Welcome back to the Lincoln Project. I'm your host, Reed Gaillan. Today I'm joined by

political consultant and communications strategist Bill Burton. Bill was deputy press secretary

and special assistant to the president under Barack Obama from 2009 to 2011. He's now

the founder and president of Bryson Gillette, a minority-owned political and strategic communications

firm in Los Angeles and throughout California. Bill also holds the unique claim to fame

for being the first White House employee to have an official Twitter account. Bill Burton,

thanks for joining me today. It's a real pleasure to be with you today.

Alright, so Bill, before we get into it, I just want to give a little bit more about your

background. So you served as press secretary for Congressman Bill Luther from Minnesota

and legendary senator from Iowa, Tom Harkin. You served as communications director for the

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006 and worked on the campaigns of Dick

Epphardt, John Kerry, and obviously then Senator Barack Obama. You were also co-founder of

the massive Democratic Super PAC, Priorities USA. So a couple things I want to talk about.

First is, you know, we have prided ourselves on being an organization that sort of excused

traditional research, both polling and focus groups, quantitative and qualitative. But I

know that that's something you keep an eye on. So as you're looking out from your

perch out west, looking back east and looking at the country, are there any polling trends

you're seeing that, you know, the folks that are listening, you think would be interesting?

You know, the thing that is surprising to me is that when you look at polls, particularly

in some of these mayoral races, coming out of the dumb Trump presidency, a very high

testing point for voters right now is competence and the ability to actually get things done

in government and not get caught up in all the partisanship and actually run things well.

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