Step 3: Preparing Your Launch
“Spring of ‘17, did I think that we could win? Yes. I thought that we could win. Did I know how we were going to do it? I did not. Did I know how to run for Congress? Not necessarily.”
Congresswoman Lauren Underwood, Illinois 14th, as told to Kara Swisher on Vox Media’s Recode Decode Podcast, August 5, 2019
You’ve decided to run. You’ve raised some money. That’s great. Really exciting. Now you’ve really got to get all the practical matters into place. So let’s get down to brass tacks.
Get Essential Help
If you’re like most of our candidates, you won’t have the money at this point to hire professional staff. That’s fine — but you will need help. Legally, you can be your own treasurer, but it would be a mistake: you’ll have no one to fact-check your bookkeeping, you’ll be too busy to keep track of every Staples receipt, and the stakes are too high for mess-ups. Once you decide to run, you will need to set up an official campaign committee and track the money you raise and spend on your campaign. As soon as you file your official paperwork, you’ll be subject to all your jurisdiction’s campaign regulations, and if you mess up, you could open yourself up to a whole world of pain, even if your intentions were good and your mistakes perfectly innocent. Most people recruit as their treasurer a friend or family member with a good head for numbers (or at least good common sense where money is concerned), strong attention to detail, and the ability to follow directions to the letter.
In addition, precisely because campaign finance regulations are so confusing, and complying with them so all-important, you should, right now, hire a compliance firm, which is similar to an accounting firm, but for campaigns and PACs. This firm will do all your campaign finance compliance work for you once you start needing to file quarterly reports on your fundraising and spending. You should at this point also engage a lawyer who will look over your contracts when you start hiring staff — and who can in general provide legal counsel to your campaign. Be sure to choose an attorney who is specialized in campaign finance law, as you’ll need them to also look over all the quarterly reports put together by your compliance firm. Finding the right compliance firm and lawyer can be challenging, but it’s worth the effort to find people you trust. Ask other candidates you know, the local Democratic Party or others PACs and political organizations you’re familiar with for suggestions.
Beyond outsourcing two essential functions to professionals, most candidates without money behind them tend at this point to do all the work of setting up their campaigns themselves, usually with the help of one highly-trusted other person (a family member, a close friend; unpaid) who can take over financial record-keeping, serve as a sounding board, and generally provide them with the basic life support they need. If all goes well, that person may remain your lifeline throughout your campaign. (Note, there may be campaign finance rules that apply to your race about paying family members.)
Whether or not this person has actual campaign experience is, in our opinion, far less important than whether they have what it takes to keep your energy up or help you unwind, make you laugh, keep you connected to your “real” life beyond the bubble of campaign land, and in general, help you be your very best. Having a helper (or helpers) who can cross the personal/professional divide — pick up the dry cleaning; buy milk; maybe even provide impromptu therapy and emergency childcare — will be absolutely essential when it comes to maintaining your well-being over the long haul. At the very least, they can help distract you from whatever parts of campaigning you find most unappealing — which for our candidates turns out just about always to be fundraising.
Similarly, if you’re running for state or local office, most states do require declaring a treasurer and forming a committee once you’ve raised a certain amount of money. Be sure to check applicable guidance in your state.
No matter how much we talk about it beforehand, we find that candidates always are shocked when they encounter the reality of having to spend five to six hours a day asking for money. (The dreaded “call time.”) Our best advice on this: be prepared for the inevitable fact that you’re going to be unprepared for how much time and effort you spend fundraising — and factor that in, with some extra time padding, when you start to get organized.
File the Paperwork
For most offices, you are required to file paperwork establishing your campaign committee once you become a candidate.[1] For example, in federal races, as soon as you’ve raised or spent $5,000, you must declare yourself a candidate with the Federal Elections Commission and file the paperwork to officially set up your campaign. Fortunately, the FEC has all kinds of instructions — even videos — available online to walk you through the early steps, and the forms you’ll need are on its website as well. Unfortunately, these efforts at user-friendly communication do nothing to change the fact that the whole system is inordinately confusing.
Just for starters, step 1 is to file Form 2.
Form 2 is your statement of candidacy, which sets up your main “campaign committee,” which is the entity to which people will donate money and from which you’ll pay salaries, consulting fees, and other campaign expenses. For the campaign committee to operate, it will need its own designated bank account. If you opened an account previously for your exploratory committee, you can roll it over. If not, this is the time to open a campaign-specific bank account, the first step being — again, if you didn’t do this before — contacting the IRS to get an Employer ID Number to link to the account.
Once you’ve done all the above (and within 10 days maximum), you’ll go on to step 2, which is to file Form 1 — a “statement of organization,” which registers your campaign committee with the FEC. And after that, you’ll have 10 days in which you’ll be able to make changes to that statement of organization — adding bank accounts, informing the FEC of any additional fundraising committees that will operate in addition to your main campaign committee, and providing the name and contact information for your treasurer, who from this point on will be responsible for keeping track of finances and making sure that all necessary reporting to the FEC actually gets done. Again, check state law for local and state races.
Make a Schedule
If you have the guts, the drive, the vision, and the risk tolerance to run for office, then you’re probably better at getting people excited about big ideas than you are at sitting down and channeling your passion into a calendar app or a spreadsheet. That’s why you need your essential helper — and why you also need to force yourself to do some active, anticipatory planning.
The filing deadlines and requirements for getting on the ballot vary state by state. They include gathering a certain number of signatures, and always include paying a fee (usually in the range of $500- $5,000), so be sure to find out when the deadlines are in your state and make note of exactly what will be required.
Make sure that your schedule includes the all-important deadlines for filing campaign finance deadlines, showing how much money you brought in, from whom, and how you spent it (your compliance firm will help with this).
Be prepared for the fact that some of the basic things you’ll soon need to do — setting up a simple website landing page or an ActBlue page for early fundraising; creating a relatively straightforward website with the basics of who you are, why you’re running, where your events are, how to volunteer, and, of course, where to send campaign donations — are going to take way more time than you think they will. The slowness is partially due to the fact that there are so many regulations to navigate once you’re officially a candidate. And partly, it’s a side-effect of the cyclical, feast or famine nature of the work done by the firms that specialize in web design, digital services and communications for campaigns: they get really busy really fast, and everyone needs their services at the same time. For all the same reasons, their fees can be astronomical, compared to the costs for similar services out in the civilian world.
Plan for that in advance as well. Then bring that same level of foresight and caution to how you handle your campaign money overall.
Make a Budget
It’s all well and good to commit yourself, in theory, to living cheaply and operating your campaign on a shoestring. But your best intentions won’t come to a hill of beans if you don’t have a reasonable sense, from the start, of how much money you’re going to need.
There are quite a few campaign budget templates that you can access online. (Arena, in fact, has a whole trove of documents and videos in their online “Toolbox” covering many aspects of setting up and conducting a campaign, and their materials tend to be consistently good.) Templates can’t, however, tell you how much you can expect various line items to cost, and those costs can vary a great deal depending on where you’re running, the size of your district, and how hard-fought your race is going to be.
We’ll lay out some approximate numbers for you now so that you can get a sense of what expenses are likely to come your way early on and how they add up. They represent expenditures for a first-time candidate running on a shoestring budget in a suburban red area not far from a major city. They cover the period from when that candidate started testing the waters through the first twelve weeks of their campaign. And they reflect a candidate who is being extraordinarily frugal, running the campaign from home without a paid staffer for the first two months, and doing as much basic website and advertising work as possible on their own.
(If you want to get a more precise sense of what a race in your district is likely to cost, you can look up the fundraising and spending numbers for the candidates who ran in the last two election cycles on ProPublica, which will give you access to their FEC filings in a very accessible way. Just understand that, if you’re thinking of running in a red district where the Democrats haven’t invested much in the recent past, the fundraising and spending numbers will be unrealistically low. In that case, you’d do well to look at other recent Congressional races in similarly-sized districts involving new candidates who are similar in some salient way to you.)
The First Chunk of Money You’ll Need for a Congressional Race
Advertising: $458
Bank fees: $51
Mailbox rental: $200
Website hosting: $400
A plain but serviceable website for which you do a lot of work yourself: $1,300
Compliance firm: $5,250
Credit card processing service fees (for political donations): $1,352
Odds and ends of office supplies, ad production, music license, postage, internet and subscription services: $186
Printing: $4,771
Filing fee: $500
Catering and event space rental and entertainment: $2,625
Consulting and online training: $750
Salaries: $9,236
Payroll taxes: $4,168
Payroll processing fees: $174
Travel: $5,058
Payment to the state Democratic Party for access to the district’s “voter list” (a list of district residents, usually including names, home addresses and party affiliations, though content can vary, along with the price): $2,000
Subscription to a voter contact management software program: $2,250.[2]
Total Approximate Cost: $40,729
For seasoned campaign professionals used to working on big-budget races, $40,000 worth of early expenditures will sound laughably low. But for one person, raising that money on their own or with one helper, it’s a lot.
Fortunately, for federal races, the FEC does allow for a way to make things a bit easier: well-wishers may offer their volunteer “personal services” free of charge. Laws may vary for state or local campaigns.
So your website, for example, might end up being the work of a skilled friend or supporter who does it for you at a greatly discounted price. Your initial campaign video might be shot by some film students eager to get hands-on experience. However, any expenses connected to these services (e.g. web hosting fees or equipment rental) would need to be paid for by the campaign our counted as an “in-kind” donation, “a contribution of goods, services or property offered free or at less than the usual and normal charge,” as the commission’s website defines it. “The term also includes payments made on behalf of, but not directly to, candidates and political committees,” it adds.
In a federal race, you have to report all these contributions (for state or local races, check applicable guidance), just like all your big ticket items — consulting fees, advertising, and salaries, for example — that will cost you way, way more.
Which is why you’re going to need to start fundraising in earnest as soon as possible.
But first: Take a deep breath.
You don’t need to have all the money you’ll need for your campaign right now. You’re not going to be able to raise all that money right now. What you do need is enough money so that you can hire someone to work with you as soon as possible. Someone who can relieve you of day-to-day minutiae so that you can put your own time and energy into meeting voters and helping them get to know you. And even more urgently, someone who can professionalize your fundraising operation on a full-time basis so that you can build up your war chest as quickly as possible and have a shot at signaling to party higher-ups that you’re someone to take seriously and invest in.
Your worth as a candidate shouldn’t be judged this way. But it will be. And so, if you want a chance to win, you’ve got to play the game. Which means, right now, getting on the phone and calling every single person you know.
Start Fundraising: The “Rolodex” and Beyond
If you’re a new candidate, every training program and every consultant will tell you the same thing about starting your fundraising efforts: you’ve got to “go through your Rolodex,” or start “Rolodexing.”
What they mean, in twenty-first century vernacular, is going through all your phone and email contacts, reaching out to everyone, informing them of your decision to run for office, and asking for their support. “Support” could, down the line, mean a whole variety of things — volunteering at a phone or text bank, canvassing, or the promise of a vote, if you’re speaking with someone in your district. But at the start of your campaign, it means money. And the assumption that the people in your digital Rolodex have money reflects the age-old expectation that the only kinds of people who are qualified to run for office are those who have friends and family and colleagues with enough excess money lying around that they can happily put thousands into your campaign.
If you’re not that kind of person — as 99% of us are not — there’s no way that, by simply working your personal contacts, you’re going to raise the $250,000 in your first fundraising quarter that the important people in Washington typically want to see in order to consider a candidate “viable.” You may not even raise the $100,00 or so that our candidates have been told they need to raise right off the bat just to have party bigwigs answer their calls. And what that means is that candidates who need the most up-front help end up missing out on a whole slew of early introductions, meet-and-greets, and endorsements that would make all the difference in getting their fundraising operation off the ground.
The chicken-and-egg aspect of this — that party leaders and top donors won’t give you their support unless you hit their highly ambitious fundraising numbers, but you can’t hit those numbers without their support — is beyond frustrating. And it sends the message to a huge swath of the population who really should be running for office that they’re not welcome.
A Heads-Up About Endorsements
The endorsement process — at least for Congress — tends to be very long, and it’s often quite arduous, involving many introductions, many conversations, and many, many questionnaires. This early on in your campaign, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll get many, if any, set-in-stone endorsements at all. But you need to get started, so that you’re ready to play the long game. While EMILY’s List (for pro-choice Democratic women) and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (the DCCC, the party’s arm overseeing Congressional races) are the best-known and most sought-after, they are also the hardest to get, especially this early on.
Be sure to research and seek endorsements from groups that exist for the express purpose of getting people with your background and lived experience into elected office: Organizations like VoteVets, which endorses young Democratic veterans, or Higher Heights for America and the Collective PAC, which endorse Black candidates; or Voto Latino; or us, Square One. If you self-identify as a progressive, you can look to the PACs tied to the Congressional Progressive Caucus or the Working Families Party or Justice Democrats. And then there are the PACs tied to advocacy groups such as former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords’ PAC or the Everytown for Gun Safety Action Fund, or the Sierra Club PAC. Not to mention the PACs run by high-profile members of the House and the Senate; Kirsten Gillibrand’s PAC, Off the Sidelines, specifically endorses female candidates running for Congress, and has been very helpful early on to a number of the women we’ve worked with.
The PACs mentioned here are, of course, just a start. Finding all the opportunities to apply for the endorsements open to you requires time and, when it comes to the most ambitious asks, the right introductions. Which is why, as soon as possible, you’ll need to hire someone savvy to help you get connected. And for state and local candidates, you may want to seek endorsements from state-specific organizations or national organizations that focus on your specific type of race, like state legislative or school board races.
In the short term, though, if you’re not independently wealthy or a tech billionaire or a celebrity; if you grew up in public housing, and are running for office in a low-income area; if you haven’t spent your adult life making monied friends and cultivating your “social capital,” what do you do?
You do like our candidates. You work the connections you’ve got. And then you build out your networks. You learn, you adapt, you change tactics and you hustle. In other words, you work hard and you get creative.
Liuba Grechen Shirley didn’t come from money: She was raised by a single mother who was still, at the time of her campaign, working as a public school teacher. She didn’t make a ton of money through her nonprofit consulting work, and she didn’t tend to have rich friends. And so, early on in her campaign, when established organizations told her she’d have to have $100,000 in the bank before anyone would take her seriously or even talk to her, it came as a massive shock. Fortunately, she’s someone who does well under pressure.
“I sat down and I wrote this ridiculous Excel document that was color coordinated of every person I’ve ever known in my entire life,” she told us in the summer of 2020. “And I just started to crawl through it. I called everyone.”
Her daughter Mila was three and had just started part-time pre-school. Every morning, after dropping her off, Grechen Shirley would put her one-year-old, Nicholas, in his stroller and start walking, and then keep walking, for two and a half straight hours, because she knew that if she did so, he’d stay asleep and she could make her fundraising calls. After preschool, she’d pick up Mila, head home, and do more calls while making lunch. And then, after lunch, she’d nurse Nicholas, continuing her calls with a headset, while Mila gave her a “makeover.” At 3:30, her mother would take over with the kids, and Grechen Shirley would start dialing for dollars again.
“It was thousands and thousands of calls,” she recalled. “And it was brutal. And I raised $126,000 in two months.”
Lauren Underwood, too, when quoted the same $100,000 number by that same organization, pulled out all the stops to make it happen. But her first “quarter” amounted to only seven weeks, due to the timing of when she officially launched her campaign. Through a combination of online crowdsourced funding, the Democracy Engine PAC, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s Off the Sidelines PAC, her family members, friends, her wider personal network, plus a couple thousand dollars of her own money — often in the form of “in-kind” donations for office supplies, travel, and the like — she managed to raise $75,000. “We were ecstatic,” her first campaign manager, Sarah Feldmann, told us recently.
We introduced her to some people — donors who we thought would be impressed with her and would come away inspired. They were and did, and so they introduced her to some more people who were also impressed and inspired. Soon a lot of people had decided that they didn’t care what the folks in DC said; they were all in. Those people then got in touch with still more people and told them, “this is someone to invest in.”
When 2018 began, her campaign had raised almost $200,000 in just two months. Someone mentioned her name to a Time Magazine journalist, who was writing a piece on the surge of female candidates running for office one year after the first Women’s March. It ran as a cover story — headlined “The New Avengers” — with Lauren Underwood’s face front and center.
After that, her campaign’s fundraising skyrocketed. She raised almost $275,000 in March alone. And then, having won her primary with more votes than all the other candidates (six white men) combined, she raised more than half a million dollars in the next quarter. She raised more than $2 million over the summer and early fall. She ended the 2018 election cycle having raised just over $4.9 million in all — and, of course, en route to Congress.
The moral of the above story is: If the money isn’t there, you’ll have to go out and find it. And with the right effort and well-targeted focus, you just might find more than you ever could have thought possible.
There are a lot of people around the country now — big donors and small — who really want to change the face of our government. They’re increasingly coming together online and amplifying their giving potential through strength in numbers. And they tend to be quite passionate in their beliefs. "There is substantial energy among activists and donors currently to elect leaders from historically underrepresented groups. To achieve a truly representative and reflective democracy, we need to maintain and even increase this enthusiasm," Sarah Rowen, Liuba Grechen Shirley’s former deputy finance director, put it to us during the 2020 elections.
You can’t, however, find your people and tap into their networks all alone. You don’t need to hire a professional fundraiser — and shouldn’t — early on (unless you’ve raised enough money for a first salary), but you are going to need the help of at least one fundraising-savvy person, starting off, who really gets you and your campaign — and also is positioned to know the kinds of people in the kinds of places (San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and other centers of wealth) who have the means and the inclination to open their checkbooks and get behind you. Eventually, you’ll need people from outside your district who can act as mentors and shepherd you into fundraising circles in other communities. People who can act as your initial “finance committee” and keep expanding your horizons beyond your own connections’ connections.
You also can — and really should — no matter what you’ve raised, reach out to those big, DC-based organizations (the DCCC, EMILY’s List, and so on) that give big amounts of money and confer endorsements, and ask again for a few minutes of their time by phone. You won’t be asking them for their endorsement — you’re unlikely to get it at this point — but you can ask for advice and for referrals to other groups that can give more advice. You should also ask if they wouldn’t mind perhaps introducing you to a handful of donors who they think would be particularly interested in your campaign. The worst thing they can do is say no.
The central question you need to ask yourself while brainstorming for potential donors is: who is a person who would be attracted to my profile as a candidate? If you don’t know, you’ll have to dig. Do your research on potential donors. Know the issues they care about. Find out what are the proper channels to approach them; for many of the biggest donors, it may be through their donor advisor. That’s why you need mentors and ambassadors who know people who know people: if you don’t already have a lot of contacts, it can be really hard to find your way in.
You’ll find, more often than not, that — no matter what they may say at first — people love to be asked for help. In fact, we’ve seen that some people actually get a bit offended if they don’t get a call. Most of the potential donors you’re going to call over the course of your campaign will be people you’ve never met, but whose names have come your way because they’ve reliably funded Democrats in the past. They’re people who believe in good causes and will know, from the people who connected you, that there’s good reason to invest in you. They like giving, because it’s a way they know they can make a difference. So if they seem reluctant when they pick up the phone, or tell you they’re not sure because they’ve already committed to so many other people, don’t let yourself be deterred. Stay friendly and energetic and grateful, tell your story, and just be you.
If you have a bad call, take a quick break, and then bounce back and keep going — “fail fast and learn from it,” as Miti likes to say. Remind yourself that raising money is what you have to do in order to be able to do the work you want to do for the people you want to help in your community. Remember that it’s a process — and it’s not personal. Don’t be afraid to be persistent. The point at which asking actually becomes obnoxious tends to be far beyond where you’d think.
Ready, Set, Launch!
Once you have some money and at least one really solid helper, you can think about your official launch. It doesn’t have to be a big deal. And it certainly shouldn’t be expensive. What we almost always recommend is launching online, with a 90-second video that’s posted widely on social media. In that video, you’ll tell a boiled-down version of your story against a backdrop of images that convey both where you come from and why you’re the best advocate for the people in your district. It needs to be thoughtful and inspiring. But it doesn’t have to be fancy.
A number of our candidates have written their first video themselves and recruited friends to shoot it. We helped produce Liuba Grechen Shirley’s video in her home, taking turns playing tea party with her children and their dolls, our knees crammed under their tiny table, while the video was shot. She also wanted to do an in-person event, but had little if any campaign cash to put into it. So we helped set her up in a backyard and invited family and friends. Our candidate stood before them in a comfortable yet professional-looking blue dress, and with her three-year-old daughter, Mila, gripping her hand, she presented herself exactly as she was: a smart, well-informed, politically engaged mother of young children with a strong background in foundation management and a particular expertise in healthcare and work-family policy.
She brought a speech with her — an early draft of the initial campaign speech that would eventually be honed and updated and road-tested into her stump speech — but quickly abandoned it, losing her place as Mila began pacing in tight circles around her knees. She spoke extemporaneously about where she was from and why she was running and what mattered the most to her. Her voice broke slightly as she came to the words, “So I am running for Congress,” and the small crowd cheered her on. And, just like that, she was off to the races.
[1] The following is not meant to constitute legal advice — always consult with a lawyer for questions regarding FEC regulation or state campaign law.
[2]This was the cost in 2018 for three months of service in a particular district for a basic-level subscription to NGP Van’s VoteBuilder, which was the software program used by just about all Democratic campaigns at that time. There are other options now.