Beyond Winning
“How can we win a stronger country and a better democracy and build a bigger table that is inclusive, if we don’t allow everyone to sit at that table? To feel like they are truly part of the change? To really bring their values and their ideas to policy? We will not ever achieve it unless we diversify those tables, not just by race and gender, [but] by economic background, geographic region, demographics. Everyone has to be at that table.
Desiree Tims, 2020 candidate for Ohio 10th
Election Day isn’t an endpoint.
If you win, it will be a new beginning. After just a few days, you’ll make the shift from campaign to governing mode. If you ran for federal office, you’ll wrap up your campaign, say your grateful good-byes, start hiring Hill office staff and — believe it or not — start fundraising again for your first re-election campaign. You’ll have to start getting ready to move, at least part-time, to Washington, D.C. You’ll brush up on policy, and you’ll start to learn what you can about congressional procedure.
All of this will happen very fast and is likely to be really overwhelming. Our advice: be sure to pause to register the moment and stay grounded. Carve out some time to revisit your mission statement. Reconnect with the values and priorities that brought you this far. Picture the people you met on the campaign trail — they will be your anchor.
If you don’t win your election — and the vast majority of first-time candidates do not — you’ll be facing a new beginning too, albeit one that hurts a lot, at least for a while. The exhaustion you’ve kept at bay through sheer adrenaline will hit you all at once, along with a whole mess of unwelcome emotion.
Our advice again: if you find yourself craving rest and family time, grab them. But don’t lay low for too long. Your campaign may have ended on election day, but your work — the drive for change that got you up and running in the first place — isn’t going to go away. That’s why you too need to take the time to reckon and reassess: what’s the best way now to continue what you’ve begun? What have you learned about the political landscape, about your district and yourself that needs to be taken into account as you figure out the way forward?
We hope that, win or lose, when you look in the mirror post-election, you'll be able to see what we see in each of our candidates, no matter what the outcome of their particular race: someone who, simply by stepping up and being themselves, has changed the face of American politics. Someone who brought a different perspective to debates about policy — channeling the voices of thousands, if not millions, of people who previously felt like they weren’t heard at all. Someone who broke down barriers. Demonstrated new faith in American voters and new ways of reaching and connecting with them. Who chipped away at old party certainties about what “winnable” looks like and who the “right” candidate is and can be. In sum: someone who redefined the possible. And who, by opening the gates for others to follow, scored big wins that will reverberate far beyond the outcome of any individual election cycle.
We can understand that all this might sound like so many nice words to you. But we’ve seen the scenario play out in real life, over and over again.
Liuba Grechen Shirley lost her race to unseat Peter King in 2018, but her campaign nonetheless scored some very big wins: Grechen Shirley came so close to winning that King decided not to run for re-election the following cycle, depriving the Republican party of one of its most powerful and long-entrenched right-wing leaders. And, on an even larger scale, she changed the electoral landscape for working parents, breaking down the chief barrier that, in the past, blocked a great many from even trying to run for office: the sky-high cost of childcare. After she successfully petitioned the Federal Elections Commission to allow federal candidates to spend campaign funds on childcare, eight other candidates for Congress reported babysitting and childcare as campaign expenses, and a number of states began considering similar legislation, sometimes with bipartisan support. She then kept the momentum going by founding her own PAC, Vote Mama, which as of this writing had helped 43 mother-candidates win offices ranging from school boards to city councils, and state legislatures to the U.S. Congress.
Desiree Tims and Candace Valenzuela lost their respective races for the Ohio 10th and the Texas 24th in 2020. Yet they also took districts formerly written off by national Democrats as “hopeless” to promising “Red to Blue” status. More important still: they smashed key political stereotypes.
Tims, a Black woman running in a 77% white district, handily beat a white man, Eric Moyer, in her primary, receiving 70% of the vote with equal support from voters of all races. Valenzuela was part of a vanguard of high-profile Texas Democrats (along with our other Texas candidates Sri Preston Kulkarni and Gina Ortiz Jones) who aimed not just to win seats away from Republicans, but also to dismantle the long-held belief by leaders within their own party that “immigrants don’t vote.” By inspiring a groundswell of grassroots activity, their campaigns succeeded in changing the whole look, tone and operation of party organizing in their state. They engaged thousands of new people from communities of color that had never felt like they had a voice in Texas politics before, and they empowered those people to keep the work going long after Election Day. As a result, when the national party comes around again in 2022, Valenzuela told us in a conference call with supporters during the summer of 2020, they’ll find a freshly trained and invigorated force of Democratic political actors on the ground, ready to lead.
“We’re training young people,” she explained. “We’re training them in campaign finance so that they know how to have their own campaigns later on, or if they’re thinking about becoming the next generation of campaign staff. We’re basically trying to make this process about teaching people in the community to organize. We’re trying to build a Democratic infrastructure, and it’s happening all over Texas.”
Our Biggest Win: Empowering You
Square One started with a simple belief: if we could discover and support young, diverse, bold candidates — real people running for the right reasons — then we could elect Democrats in every corner of the country and create a stronger, more representative democracy. Since day one, we’ve never swayed from that view, because with time we’ve only grown more certain that it’s true.
In the coming years, we want to see more talented Democrats running for the right reasons in every single district all across the country. We want to see them daring to run in the most heavily Republican areas, even in utterly impossible-seeming places where Democrats haven’t won for many decades. We want them to have the means to take big chances and the support to hang in, even if it means running multiple times again.
That’s because if your goal is to profoundly change the face — and the functioning — of America’s political leadership, you can’t do it in one election cycle. You have to take the long view. You have to name, face, and start to dismantle the sorts of structural impediments that keep regular people of all backgrounds and from all communities from running for office. And you have to build a pipeline so that those people can stay in the game long enough to make their way to Washington, D.C.
For us, the biggest win of all would be for our work to one day become unnecessary. We’d love to see so many women, people of color, LGBTQ candidates and other now-non-traditional candidates running for and winning office that the whole question of fair representation would be a thing of the past. To see such a shake-up that candidates who weren’t rich and well-connected wouldn’t need us.
That day — however distant — will come. Huge progress has already been made in recent years. But there’s a whole lot more work to be done. We’re doubling down.
And we hope that, with this guide in hand, you’re feeling ready to get to work, too.