Step 1: Getting Started
Why are you running? What do you want to do? And why should anyone believe in you? If you can’t make that case to yourself, you’ll never be able to get it across to others. When we first meet candidates, we ask those questions. You’ve got to do the same. Tell your story. And retell it and retell it. Once it’s working, you can go out and see if it flies.
During her first campaign for the Massachusetts 7th, the now two-term Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley visited a shelter for women who were experiencing homelessness. One of the women there told her how much she’d loved one of Pressley’s campaign ads, which showed the then-candidate riding a city bus through her district as a way to illustrate its vast economic and racial diversity. Watching from her shelter, the woman had felt seen and represented. And now she was all-in, she told Pressley, because, as the Congresswoman has repeated many times since, “Change can’t wait.”
That feeling of urgency is what propels insurgent candidates like Pressley —and candidates like ours — into wanting to run for office. The decision to run comes from the gut. It’s essentially a leap of faith. Getting ready to run is where heart meets head. It’s where you figure out if and how you can arrange your life for a solid 18-month period in which — if you win your primary — you are going to eat, sleep and live out campaigning as close to 24 hours a day as your body can handle. It’s when you’ll figure out if your relationships are up to the challenge. And when you have to ask yourself if you are really up to the challenge.
Running for Congress — or any office — is one of the most meaningful and rewarding things that you’ll ever do. It also may well be the most difficult — in every possible way. For that reason, the first thing we do when we first sit down with a candidate, while we’re getting to know them and before we’ll commit to working with them, is guide them in really thinking over in depth why they’re running, and what they plan to do while running to make sure they can hang in for the long haul. We call it laying out the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Our point in doing this is not to scare them off, but to help them be prepared to maximize the good, manage the bad, and mitigate the ugly.
How can you set yourself up to do this? You prepare. And you start by asking yourself some very tough questions about who you are, why you’re running, and whether you can currently handle the extraordinary pressures of running a campaign. ready to handle the extraordinarily hard work it’s going to take to run a campaign. The place we always start is by asking candidates to tell us their story. Your story says a lot about if you’re running for the right reasons and if you’ve got what it takes to convey those reasons to voters. Your story can and also should convince voters that, if elected, you’ll have the skills to get the job done.
After reading this section, you should be able to answer the questions we ask above. In addition, you’ll have a blueprint for figuring yourself out and plotting out your life so that you and your family can undergo the rigors of a campaign and win or lose, come out the other end feeling whole.
“I got into politics kind of by accident. I was getting my master’s in public health, in a program that focused on health policy … and from there came the realization that nothing would change without the right people in office making that policy, and that the Republicans had no interest in helping families like mine; they were making bad policy by choice. I have a husband with a pre-existing health condition, and I didn’t know what else to do to protect not just his healthcare and my family’s healthcare, but our financial stability as well, because I am old enough to remember life before the Affordable Care Act. I asked around to see if anyone else was going to do it. Nobody seemed to really have a plan. And that was unacceptable to me. So that’s when I thought, all right, that’s that: I guess I’m going to run because the cavalry’s not coming. I didn’t know what else I could do other than get mad and get involved.”
Kim Nelson, candidate for the South Carolina 4th, 2020
What’s Your Story?
The first-time candidates we work with enter their races facing incredibly tough odds. They don’t have wealthy friends or family, fancy connections, or jobs they can afford to leave while they start campaigning. But what they do have, every time, is a clear vision for their candidacy, a genuine sense of themselves, and a powerful way of demonstrating how the story of their lives has led directly to their run for office. They exude authenticity. Not the imagined, packaged “authenticity” we often hear political pundits talking about, but the real thing. That you-know-it-when-you-see-it thing. Voters can feel it. Real authenticity is something you just can’t fake. And the vehicle through which candidates communicate it to voters, especially at the start, is their story.
A candidate’s story, in this early stage, doesn’t have to be perfect. (And it really shouldn’t be — a story that’s too polished is always a real turn-off – and every time you retell it, either out on the campaign trail or before, it’ll get a little bit better.) It has to be good enough for voters to get a clear sense of whether the person is authentic and if their campaign is for real, which basically means that they’re using their own personal experiences as a jumping off point to help others and are running for something bigger than themselves.
This is what struck us, straight-away, about the now-second-term Congresswoman Lauren Underwood. When we first met her, in October 2017, she was still a new candidate, with a tiny and extremely underfunded campaign that she was operating out of her home while driving back and forth to Chicago to teach nursing most workdays. She had so little of a campaign apparatus, in fact, that we had to contact her via LinkedIn. We spoke with her by phone, and then flew out to Chicago and met her in a barbecue restaurant right outside of O’Hare Airport. And from the moment she opened her mouth and started telling us her story, we just knew: this is it. She was the real thing.
Lauren Underwood was running for Congress because her district’s four-term Republican incumbent, Randy Hultgren, was threatening to get rid of Obamacare. She had a pre-existing heart condition, and knew personally that, if health insurance was going to be taken away, it was really going to hit her and her family and other families like hers extremely hard. From her professional life as a nurse, she’d seen up-close how many other people with chronic conditions desperately needed the protections of the Affordable Care Act, and from her healthcare policy work in the Obama Administration, she also knew just how many people, nation-wide, would essentially be left without a life raft if it went away.
She was exactly the type of person who we knew would make an amazing candidate and a fantastic Congresswoman. She had the “it” – a combination of intelligence and empathy, a very real knowledge of how life looks and feels for most people, plus an incredibly solid grip of policy. When she told her story, she delivered all that up with a calm confidence that was friendly without being over-casual, and authoritative without being lecture-y. And she had a great sense of humor.
We recognized that “it” factor too in the voice of Lucy McBath, the now two-term Congresswoman, who first ran in 2018 to represent Georgia’s 6th district. On the surface, she seemed an impossible fit for voters in that area: a Black former flight attendant and nationally-recognized gun control activist running in a longtime Republican stronghold that had kept former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in Congress for 20 years, and hadn’t been represented by a Democrat since 1979. But the demographics of the district were changing: more Black and Asian voters were moving in, as were more college-educated voters, and higher income voters of all races. And she had a story that resonated with so many: her son, Jordan Davis, had been killed on the day after Thanksgiving in 2012 in a Jacksonville, Florida convenience store parking lot by a white man who’d shot 10 bullets into Jordan’s car in a dispute about the 17-year-old’s music.
When Lucy McBath talked about Jordan, she spoke too about Trayvon Martin, another black teenager who just months earlier had been shot by another white Florida man. She spoke about “Stand Your Ground” laws, and a court system where she’d had to fight for two years to see Jordan’s killer, Michael Dunn, brought to justice. She talked about traveling around the country, meeting other grieving moms, seeing wounded children, hearing the mix of pain and frustration that fueled her own advocacy, and realizing that speaking out wasn’t enough for her: she had to go to Washington to fight for top-down change. Just months earlier, another Florida man, George Zimmerman, had successfully defended himself against murder charges by taking refuge in the state’s “Stand Your Ground” law, after he’d shot and killed another Black teenager, Trayvon Martin. Jordan’s killer, Michael Dunn, attempted to do the same – and came close to succeeding, but for McBath and her husband’s two-year fight for a fair second trial.
When we endorsed Lucy in 2020, we were drawn to her not just because she had turned her terrible personal tragedy into a tale of resilience, but because, when she told her story, she spoke to all parents in the United States. In fact, she spoke to everyone in the U.S. who loved someone, who either had suffered a loss or knew they would be devastated by the loss of a loved one, and who was disgusted by the idea that our laws could justify – even facilitate – the kind of reckless disregard for human life shown by Michael Dunn. She would go on to tell her story hundreds of times on the campaign trail, but it never sounded rehearsed. Because, many years later, you could hear the emotion come up from the core of her being – and you could tell that she was saving her own life by trying to protect yours.
Liuba Grechen Shirley, a Democratic activist on Long Island, also had a story that turned around making mother-love a force for change. She was a person whose name had come up for us over and over again, after we’d identified her district, the New York 2nd, as one we wanted to compete in and started asking local leaders if they knew of anyone who would make a great candidate. She had never run for office before but was well-known throughout her community for having founded a local Indivisible group called New York 2nd District Democrats right after Donald Trump’s election. (“The only way I could deal with it was by writing action alerts,” she’d later say.) She had taken it from being a small Facebook group to a 2000-person membership organization. She had a reputation for being both dynamic and highly skilled, with an MBA and a solid background in nonprofits and philanthropies. And she lived in a district that had been represented since 1993 by a Republican, Peter King, who was both an avid supporter of Donald Trump and a fixture of the Long Island politics-and-patronage scene. For that reason, the district had long been written off by DC Democrats and by officials within her local party, who had been running lackluster candidates against King for years and years, seemingly fine with the fact that they didn’t raise much money and didn’t make all that much of an effort to campaign.
When we first called Grechen Shirley to talk to her about running for Congress, she said no. She was working from home while also taking care of a one-year-old and a three-year-old. Her husband had a full-time office job; both of them were making massive student loan payments, and they couldn’t afford childcare. Running for office, she told us regretfully, was just impossible.
But then she changed her mind.
“I have to do this for my kids,” she called us back to say. “Because I care so much about them, I think I could run for Congress and try to create a better country for them.”
That became the basis of her story. Grechen Shirley would talk about her fears for girls like her daughter, who were growing up with a president who treated women with contempt, and with a party in power that opposed equal pay and paid family leave and wanted to go back to a time when pregnancy was considered a pre-existing medical condition. She would talk about her son, who broke his femur during her campaign and needed to have the bone reset in the hospital, under general anesthesia — and about how, just minutes after the toddler had been rolled away, a staffer had approached her and her husband to talk about what their insurance would and wouldn’t cover. (A prelude to the fact that, ultimately, the insurance company refused to pay for the two-night hospital stay that the doctors had ordered, arguing that the procedure could have been done in an outpatient setting.)
Establishment Democrats in her area accused her of milking her child’s story for political advantage. But voters felt that both she and her story rang true — because they both were.
Love of children and the hope for a better world for them; the need for high-quality, affordable health care; the responsibility of caring for parents who are ill or aging -- as was a key, life-shaping event in the story of Sri Preston Kulkarni, whom we backed in a closely-watched and hard-fought Texas swing district in 2020 – these are all universals. The desire for a better life is, too.
Desiree Tims, our 2020 candidate for Congress in the longtime red Ohio 10th, grew up the beneficiary of that kind of dream. Her grandfather, a sharecropper in the deep South, had had to leave school after the second grade. He’d migrated north in the late 1940s to work in factories and steel mills, ultimately purchasing the Dayton home where Tims grew up. Late in life, he’d urged his super-smart granddaughter to get as much education as possible so she could go as far as her talents and ambitions would take her. She’d won full scholarships to college and law school, had interned for the Obama White House and worked as a policy analyst for Senator Kirsten Gillibrand on Capitol Hill. But the closer she came to the inner circles of power in Washington, the more it galled her to go home and see how many working class families in Dayton were falling behind – and how many low-income people were being abandoned. The children who were drinking brown water and learning from 20-year-old textbooks. The grandparents losing their pensions after working hard all their lives. Her grandfather had by then died, but his example served as Tims’ inner compass as she analyzed and judged policy measures, backing those she believed would have benefitted him and others like him, and opposing those that would have left them behind.
“He believed in the system and that the system would work. That if you worked hard, you could get ahead,” she would say on the campaign trail, segueing from her personal story to a plan of action. “And for far too long now, so many people have been working hard, but it’s like they’re on a treadmill. They aren’t moving, they aren’t making any progress. So it’s time to make sure that we open the doors of opportunity for everyone.”
We heard her deliver her stump speech countless times, and it never got old or sounded canned. And that’s because it simply was true. As Miti always says: you can’t teach authenticity, but you can feel it.
Telling your story is where you need your campaign journey to begin.
If you had just two minutes to tell people about yourself, what is it that you want them to come away with?
Who are you? What are the most important people/places/experiences that made you who you are? And how did all of that turn you into someone who wants – and is able to make life better for others?
Answering those questions isn’t easy. In fact, ironically enough, telling the truth about yourself, coming up with a way of talking about your own life that sounds unrehearsed and authentic, takes a lot of work. Especially when, as a candidate, your life story really has to be told in a way that’s as much about you as it’s about other people: how you’re like them, how you understand them, how your entire life has led you to a point where you’re uniquely able to help them.
That’s a very tall order, so don’t worry if you can’t get it just right from the start. You’ll have to refine it, edit it — a lot. You don’t need to hire a campaign professional or media consultant to help you do this. But you do need to tell it to as many people as possible — listeners whose opinions you really trust — in a safe and constructive environment. And you need to take the time to make it work and be ready to accept edits.
What if you don’t know where to start?
What we do is walk our candidates through an exercise that’s very similar to what companies do when they’re defining their mission statements. We find it to be a very effective way to draw out a candidate’s values and priorities, break them down into their component parts and then sew them back together into a story and a plan of action.
It’s a painstaking process. We sit them down and go through a relatively set list of questions, writing the answers up as single words or short phrases on a white board or — as is our preference — on Post-It Notes stuck to a wall. This strikes many people as overly mechanical, even artificial at first, but everyone we’ve ever done it with has ended up saying it was extremely helpful. That’s because the process helps you prioritize what’s really most important to you. And then it makes it much easier later on to make decisions about the direction you need to go in, because you can ask yourself each time if a specific choice aligns with your top priorities.
The list of questions we ask basically goes like this:
1. Where were you born?
2. Who are your parents?
3. What was it like for you growing up?
4. What was the district like when you were growing up? (Assuming you grew up in your current district.)
5. What was your family like?
6. What were the challenges you and your family faced?
7. Where did you go to school?
8. Where did you go to college? (If you did go to college.)
9. If you served in the military or the Peace Corps or have worked in government or community organizing or advocacy, what led you to those experiences, and what did you learn from them?
10. What are you most proud of in your career to date?
11. What do you still want most to do?
12. What are you most proud of in terms of who you are personally (i.e. independently of professional achievement)?
13. What could you do for your community that would make you most happy or proud?
14. What do you want to do — and think you can do — that would create really lasting change?
15. What skills or special abilities do you have that could help you reach that goal?
16. What makes you different from other people?
17. Who or what gets you excited and energized? Where do you find your motivation?
At first, we throw just about all the words a candidate generates up on the wall. And then we refine them to about four main points that really define who they are, what their core values are, and what they want their legacy to be
The good thing about doing all of this via the Post-It Notes method is that you have to keep your answers short and to the point. Another good thing about throwing your words up on a wall is that you have to look up at them, confront yourself head-on, and confirm that what you’ve said is really true — a genuine reflection of the way you are, rather than an image of how you want to be.
What emerges from this exercise will serve as the dynamic blueprint for your campaign. Not a template — you couldn’t possibly sound authentic if you were operating off a generic “cheat sheet” — but a North Star that will give direction to every bit of messaging you create and every policy position you take.
When people say that a candidate “doesn’t have a clear message” or perhaps “has no message” at all, it often means that they haven’t done this kind of work to adequately identify and define their core values. Sometimes that happens because they’re already well-known and assume that their prior work speaks for itself. Sometimes the problem is that their message derives from polling and has been boiled down and cooked into words by a team of DC consultants and advisors. That’s a trap that you can and should avoid. Outside advisors — no matter how skilled and experienced, no matter how much they genuinely want you to win — cannot define you. They also can’t have the final word on what will “sound right” to your voters — because they likely haven’t lived among them and haven’t spent time talking to them and getting to know them.
Once again, you can’t fake being real. Voters can tell if you’re sincere and if you truly share their values. They also have a nose — and very little patience — for pretenders.
Can You Afford to Run? (Making Sure You’re Really Sure.)
“To run for office, you have to be incredibly passionate about why you’re doing it and you have to be a little bit crazy. If you’re independently wealthy and incredibly well-connected, it’s a completely different experience. If you’re someone like me, running for office is like having three full-time jobs. Your entire family is involved in it and your whole family has to be involved with it. So if you want to do it and not have enormous amounts of stress I would make sure you have enough money to live on for two years. And I would make sure your family is a hundred percent bought in and behind you.”
Liuba Grechen Shirley, founder of Vote Mama, 2018 candidate for Congress, New York 2nd
No one runs for office in a vacuum, and no one can do it on their own. You’re going to be working seven days a week once you commit yourself to a campaign, and yet your life responsibilities — personal, professional and financial — aren’t going to go away. For wealthy candidates, this isn’t much of an issue: they can afford to quit their jobs and devote themselves to full-time campaigning, right from the start, and they can also afford the professional help — nannies, housekeepers — to compensate for whatever work they might otherwise do at home. Regular people can’t do that.
Most of the candidates we’ve worked with have kept their jobs full-time until their primaries, and many have hoped to be able to continue working even if they win their primary and go on to the general election. But that’s not realistic. There are outliers, of course — Lauren Underwood, for example, continued driving the 30-plus miles from Naperville to Chicago, teaching nursing classes for four hours and then driving back home every day to work another 12 hours or so on her campaign. But most people don’t have the job flexibility, or the stamina for that.
If you make it into your general election, you’ll be campaigning around the clock. You’re going to need backup, and the time to ask around to figure out if you’ll have it is now — before you fully commit to running. This means talking to your family, your friends, and your employer. Tell everyone that you’re thinking of running for office and are hoping to have their support. “Support” will mean different things in different contexts. But what the various conversations you have should add up to, overall, is an answer to the question of whether you can afford to run — in the broadest possible sense of the word “afford.”
Ask your job: Are they on board with your becoming a (partisan) public figure? How do they feel about your going part-time, as you will need to, at the very least, particularly if you make it past your primary and into the general election? If you have to leave your job to devote yourself to full-time campaigning, will you be able to go back if you lose?
Ask your family: can someone else keep your household afloat while you campaign?
Fixed expenses don’t go away. So you’ll need to talk with your partner, family, or roommates about how you’ll keep household income coming in and limit your expenses. You want to avoid raiding your savings to finance your campaign or — even worse — max out your credit cards or take out a second mortgage on your home (yes, it happens) to fill in any shortfalls in your fundraising. Because afterwards, win or lose, you alone will be stuck with that debt.
It’s not illegal, by the way, to pay yourself a salary out of campaign funds if you’re a non-incumbent candidate running for federal office. You just can’t receive more than what you earned in the previous year or more than what the lowest salary is for the office you’re seeking (whichever is the lesser amount). The salary has to be pro-rated, so that you receive pay only for the period between your state’s filing deadline to appear on the primary ballot and the date of your general election or runoff. A number of young, first-time candidates for Congress did this in 2018. But virtually no one else did or has: taking a campaign salary has long been viewed as a no-no in U.S. politics, and the candidates we work with tend to fear that their opponents will use it to fuel attacks against them: that they’re “pocketing” campaign funds, for example, or just running to “get rich.”
We think it’s a shame that more candidates don’t take advantage of the campaign salary option, given how many people would undoubtedly run for office if they could afford to. Indeed, we think that doing so — and being open about it — could be a very positive potential talking point for connecting with voters. (“My opponent can easily stop working for 18 months and fund himself off savings and investments, but I’m just like you – I can’t afford to stop working.”) If you’re running for state or local office, be sure to check local regulations on paying yourself a salary from campaign funds, as laws differ state to state.
If you have children, do you have good childcare? Is it flexible? Will it be affordable if you need a whole lot more babysitting hours? If not, is there someone who can take over your share of overseeing their lives while most of your attention is consumed by your run? In addition, do you have aging parents or grandparents or siblings or other family members you have to take care of? Is there someone who can step in to help take care of them?
It also is now legal, as of May 2018, to use campaign funds to pay for childcare in federal races, thanks to a successful petition filed with the FEC by Liuba Grechen Shirley, who made the case that, for primary caretakers like her, there’s no way to run for office without consistent, reliable, high-quality help. Many states have adopted a similar policy for state and local campaigns, but check your specific state’s guidelines to see what applies.
Exploring all the different sides of the “can you afford to run” equation isn’t just about logistics. Before you make your final decision, you’re going to have to ask yourself some deeper — and potentially far more uncomfortable — questions:
What’s your relationship to money? How do you feel about asking people for it? And how good are you at keeping track of it and being frugal? It costs an ungodly amount of money these days to run a Congressional campaign. Although the exact dollar amounts vary a great deal race to race, for our candidates, running for the first time and in tough swing districts, the totals have tended to begin at about $2 million, and have risen as high as $9 million. As a result, fundraising is going to be a huge part — and most likely the most frustrating and difficult part — of the campaign work that you do. Believe it or not, you’re going to be spending at least 40 hours a week calling people up and asking them for money, only, more often than not, to have them say no (if they don’t just hang up on you in the first place). You’ll be telling them your story, laying out your dreams over the phone, only to have them, more often than not, say thanks, but no thanks – or even, “I don’t care.” There are going to be days and nights where you’ll get 50 of those no’s, nicely or not-so-nicely phrased, in a row – and you’re going to have to keep on picking up the phone and dialing on.
In addition, to keep your expenses from spiraling out of control — especially early on, you’re going to have to keep a very tight hold on your spending. As you travel around your district, you may end up spending a fair bit of time on the road. Are you willing to stay with friends and supporters, rather than in hotels (at least at the beginning)? Can you trade in your lattes (or whatever your particular indulgence) for regular old watery coffee?
The justification for the luxury that accompanies executive travel is that those at the top need to always be at the top of their game. Well, guess what? You’re about the become the CEO of your own high-stress, high-speed start-up in which, at first, you’ll play every single role, and you’ll be needing access to hardcore self-care, too. But you’re going to have to recharge your batteries on Diet Coke and workout videos on your laptop, in-between calls to potential donors. (Kim Nelson, our candidate in 2020 for the South Carolina 4th District, needed to break up call time with “stretch breaks” or quick walks around her campaign manager’s apartment building. When time was really tight, she’d march in place.) And, if you’re successful enough to make it past your primary in a high-stakes, close race, you’ll have to keep smiling and shining with the eyes of the media following your every move. And wardrobe change. And persistent salad dressing smudge from lunch the day before.
There can be a kind of a reverse glamor to it. A down-in-the-trenches solidarity with your team that many love. But the campaign lifestyle is not for everyone. It takes a certain kind of grit — and a good sense of humor. It takes some big-time organizational skills as well. You’re going to have to keep really good records, keep all receipts, and be extremely strict about not mixing your personal and campaign funds. So if you’re not good about this kind of thing, find someone else who is, and hand your book-keeping over to them, pronto. If you do decide to run and get to the point where you’ll need to make a budget, get help from a level-headed, money-minded person as well. Because, once you start to raise money, you’re going to have to be able to account for every penny of it. And speaking of knowing your limits:
What’s the state of your relationship with your significant other, siblings, or parents, or whoever else is likely to be the rock who will take over whatever you yourself will find unmanageable? And are the people you love and care about — and will increasingly depend upon — truly with you, aware of the additional load of responsibilities that will soon come their way? And are they really equipped to take those responsibilities on?
Money is never just money in a relationship — and neither, for that matter, is time, particularly when it comes to time for household chores or childcare. No matter how frugal you are and how carefully you plan, adjusting your work time so that you can make room for campaigning is going to put a major stress on your finances — and on your closest relationships. When Kim Nelson started the 2019-2020 campaign season, she was in her final year of graduate school, was working part-time, and was sharing responsibilities for parenting a three-year-old and a five-year-old with her husband, who also had a job outside their home. As her campaign took off, she realized she had to devote herself to it full time. To make up some of her income, her husband added a weekend job at Trader Joe’s to his weekday office job — and to make up for the time he could no longer spend on housework or parenting, both their mothers stepped in to help. He often handled dinner time, bath time, and bedtime while the candidate did her 5-6 nightly hours of call time and, eventually, fundraising on Zoom. “We're frequently like two ships passing in the night,” Nelson said of her husband a few months before her 2020 general election. “But if you have a partner who can offer you that help, take it.”
If you run for office, you’ll have to 100% guarantee yourself regular access to someone with whom you can blow off steam. A friend, a family member, a clergy person — maybe even a therapist. Your time will be so tight that you’re likely to feel that you have to give up the daily or weekly or monthly check-ins with the people who keep you whole. Don’t do it. You’re going to need them more than ever. Which leads to another question:
How good are you at managing stress in healthy ways? And how is your health generally?
You have to be pretty strong constitutionally to run. Mentally and physically. You have to be able to withstand a lot of loneliness, because being a candidate can be very isolating, even if — as will be the case — you’re surrounded by voters, staff, volunteers and other supporters almost 24 hours a day. There are a lot of ups and downs, adrenaline surges and blood sugar crashes. Some people weather those better than others. Some are more conscious than others of when they need to take a break and what they need to do to de-stress.
Only you — and those who know you the best — can feel when you’re getting seriously over-stressed and are aware of what you need to do in order to relax. Remind yourself of that now. If you tend to fall into bad habits when you’re overwhelmed, now’s the time to admit to them, face them head-on, and make a plan for how you will cope. If you have any type of chronic health problem that’s worsened by stress – which could be any one of a broad range of conditions ranging from depression to arthritis to eczema to migraines – think about that now, too, and plan for how you’ll manage it. We’re not saying that having one of these conditions should keep you from running; on the contrary, we’ve worked with many excellent candidates whose frustration around securing high-quality and affordable care was the fire in their belly that led them to run and helped them connect with voters. Once again, you just need to plan in advance for how you can try to keep your health conditions from getting the best of you.
Talking about stress brings us to the part of campaigning that is truly ugly: the personal attacks that will almost inevitably come your way, particularly if your campaign becomes strong enough to pose a real threat. Dirty tactics are, unfortunately, just as much a fact of American political life as is the need for big money — and today, the nastiest allegations are amplified by the echo chambers of social media. All of this tends to be worse if you’re a woman, a person of color or LGBTQ, and tends to be most dramatically horrible for women of color. All of the candidates we’ve worked with have received hate mail, and some have even gotten death threats, directed not just at them, but at their families. We’ve never seen any of those threats result in direct physical harm – unless you count the punctured tires that Desiree Tims encountered one morning when she got into her car to attend a Black Lives Matter rally. (And the five bullet holes that staffers discovered that same morning in the windowed storefront office of the local Democratic Party.) But they are always very scary, and need to be taken seriously.
That means, once again, careful planning and troubleshooting. You’ll want to be sure you have reasonable security measures in place in and around your home. You’ll need a plan for how you’ll keep yourself safe when you’re out on the road, especially late at night after campaign events: scheduled phone check-ins, at the very least, or, if possible, having a friend or family member come along with you.
Right now, the burden of costs for security lies with individual candidates, their families, and closest supporters. And candidates like Desiree Tims, who in the tense and highly polarized summer of 2020 campaigned in a 77% white, Republican district dotted with Blue Lives Matter signs, will just have to draw on all their stores of courage and resilience.
“They can flatten my tires again. They can shoot up our office again. They can burn a cross on my lawn and I will keep fighting,” she told a Zoom gathering of supporters about six weeks after the twin incidents. “You can’t focus on the negativity. You have to focus on the fact that I won [my primary] with 70% support of all races and all creeds.”
There’s one other important risk factor we’d be remiss not to mention: Do you have any personal vulnerabilities that could derail your campaign? Any secrets? Unfortunate photos circulating from when you were in college? You don’t have to be perfect. Nobody is. And if you didn’t grow up in a political family then you won’t have lived all your life with an eye on always protecting your image. And that’s okay. But you do have to be honest with yourself — and with your eventual campaign manager.
We believe that there’s no challenge that a campaign can’t recover from — except for a true moral scandal, or something really damaging that comes up from the past, such as a history of not paying your taxes, a criminal record, or non-payment of child support. You’ll need to take any potential risks of this sort under consideration now, and prepare for how you’ll deal with them if they come out during your campaign (which they inevitably will, if you’re successful enough to come under scrutiny). Know as well that if you’re a woman and/or a person of color and/or LGBTQ, voters are going to hold you to a higher standard than straight, white male candidates and will be a lot less forgiving. It’s why the candidates of color we’ve worked with have always been so truly beyond exceptional — they have to be, just to play in the same ballpark as run-of-the-mill white candidates. We welcome the day when, like white men, they’ll have the privilege of just being good-enough.
We closely vet our candidates to figure out what potential attacks may come their way from their opponents before we endorse them. This is not a side of things that we particularly relish — but it’s a necessity if you’re going to compete in today’s electoral arena. Figure out now if you can stomach it. And, as a general rule, plan for the worst and expect the best.
We cannot put strongly enough that you can’t skimp on these preliminary steps.
We would consider it a real failure if we endorsed a candidate and they dropped out three months later because they didn’t realize how hard it would be. The loss of time and effort would be devastating for us all, and we would never want that to happen to you. If, however, you make it through the whole process we’ve outlined above, and come out of it solid in who you are, clear on your goals, and all the more eager to get the show on the road — congratulations! It’s time to go out and test the waters.