R’s, we’re probably not going to get our agenda pushed through.”

There's a lot of thoughts that have to go into who gives money. The easiest thing that most people do, and it's a cop out. But I get why they do it. It makes their lives so much easier to do it this way because of all the things I just said. There's usually a friendly incumbent rule.

If you haven't been a shitty incumbent, you've walked the walk for a little bit, you haven't completely gone nuclear on their issues or whatever, a lot of times, they'll support you somewhat. Or at least not support your opposition.

Again, they're in business. And so they're good at doing business. It’s not personal.

Robert Hansen

Well, one would hope.

Pasha Moore

It's not personal. So many people get so upset when there's like, “Oh, but I'm the challenger to this person. And he's terrible and blah, blah, blah, all this stuff. But X Y, Z PAC didn't give me money.”

I'm like, “Because they decided to ruin your life?” I'm like, “That's not personal.” People are very strategic from up and down the ballot to the people who give them money every way around it. There's always a reason why people do anything. And that's not just in political giving, that's in life.

Robert Hansen

Sure. We talked about individual donors, but I don't think we've actually covered off on corporate donors. Is there a different tactic to go hit them up? Do you have to do browbeating and talk to them about their business?

Pasha Moore

No, there's always just specific people. There's usually a government relations person that works for them, you usually go with them. And then you're just like, “Hey, this is what the deal is.”

They know what their budget is every year that they have available to spend on whether they're in Texas or they're given to federal, whatever it is. It's the same concept of the relationship, though.

I can't just figure out like, “Oh, who's Boeing's lobbyist in Wyoming?” Cold-calling lists aren't going to work very well. You have to build relationship with those people, too.

Robert Hansen

Yeah. How do you go about convincing them that, “This is the candidate.” Do you have to come up with business cases to explain?

Pasha Moore

No, you usually show them in polling. You're like, “Okay, we're going to win because of X.” Or, “Here's our path to victory.” Or, “Here's all the things we're going to do.”

It comes down to the general way that districts are drawn this time, and it doesn't matter who's behind the redistricting and what state it is. You naturally try to keep tribes together. You can look at a district, and there's very few toss-up districts left in the country for anything. And that's okay.

Frankly, I don't know how much better off we would be as a society. If we had so many more toss-up districts that just cost that much more money, there'd be that much more involvement, etc.

If people can handle the like, “Oh, in this cycle, Democrats win. In this other cycle, Republicans win.” You're constantly getting somebody new to represent you. I don't know if we necessarily want a ton of districts that have that going on. I don't know. I'm not saying we do or we don't. I legitimately don't know.

Robert Hansen

I don't know either. In terms of donations, I think one of the things that keeps a lot of people away from donating is because they're going to end up on the books.

Pasha Moore

Yeah, people do have concerns about that. Sure.

Robert Hansen

First of all, do you know any ways to keep it off the books?

Pasha Moore

No, I won't play that game.

Robert Hansen

Yeah, okay.

Pasha Moore

You could give all your money to a 501(c)4 that can do education around campaigns and policies and what have you, and they don't have to disclose their donors. You can do that. That’s about it.

Robert Hansen

Okay, it is a path.

Pasha Moore

It’s not a great path. You're limited on what you can do as a C4 for an actual campaign?

Robert Hansen

This one guy, I don't know him. But I know of him very well. His name is Brendan Eich, and he's the inventor of JavaScript.

Pasha Moore

Oh, okay. Am I supposed to know him?

Robert Hansen

He was the CTO of Mozilla.

Pasha Moore

Oh, that guy. I forgot his name. Yeah. They tried to embarrass him and call him out. It was the original doxxing.

Robert Hansen

It was. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, they went through and actually found out that this person had invested some amount of money. It wasn't a lot of money. I think it was like 400 bucks or some very small amount of money.

Pasha Moore

It was stupid what they called him out on. I don't remember the specifics either. But I remember thinking like, “You're mad at him over that?”

Robert Hansen

It was an anti-gay marriage bill, I think. Please don't quote me on that, if I'm wrong.

Pasha Moore

It was like a Prop 6 thing in California.

Robert Hansen

I’m not exactly sure.

Pasha Moore

I think it was something like that.

Robert Hansen

I probably should have double-checked this.

Pasha Moore

It’s okay.

Robert Hansen

But anyway, his career, I wouldn't say was completely ruined. But he was definitely run out of Mozilla with pitchforks. He was definitely ostracized. I was in the middle of the thick of a lot of those conversations because we were creating a browser around the same time, and it caused a lot of controversy.

Mozilla is actually an open-source software. So you could actually upload anything you want into the codebase including religious symbols. What's going to happen if you do that, it opened up the floodgate of all these interesting conversations.

Is it a good thing that Brendan Eich is run out of town for a decision he made to back up a political campaign?

Pasha Moore

I don't think it's a good thing for that to happen to anybody, people that I like, people that are on my side, people who I don't like. I don't want anyone to be doxed. I don't want anyone to be dinged for the fact that they felt a civic pull enough to say, “You know what, I want to give $500 to that person running for Congress.”

We have such a huge civic engagement problem in this country. There's a lot of reasons why we do. But now we have a new threat to civic engagement.

That's the fact of, if I go and do this or somebody finds out how I voted, I'm going to get run out for my company because there's some militant little group that decides, “Everyone should be exactly like me. If you're not, we're going to harass you until you leave. And we're going to demand you're fired.”

That's not healthy. That's not good. That's not good for society. That's not good for people's personal lives. It's ridiculous that we are in that situation in America right now. Ridiculous.

Robert Hansen

I think that there's got to be some technical solution where really what you're trying to do by having OpenSecrets is just making sure that people don't donate too much, I'm assuming.

Pasha Moore

That's where it started. I don't know if it's pure like that anymore. I don't know.

There's always been this “gotcha” mentality to opensecrets.org. No offense to you listening from opensecrets.org. But you know what you are.

They would not put the little scale on the cover, “Oh, 68% of John Gordon's donations come from manufacturing.” They wouldn't put that kind of stuff out there if they weren't trying to make a point.

Also, the FEC's website is public. Anyone can search it and pull everyone's exact reports. We don't actually need opensecrets.org to know anything.

Robert Hansen

I think there's a way to fix it.

Pasha Moore

Tell me what you think. How do you fix it?

Robert Hansen

Well, I think if you have every single person who is donating to any single location, all of that can be tracked with a unique key, let's say. And so you know that this person is not allowed to invest any more into this unique key. That's it.

You don't know what that unique key is related to. You don't know when or where except for it was within this cycle. And then you could say, “Well, some of these things can't be more than a certain amount.” Otherwise, it opens an investigation.

It'd be very easy to develop something like this, I think. And you would still retain all the purpose of OpenSecrets originally, which was hopefully just identifying fraudulent activity and then totally reduce people's reluctance to spend.

Pasha Moore

Well, you forget who the liability and the impetus is on in catching people giving you too much money. It's on the candidate. It's not on the donor. The candidate gets in trouble, not the donor. The candidate will always return that money if it's over immediately.

Robert Hansen

Yeah. But it seems like even more reason to keep it secret, then. If that's really the goal of this whole thing, to prevent candidates from accidentally taking too much money or purposely, that's easily identified with software like that.

Pasha Moore

Yeah. But you can't have the government administer software like that. You just can't. I see where you're going with that. But no, that's bad.

Robert Hansen

They already have worse data, though. It seems like this would be one thing to reduce that. You're not worried about somebody working behind a data center or pulling a report. That can easily be monitored, easily identified.

What you're really worried about is the masses looking at each other and saying, “Well, this person is bad because they liked XYZ candidate or this other candidate.”

Pasha Moore

Sunlight is important on all of this stuff. People have the ability to find this stuff. People file their own tax returns or pay somebody to do it, it's the same thing. You just can't search people's tax returns.

In this case, you can search FEC reports. Or you can search TC reports or whatever they call them in Arkansas, Louisiana, and what have you. They're all part of a public database.

All of these entities have code and laws on the books in their individual states and in Congress that the public has every right to know who gives money to stuff.

It doesn't really have anything to do with like, “Oh, you spent money where you weren't supposed to.” or, “Oh, this person gave you $100 more than they were supposed to this cycle.” It's not about that. It's about the general public having the ability to find the information as to who is financing campaigns in your area.

Robert Hansen

You would like that data, then?

Pasha Moore

Yeah, sure. Look, OpenSecrets exists. There's a couple of others out there that are similar though. There was the Sunlight Foundation, the way they did things and followed the money.

There's all these different groups out there that always pop up. They all have this “gotcha” mentality about it or whatever. But literally, they exist because they know that most people are too lazy to try to figure out like, “Oh, how do I find out who gives money to Ted Cruz's campaign?”

It's really simple to pull a report or to search for a donor in any of this stuff. You have to know what you're doing. But you have to know where to go, of course. You can’t just like, “Oh, yeah. Whatever. It's easy.”

That's why groups like OpenSecrets, I just feel like they just have a nefarious intention. They just always feel very “gotcha”. And I just think it's shitty.

Robert Hansen

I think I'm getting mixed messages from you. You hate it, but you think it should exist.

Pasha Moore

I think OpenSecrets is shitty. I think being able to see public data that’s just like, “Oh, it's here on a report.” It's like three donors to a page. And I have the ability to find that, yeah, I'm fine with that. I don't care.

I think the way that OpenSecrets takes that and bastardizes that information and puts their little chart over like, “Oh, 80% of the people do this. And 60% of the people do that.” It's bullshit.

I think the way that they operate sucks because they literally just want everyone to be like, “I'm so mad. Ted Cruz took all his money from oil and gas. Obviously, he hates climate change because of it.” or whatever it is these people pull out of their rear ends to think about and complain about. That's the problem that I have with it.

Public information of this, no, I don't have a problem with that at all. I think it's great, actually. Frankly, it helps fundraisers know who's given where. It helps me do my job. But being a dick about it like these people are, I think that's a problem.

I think that's a problem that we have throughout politics. And it's why people have gone to the far ends of the spectrum on both sides. It’s because everyone's just so vigilant in their dickheadedness towards anyone that's slightly different from them.

Robert Hansen

I have a feeling like you can get rid of OpenSecrets if you wanted to. But if the data exists, someone's going to create another version of it.

Pasha Moore

Sure, there should be. Like I said, there's several versions of it. It just is what it is. Whatever, fine. Frankly, it's like what my grandmother always said about certain people in our hometown.

There is no way you can make that person happy. They wake up looking for something to complain about. And there are just a lot of people that are very piqued by political things that they wake up every day and they want to find something to complain about. And OpenSecrets just feeds those people.

Robert Hansen

You have a bunch of different types of candidates that you have supported like judicial. We mentioned state, legislative, congressional. Are those fundraising processes different? Or are they pretty much uniform? Do you have to treat them the same?

Pasha Moore

No, the foundation is the same. There's foundationally things you do that are similar or the same.

Robert Hansen

What would be something that would be different then, do you think?

Pasha Moore

Everybody has different groups that care so much about state campaigns or so much about federal or local or what have you. So that shifts your thing. And then there's different limits everywhere, too. It's like, “Oh, I can only take $1,000 here.” or, “I can do this here.”

Robert Hansen

Is it state-based?

Pasha Moore

Every city is different. If you're running for city council or mayor here in Austin, you have caps. And I think those caps are something stupid like $350 a donor or something here.

I know in San Antonio, it's $500 and $1,000 if you're running for mayor. Then of course, there's federal limits. Then of course, in running for state rep or statewide office here, whatever there is, outside of US Congress or US Senate, there is no limit to money.

You just have to change approaches if there's limits or no limits. The foundation is the same.

Robert Hansen

I guess I should know this, I just don't. Are you allowed to invest in your own campaign?

Pasha Moore

Sure. And you can do it a couple of different ways.

Robert Hansen

Any amount, or you’re limited as well?

Pasha Moore

You can loan yourself money, I think, of any amount that you want to do. Then if you're in Texas and you're running for state rep or whatever, if you just want to give yourself the money, that's fine. Most people always put it as a loan though in case there's an opportunity to pay themselves back.

Robert Hansen

Got it. You can count it as a loss if you do it that way as well, bad debt or whatever.

Pasha Moore

I don't know how people do it on their taxes. I don't think so. I don't know, and I have no idea. I guess if they have themselves as an LLC, sure, I guess. I don't know. I don't ask those questions.

Robert Hansen

Where does the money go when you raise it, if you had to say what the breakdown typically looks like?

Pasha Moore

There's overhead costs; pay me, pay the consultants, pay the fields, depending on the size of the campaign, pay the field staff, etc. You have silly stuff. You have to have your website done, and you have to have bumper stickers and postcards and all the accouterments like that that go along.

Your yard signs, everybody in politics bitches about yard signs. We’ll never get rid of them. It is what it is. The people love them. Give them to the people. So you have that kind of stuff.

Primarily, depending on what the overall strategy is for how you're going to get out the vote and remind people who you are and to vote for you and all that stuff, you're going to put a ton of money on television. You're going to put less money but still a lot on radio, if you decide to do radio.

Then you're going to spend a lot of money, as disbelieving as this is about to sound, in direct mail. It still moves people to the voter box. You get the shiny, oddly-shaped card.

The beautiful candidate’s family in the mail tells you all the wonderful things they're going to do and all the police endorse them or what have you. It makes you go, “Oh yeah, shit, election day is coming up.” And you go vote, “I'm going to vote for this guy.” It really does help.

We don't get a lot of mail these days. So it stands out, too. Then of course, there's always money. There is a lot of money now. And it becomes a higher percentage of the overall budget every year of your digital spend, your email campaigns, your banner ads. There's just so many different digital ads you can do now.

Robert Hansen

Canvassing is mostly people donating their time, so you don’t have to pay for that.

Pasha Moore

People do pay for doors. There are services that exist out there. I don't believe in those services because I think you get a bunch of kids that you pay X amount of money to, and they just throw the lid on the yard. I don't think that's effective.

I think it has to be volunteer-based for it to be effective. And I think some people just like to feel like they're contributing their time talent shoe-leather, want to be helpful.

Robert Hansen

Interesting. You've been in over 100 different campaigns now at some level.

Pasha Moore

It's over 135 at this point because I've worked on so many. Well, it's campaigns, political organizations, groups, a lot.

Robert Hansen

What does a good candidate look like?

Pasha Moore

Look, at the end of the day, the last thing you ever want in a candidate is to have that October surprise where it's like, “Oh, cool, you have a second family that you thought we wouldn't find out about or that the opposition research wouldn't find out about? Great.”

Robert Hansen

We'll get to that in a second. But what makes a good candidate?

Pasha Moore

Someone who's honest, someone who actually knows why they want to try to be an elected official and not just because they want the honorable in front of their name for the rest of their lives.

Somebody who really wants to serve and come in and spend a couple years in the state legislature or congress, see if they can get some stuff done, make life better for the constituents back home and call it a day.

Robert Hansen

Because they're more believable, is that why?

Pasha Moore

No, because I don't want to work with people who don't have a fucking plan. I'm sorry but anyone who speaks in platitudes or sound bites, I'm like, “Jump off.” But if you get a little bit boring and you're just like, “There's this really big problem with this one section of the property tax, and it's affecting everyone in my home county and blah, blah, blah.”

Sure, you're not going to put that on a postcard. But the fact of the matter is the dude who knows is like, “Somebody just point this out. We need to try to fix it.” You want to work with people who are like, “I see problems. And when I see problems, I see solutions.”

You don't want to work with people that are all just like, “I just want to fight climate change.” or, “I really like the sanctity of the family.” It's like, “Okay, that's not necessarily a problem. And it's definitely not a solution.” So those are the people you have to go, “Oh, cool. You want the honorable in front of your name. Got it.”

Robert Hansen

The reason why they are unelectable is just because they don't speak to the-

Pasha Moore

Oh, I'm not saying they're unelectable. I’m saying I don't want to work for them.

Robert Hansen

Okay. Back to my question, what makes a good candidate? Not necessarily one that I work with.

Pasha Moore

Oh, you didn't ask what makes an electable candidate. You asked what makes a good candidate. There's a lot of differences.

Robert Hansen

All right, let's start over. What makes someone electable?

Pasha Moore

Getting 50 plus one of the voters to vote for you is what makes you electable. You can do that. And it depends on where you live. It depends on what the race is. There's no silver bullet for any of the stuff that we're talking about today because werewolves aren't real.

Robert Hansen

Is there a certain demographic?

Pasha Moore

Nope, really not.

Robert Hansen

You got to be this tall to ride the ride. There’s just nothing.

Pasha Moore

The appetites of voters change every election. Sometimes it's like, “Cool, we want the spunky 32-year-old chick.” Then the next time it’s like, “Cool, we looked at the 68-year-old white man.”

Sure. Maybe there's some demographics that are just like, “No, you probably don't have a shot.” But for the most part, it really just comes down to people are going to look at it and say, “Yeah, this person has an R beside their name. And I'm an R. I'm going to vote for this person.”

Then when you come to the very tiny middle of people, it depends on what the topic du jour is.

Robert Hansen

It seems like there are certain things that tend to help. They've got a family, for instance. They’re family people. They are religious, for instance. It doesn't matter which side you're on.

Pasha Moore

It shows you have roots, where you live. That’s why.

Robert Hansen

That's why? Are there other things like that?

Pasha Moore

It shows you’re actually a member of the community because you're taking your kids to school or you're going to the church. And you know people in the community. It goes back to one thing, root.

Robert Hansen

Okay, so that would say that somebody who's an outsider moving into town may be not such a good candidate.

Pasha Moore

A lot of times, no. Just simply because they don't have a network where they live, you know what I mean? People don't know them. It can be very difficult. You can quickly get to know a bunch of people, and they can get to know you. It's not impossible.

Robert Hansen

All right. This person has two families, a rocky career. How do you handle that?

Pasha Moore

It depends on what it is.

Robert Hansen

A couple of months into the campaign, and this bombshell drops. What do you do?

Pasha Moore

It depends on how they choose to try to fix the problem or explain the problem. To me, though, that's a total integrity thing.

Robert Hansen

Do you have any war stories or anything?

Pasha Moore

I don't have any I want to talk about, but I will throw deuces at those people. I don't have time for that. I'm not going to deal with someone that I can never trust again. So I'm not going to do it.

Robert Hansen

You can't trust them because you didn't know? Or because you asked them and they said, “No, I don't have two families.”

Pasha Moore

No, it's just more of just like, is there anything that's going to bite you? You know what I mean? You're spending every other weekend with your family in Tucson. Someone's going to find that out. Certain things that are just like, “Oh yeah.” You take it case by case, but it really doesn't happen often.

Robert Hansen

Oh really?

Pasha Moore

No.

Robert Hansen

Because it seems like politics talk.

Pasha Moore

We talked about this at the beginning of the conversation. We willingly put our information out there. It's so easy to find out anything we want to know about people. It’s not a big deal.

Robert Hansen

I feel like there's some controversy in Senate or Congress. Not daily but very frequently. So I would be surprised if it wasn't a more systemic thing.

Pasha Moore

Most people do stupid shit. I really do believe that power causes brain damage. And why, no, hear me out.

Robert Hansen

I think there's some studies to actually agree with you.

Pasha Moore

You've got the receptors with the serotonin and the dopamine and all that stuff. It's like when people constantly post on Instagram, it's the same phenomenon. You get that, “Oh, 300 people liked my photo.” And they're getting those 300 micro doses of the dopamine or whatever.

It's the same with power when someone's like, “Oh my gosh, it's Congressman Johnson.” And they get so excited. Dopamine, dopamine, dopamine. I think you fry those receptors.

That's what leads to this crazy ego and crazy power trip and “No one's going to ever turn on me.” type of attitude. They literally fry the brain because of power and because of ego.

Robert Hansen

Maybe that, maybe it's something about everyone saying yes to you all the time. It's hard to come back from that and figure out that you actually are fallible.

Pasha Moore

Yeah. But once they get to that point, they've been beaten. People very rarely willingly go home from elected office.

Robert Hansen

You got to drag him out, kicking him screaming.

Pasha Moore

Yes. It's like, “Why do you want to keep doing this shit?”

Robert Hansen

Why have you seen otherwise good candidates lose? Other than these super rocky history type stuff.

Pasha Moore

Sometimes it's just not meant to be. You can do everything right. And for whatever reason, the middle of the electorate that year just wasn't buying what you were selling. There's a million different reasons why good candidates lose.

Most of the time when it comes down, they lose. Yes, there are some that it's just like, “Whoa.” They just really weren’t buying what you're selling. The middle voters, those 5% in the middle that everyone's gunning for every cycle or whatever that you don't know which way they're going to go, their appetites change. You just never know who they actually are.

As you're trying to figure all this stuff out as you go through this dead sprint of a nine-month period of this campaign, it can be hard on that. But most of the time, the reason people don't win, they don't work hard enough at the campaign.

Robert Hansen

It's mostly the sprint at the very end? Or they're not putting in the effort? Or should they put it much earlier?

Pasha Moore

Yes, much earlier on. You got name ID. People now know what you stand for, who you are. Name ID, name ID, name ID. and anybody. And you have to remind them, “You got to vote. You got two weeks to do it.”

Robert Hansen

What advice would you give some newbie just getting started deciding they want to get into politics? What are the task lists to be good enough to get to the point where you can actually go run?

Pasha Moore

Change your mind.

Robert Hansen

Don't do it.

Pasha Moore

Number one, don't do it. Okay, the question is work in politics or be a politician?

Robert Hansen

I meant more of a politician. But actually, I’d like to hear you answer both.

Pasha Moore

First and foremost, don't just wake up today and be like, “I'm going to run for office.” and you've never done shit to help your local party. You've never done anything with your local United Way or anything. You've basically been a crappy civic member.

Don't run. Why are you running? You have so many options to help people in your backyard that don't mean that you've run for office. Again, you get the honorable in front of your name.

If you really do want to be engaged at that level and you want to run for office, I recommend before you do that, you get actively involved in your United Way chapter, your Red Cross chapter.

All the stuff that's very county wide or city wide or area wide, where they raise a ton of money and try to help people locally from school children to homelessness to old people to mental health. They cover the gambit in those organizations.

There's a million others. There are so many different organizations, depending on where you live, that you should get yourself involved with. If you're a church-going person, show up to church.

Don't talk about how much you and God have it together, but you never show up at church. Okay, that makes you look like an asshole. It makes you look like a liar.

Make sure you're a part of the PTA. Make sure you're a part of the Junior League. Do the things that are trying to help in the community first, and devote yourself to that.

Not only will you actually see what it's really like to do things on behalf of the community in which you reside. But you'll meet a bunch of people, and people will get to know you and all of that.

There's a ton of different ways outside of being an elected officer of the community to help your community, which is the whole reason you want to be elected if you're doing it for the right reason.

Robert Hansen

Theoretically right, yeah.

Pasha Moore

Start there is what I would recommend. Let's just pretend that Suzie Q has decided this is what she wants to do, and she has pure intentions. So she goes and she does all of this.

She's like, “All this is done. It's just stoked my fire brighter. I went through all this with these three organizations. If they change this in the legislature, I can make all this happen.”

Okay, great. You want to run for office there, you better figure out how to ask people for money. And you better have some money of your own if you want to spend some of it.

People are always super-duper surprised when it comes down to it that they have what I call their Christmas card list. If you're sending them a Christmas card and they're sending you a Christmas card, 90% of those people should actually be your friend.

Someone that's like, “Oh, they would come to your funeral.” There should be something there. So I always tell people start asking for money from your Christmas card list when you're having to do it yourself.

You would be surprised, though. People will get very upset because they're like, “Well, Don and Judy only gave me $250 after I asked them for $1,000.” I always have to tell people, “Whatever they can give you, get them to give it to you.”

You don't actually know people's financial situation or appetite for wanting to be involved. They see OpenSecrets pinging people and all people getting doxxed and everything.

They have to be ready to go with an actual network of people who can give them money because the first parts of your campaign are going to be nothing but rubber-chicken dinners at local grassroots organizations and the Chamber of Commerce and the United Way dinner and asking your friends for money.

I'll tell you this, John Doe, typical major donor who can make or break your campaign will always ask first, “Well, what's your local support like?” He's not talking about the people who are going door to door for you. He wants to know how many of your friends have given you money. Or if you've looked at him like he's going to be Daddy Warbucks.

Robert Hansen

I like that answer.

Pasha Moore

You should like all of my answers, Robert.

Robert Hansen

Well, some are better than others. But I like that one specifically because I think one of the side effects of learning the lay of the land, whatever it is, PTA meetings or whatever, even HOA meetings, just learning the issues that are around you, around the community can really help frame up how you talk about your campaign.

Pasha Moore

It means discovery, too. If you live in a gated community of your 10,000-person hometown or whatever, you might not know what it's like to live in the trailer park down by the river.

You need to try to encompass the experience of everyone that you are thinking you want to go and serve. The best way to do that is actually get engaged in the community. And not just with your local debutante ball. But you should get involved with that, too.

Robert Hansen

Yeah, the homeless shelter and just learning what's going on around you. There’s lots of opportunities to serve in this.

Pasha Moore

Yeah, don't be creepy. If you don't have kids in school, don't join the PTA. That’s crazy. You should listen to other people and really figure out what it is that's wrong.

Robert Hansen

That's interesting. I like that. Have you done any fundraising for any Democrats?

Pasha Moore

No, it's an integrity question for me. I don't know how the hell you would do for both.

Robert Hansen

I’m just curious.

Pasha Moore

No, I'm a Republican fundraiser.

Robert Hansen

I know some donors do both.

Pasha Moore

Some donors hedge their bets on things. They're not as prevalent as you would think. But I don't know if anyone is a Democratic fundraiser and will dabble in Republican or vice versa. I don't know of that.

Robert Hansen

Do you have any insight at all into if there's any differences in how you'd fundraise in those walls?

Pasha Moore

Asking people for money is asking people for money. I’m sure there's different things.

Robert Hansen

There’s unions, for instance.

Pasha Moore

Sure. You would treat them like we would treat corporate donors. It's not a big deal. But there's different things that friends of mine that are fundraisers do differently for me and I do differently for them.

At the end of the day, the overall thing is ask for money. And then outside of that, how you get there is how you get there.

Robert Hansen

I would assume that unions have a little bit of a different scenario because it's not like a candidate is going to go up in front of Walmart and just talk to other employees necessarily. But you might do that for a union.

You might just walk in and say that the union chapter supports so and so. Like police unions, for instance.

Pasha Moore

Sure. Republicans go to police unions and talk to their people for their votes, not for their money. From my understanding, the unions have general political accounts that they spend big bucks for super PACs out of.

They have a legitimate PAC that they can write those $5,000 checks out of. The unions want their members to give money to them, not to candidates. So it’s like, “Cool. Yeah, come on down.”

Robert Hansen

Don’t ask for money.

Pasha Moore

Yeah, it's not necessarily something that said, “Don't do.” from my understanding. You wouldn't necessarily do a whole big hurrah because you got 20 people in a crowd to give you 25 bucks. No, you want those people to vote for you.

Robert Hansen

It's worth more. Changing the topic a little bit, in 2020, you were involved in the USC Election Cybersecurity Initiative.

Pasha Moore

Yeah, I was.

Robert Hansen

Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Pasha Moore

Yeah, it was super fun. Obviously, from the 2016 presidential election cycle, there were a lot of questions around whether elections were hacked, whether Facebook was hacked or individual Facebook accounts were hacked or email servers or individual voting machines or whatever.

To help assuage anyone's fear going into the 2020 election cycle, Google was looking for a place to put an investment into actually doing a rudimentary. Honestly, it was a little bit rudimentary. They were the money, but they didn't necessarily drive the way things were done.

It was all very USC-driven out of the Annenberg School, out in Southern California. It was great what they came up with, actually trying to drive basic cyber hygiene for people.

Stop and think about it. So many of the people who are involved in political campaigns are retired Esther, who doesn't know about two-factor authentication or what to do if her Twitter account gets hacked. And she's over here running the Twitter account for John Doe for state senate or what have you.

The original plan prior to COVID hitting was we were going to travel to all 50 states and engage primarily with, and this is not every state but primarily every state is this way.

The secretary of state is the one who actually oversees and administers the state's elections. A couple states it’s the lieutenant governor, and then there's a couple places where it’s just weird.

We worked with their offices so we could engage. It was very nonpartisan slash bipartisan. But we wanted to engage every person, every campaign, and their actual campaign staffers and volunteers, state parties, legal women voters, county clerks.

We wanted to run the gamut. Not only is it like all these campaigns need to know what was going to happen or to mitigate anything that could happen from a cyber hygiene perspective. But also every state has a different budget, every local budget’s different, etc.

It's not necessarily there wasn't training to be had for the people who work in a county clerk's office. If I'm a foreign bad actor and I'm just looking to cause some mayhem, you're going to look at every avenue possible that you can try to hack into to ruin things.

We did have some scary scenarios we would talk about that had to do with the power grid going down. Anyway, it was all crazy. Hypothetical, of course. But obviously, COVID hit in 2020. And so it worked out just fine.

We were able to pivot. We ended up doing a training in all 50 states. We ended up doing 54 total trainings from the end of January to the end of October. And we were able to do that because we would do two a week via Zoom.

We were very specific. We still did it with like, “Missouri, this is your date. And this is who we're recruiting.” Other people who had been in other states wanted to participate. We, of course, would give them the login. And they could participate along. But we trained people on cybersecurity.

Robert Hansen

How was that useful for them in that context?

Pasha Moore

There's election websites, there’s email addresses, there's anything that can be hackable that has to do with their individual campaigns that they were working on or if they are Pulaski County election administrators.

Robert Hansen

Hacking them directly.

Pasha Moore

Yeah, exactly. Just thinking through different ways that they can actually be a part of that. So much of what was said from the 2016 cycle was that there was a bunch of misinformation and disinformation out there. I want to get this right.

Misinformation is a mistake of spreading information that isn't true. Disinformation is actively spreading untrue information. There was part of the training that was how to recognize it, what to do about it, etc.

This is where, “The power grid goes down, blah, blah, blah.” type of scenarios. A little bit of the training was with crisis communications because if you're local yokel, small county, nowhere Oklahoma, I highly doubt your county has paid for you to go through crisis communications training.

That could be because you're an hour away from some top secret military base that the Russians know about. The school gets hacked because the kids of the people who work at this super-secret military thing, it's a way to hack into their stuff. There's all these kind of things.

Anyway, this has been a really good program. We trained over 4,000 people. And it was very specific. It wasn't just a call to anybody. It was very specific people who were actual grassroots volunteers, actual campaigns, actually administering elections. It was very specific.

We had an excellent turnout. We had excellent support from Google and from USC. And we ended up being recognized for the work that we were able to do in the middle of a crazy pandemic. That was still so crazy.

You got to understand we were doing the same presentation for everybody. So twice a week for months. And these weren't 20-minute presentations. They were like three hours.

All of us were so exhausted by the end of it. It was like, “If I hear any of this stuff anymore, I don't even know what I'm going to do. I'm going to rip my face off.” It just got so crazy.

For everybody who was in our audience, first time they ever heard it, they were so excited and had some great questions and really got a lot out of it. But we were fortunate we won a Reed Award.

Robert Hansen

What is that about?

Pasha Moore

The Reed Award is from Campaigns & Elections magazine. It's where people go to gather, and it's agnostic and political. It’s both sides aisle. And so they do big awards every year.

There’s those and the Pollies that are the big awards for your TV commercial or your mail piece. But they always do things around grassroots engagement, civic engagement, education. And so we ended up getting best civic education piece for 2020, which we were pretty proud of.

Robert Hansen

That's cool.

Pasha Moore

It was cool.

Robert Hansen

Did you get any feedback from the individuals later?

Pasha Moore

Yeah, we did. “Oh, we set the whole office up on two-factor authentication. And everybody feels so much better now.” Frankly, the program in a different form still lives on.

We're no longer a part of the program, we just did the 2020. We were able to gin up quite a bit of press about what we were doing, which was great. You would think that the Annenberg School, which is a school of communication, would be able to gin up some press for themselves, of course.

There have been people and organizations. Europe and Asia, they have wanted somebody from the school to come and do the presentation and train them. And so there's been international engagement on it as well, which is cool.

Robert Hansen

That's great.

Pasha Moore

They say, you don't know what you don't know. And that was the tactic that we took on this. People don't know what to do if their Facebook account gets hacked, and it's something serious. Who do you call? Not Ghostbusters.

Robert Hansen

How did you get involved in this in the first place?

Pasha Moore

People who know people.

Robert Hansen

You got a spam email from some Russian address?

Pasha Moore

No, it wasn’t. It was a partner that I worked on a project with. He was approached by somebody he had done a project for in the past. As we do everything, it's like, “Oh yeah, you did this for me once. I’m going to call you again.” It's how it works.

Robert Hansen

That's cool. Chris tells me that you're involved in helping him with the Texas Media Coalition and getting a new piece of legislation passed. I've asked this question before of some other guests, but I'd love to hear your answer. How do you get a bill passed in Texas?

Pasha Moore

Bribery and Diet Dr Pepper. I wish it were that easy.

Robert Hansen

Have you tried that? It might work.

Pasha Moore

No, I’m too cheap for bribery. Come on. The good news about legislation that you want to die a slow and painful death, there are so many bills that are filed. And we only have 140 days every other year for anything to even happen in the state legislature, any type of changes to the constitution, to the code to happen.

When you think about it, between both chambers, the upwards of between $5,000 and $6,000 bills that are filed a semester, I guess we could call it a session, percentage wise, very few actually get passed out by the chamber and signed into law.

Robert Hansen

How many, out of curiosity? 10%, 20%?

Pasha Moore

1% maybe. I don’t know. Less than 10%, I’m sure. Don't quote me on this, I think the number is around 300. I don't know. Then there's the bills. Anyway, I'm not going to go down a whole civics lesson. But some of it just has to do with timing.

Is what you're trying to get done something that you have the right people who want to champion this and use their political capital to get this through the right committee and on the floor to be voted for at the right time and have the right person across the other chamber to be a companion bill to this?

They're going to do the same thing on their end with the right committees. Some of it is a little bit kismet. Some of it is just timing of like, “Oh, cool. We know that we've got to do this session, and it aligns with those three things. Great.” And there are some things that are always going to be dead on arrival.

If you want to put through some wild ass climate change ban all gas cars immediately in the state of Texas type of bill, no one's even going to take that seriously.

You have to be really thoughtful, and you have to be really serious about what it is you're trying to do. Another thing, your legislation can't be such a crazy change that's hard to enact.

That dog’s not going to hunt. You can't get that done. Primarily, you have to do a lot of educating, a lot of shoe-leather in the building, and you have to have the right champions.

Robert Hansen

I've been told in Texas, in particular, the lieutenant governor has a lot of authority to say, “I'm not going to go forward with this.” Why specifically him and not just

the chamber?

Pasha Moore

The Texas Constitution, and I will tell you it’s because Sam Houston was very cognizant of not wanting to be treated or have the ability to be treated like a king. He was worried about future governors.

This is my understanding because I obviously grew up with Arkansas history, not Texas history. But he really just wanted to make sure that there was always a stop-gap. And the governor of Texas couldn't just be some dictator.

Robert Hansen

Interesting.

Pasha Moore

I think it’s smart. It's interesting. Everybody has their own role over there. The governor has a role, the lieutenant governor has a role, the speaker has a role. They're all equally important in different ways.

Robert Hansen

Until very recently, I didn't know that that was the case.

Pasha Moore

In most states, the power is with the governor.

Robert Hansen

Yeah, right. It feels more like a vice president, where it's almost ceremonial.

Pasha Moore

In a lot of states, the lieutenant governor is a part-time job and is paid accordingly. Bless their hearts.

Robert Hansen

Bless their hearts. What do you give Chris’s chances of getting this done? And why?

Pasha Moore

That's tough. I don't know if I want to go on record saying this. I don't know who's watching this.

Producer Chris

Oh, come on, Pasha. You got to help me out here. It’s for the state of Texas.

Robert Hansen

100%?

Pasha Moore

No, I'd never give anything 100%. But at the end of the day, the incentive program that has been put together to help job creation, bring business to Texas, keep business that's currently in Texas in Texas.

It's a home run of what he's put together. It's totally a home run. It makes perfect sense. It's not appropriated money. It's not money coming out of anybody's pocket. It makes sense.

A version of it already exists for something very nation-specific. This just expands on that. It is sad to me that we're basically last. We're the size we are not only land wise. But also, we have all seven ecosystems in the state. Nobody else can say that.

We have 30 million people that live here. We have all kinds of really awesome, good things. And we have that whole everything's bigger and better in Texas. Well, actually, it's not because we're behind every state almost on our incentive program for bringing film and television to be produced in our state.

It's like, “Oh, shit, did we forget something?” It's silly, almost. I think the thoughtfulness of the bill, the partners that we currently have and that we will continue to grow upon and build and expand our partnerships that we have in the industry and in the business community because this is a job creator.

This is a revenue generator for the state. There's obviously an incentive for them to come here. But once they get here, they are spending money. And it is a good thing.

We have really the right partners, and we're on track to gain even more of those right partners. And so I feel like everything we've done so far, we haven't misstepped.

I think our chances are excellent, honestly. I think there's a lot of appetite for this. And I think there's a lot of things that have lapsed in the state of Texas that there needs to be some sort of replacement for.

Robert Hansen

Hear that, Chris?

Pasha Moore

If we are going to continue to be the Texas miracle and be the number one state for business in the country, you have to work to keep those titles.

Robert Hansen

Chris, it sounds like 100% to me.

Producer Chris

Well, thank you very much, Pasha. I spent a lot of time doing this. So we'll see.

Robert Hansen

Pasha, this has been great. How do people get in touch with you or follow you?

Pasha Moore

I don’t want people to get in touch with me.

Robert Hansen

What if they have a campaign?

Pasha Moore

Forget that you ever saw this episodw, please. The three people that are going to watch this, and it'll only be three because I'm not telling my mother I did this. My name is weird. You can just search me, you can find me on LinkedIn.

Robert Hansen

LinkedIn?

Pasha Moore

I'm not giving anyone my email or my phone number. I don't have a website for a reason.

Robert Hansen

Yeah? What's the reason, out of curiosity?

Pasha Moore

Privacy.

Robert Hansen

Okay. You don't have to put your address on there.

Pasha Moore

My grandmother always said a lady should maintain an err of mystery. So here we are, as I do a podcast. I can talk about everything I know.

Producer Chris

Pasha, Robert is one of the best cybersecurity experts in the globe. You know that.

Pasha Moore

No.

Robert Hansen

She just found out.

Pasha Moore

Great.

Robert Hansen

It's great. It's all great. Pasha, this has been great. Thank you so much.

Pasha Moore

Thank you very much.

Robert Hansen

I really appreciate it.