FM3 Research Partner and President Dave Metz has provided opinion research and strategic guidance to hundreds of nonprofit organizations, government agencies, businesses, and political campaigns in all 50 states since joining the firm in 1998. During the 2024 election cycle, Dave’s research helped elect several Democratic members of Congress while Dave also served as one of the Battleground pollsters for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). His polling for campaigns and independent expenditures also helped elect Washington Governor Bob Ferguson; a dozen state legislators; and the Mayors of San Francisco, San Jose, Sacramento, San Diego, and Boise. Dave’s research also helped win statewide ballot measure campaigns in Rhode Island, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio, and California—in the latter state, all four of the ten ballot measures on the state ballot for which Dave provided polling were ultimately successful. Dave also helped pass major local finance measures in communities as diverse as Anchorage, Portland, San Francisco, and Suffolk County, New York.
More broadly, Dave has specialized in providing research to win some of the nation’s most expensive and contentious ballot measure campaigns. His research has guided the passage of most state and local ballot measures reforming drug policy over the past decade, including ten state marijuana legalization measures, as well as measures to authorize therapeutic use of psilocybin in Oregon and Colorado. In 2022, Dave’s research helped win a decisive defeat for Prop 27—an attempt to establish corporate online sports betting in California—in what was by far the most expensive ballot measure campaign in national history. Dave has also worked with public health coalitions to establish precedent-setting soda taxes in Oakland, Berkeley, and San Francisco, overcoming tens of millions in industry opposition spending in the process. Additionally, Dave’s research has supported the largest land and water conservation measures in national history, including seven statewide bond measures providing $30 billion to protect land and water in California, as well as major statewide measures in Florida, Maine, Minnesota, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Alabama, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, and Oregon.
Dave’s other successful work on ballot measure campaigns has included tobacco prevention (California, Colorado, Florida, Nevada, and Arizona), health care funding (California and Arizona), reproductive rights (Oregon and Colorado), clean energy (California and Washington), early childhood education (California, Texas and Arizona), arts funding (Oregon and Minnesota), stem cell research (California and Missouri), transportation funding (California, Arizona and Washington), and political reform (California, Alaska, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Illinois).
With a focus on conservation, clean energy, and climate change, Dave has provided research on key message and policy issues to numerous environmental organizations, among them The Nature Conservancy, the Trust for Public Land, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the League of Conservation Voters, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Wilderness Society, Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, and the National Audubon Society. He has conducted research and developed messaging recommendations to guide the environmental community in addressing challenging issues like wildfire, natural climate solutions, and “regulatory takings.”
Dave received his bachelor’s degree in government from Harvard University and his Master of Public Policy (MPP) degree from the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. His writing on politics has appeared in Campaigns & Elections magazine and in Classifying by Race, an edited volume on the role of race in American politics. He lives in Berkeley with his wife and two children. As a Wisconsin native, he also spends much of his free time cheering on the NFL franchise that he co-owns with 537,000 close friends.