Step 2: Testing the Waters

“Running for office is not for the faint of heart.”

Allen Chen, campaign manager, Sri Preston Kulkarni, Texas 22nd, 2020

 You feel ready. You’ve straightened out your story. Now, it’s time to figure out whether your district is ready for you. Familiarize yourself with the key players. Meet the people who know other people; learn in detail about the needs of the community. And don’t get hung up if Democratic bigwigs won’t answer your calls.

 From your self-reflection and conversations with friends, family and bosses, you should know whether it’s possible for you personally to run for office. After that, you’ll need to figure out whether it’s plausible politically.

No matter what office you are running for, you should take the time to consider the feasibility of your campaign before committing. Check the applicable campaign finance rules to make sure you are not required to file any paperwork while in this exploratory phase. If you’re considering a run for federal office, federal law allows you to “test the waters."

“Testing the waters” is an actual legal term. It refers to the period when you’ll “explore the feasibility of becoming a candidate,” as the Federal Elections Commission’s website puts it.  It’s a very important time — a sort of pause-to-think-it-over period — in which you can ask a lot of questions and get a great deal of information without filing the paperwork that will formally declare your candidacy and bring on all the legal restrictions that accompany running for Congress. That means it’s much easier to seek advice and get support from people like us than it will be — regulation-wise — once you do file your paperwork and officially start your campaign.

While testing the waters as a federal candidate, you can talk to campaign advisors. You can travel in your district to gauge what kind of support you might expect. You can do polling, according to the FEC, though we’d advise against it at this point. You can even do some preliminary fundraising (generally among family and friends, if they can swing it), but – and this is a big “but” – as soon as you raise or spend $5,000, then you have to register as a candidate with the FEC. You can’t “test the waters” for an infinite amount of time or right before an election. You can’t, in this period, refer to yourself as a “candidate for Congress,” or run ads or do phone banking declaring your intent to run. You have to make it clear that you’re raising money for the [Your Name Here] Congressional Exploratory Committee or for the Friends of [Your Name Here], and not for the [Your Name Here] for Congress Campaign. You don’t have to open a bank account at this point, but it’s a good idea, just to make sure you won’t be commingling your personal and potential campaign funds. If you do want to open a bank account, you’ll need first to contact the IRS to request an employer ID number (you don’t want to use your own social security number). You also need, right from the start to keep really good records so you can accurately track how much you’ve raised or spent.

What’s the point of all these fine distinctions? So that you don’t formally and fully commit yourself to a campaign before you’re quite sure that you’re ready to do so.

Be aware that, if you do end up running, only some of your expenses from the testing the waters period will be eligible for reimbursement by your campaign afterward. You may be reimbursed for campaign-related travel, for example, or for paying for meals where the sole purpose is to explore the feasibility of your campaign.  Other expenses, however necessary, will remain yours alone. (Campaign-trail-appropriate clothing, particularly for women, tends to be a big and glaring one. Men in politics have the privilege of getting by with a relatively budget-friendly uniform of regular pants and button-down shirts, but women are still ferociously scrutinized — and need an ever-changing wardrobe of event-ready attire. So, once again, be prepared. Watch your spending. And keep scrupulous records.)

If you’re running for state or local office, most states don’t have a Testing the Waters that applies. Check your state’s campaign rules for guidance.

And now, with all that squared away,  you can move on to the good stuff.

Take a Really Good Look at Where You Are Running

Your number one most important job at this point in the campaign is to get to know your area — whether it’s a congressional district, city council seat, or school board district. Nine times out of ten, you’ll already have a pretty solid foundation, either from having grown up there, or from having spent enough years living there, and having been an active-enough citizen in the community, that you know people, and people know you, and know about your commitment to the issues they care about.

You’ll have a big leg up if you’re already active in your community through your work or your union, or your children’s school, for example, particularly if people already think of you as a strong organizer or a leader. If that isn’t the case, it’s not fatal: you’ll just have to work harder to introduce yourself, and you’ll have to be rigorous about always remembering to ask for still more introductions. And if you haven’t lived in your community for very long — or if you grew up there and then moved away for many years and have just recently returned — you’ll need to find out if it has recently been changing, and if so, in what ways.

For example, if you’re running in a red district that’s trending purple, check for indicators that, with the right candidate, it could potentially swing blue. For example: has it vacillated between Democrats and Republicans in recent elections?  (The Ballotpedia website will tell you that.) Is there a steady increase in the proportion of its residents who are young, college-educated, women (especially college-educated women), and people of color — all groups known to favor Democrats (though not always and not in every district) and who may not yet have been registered to vote in the district at the time of the last elections?

Individual voter data will have to be obtained by the state party or a vendor, for a cost that varies state to state (or, in some states, is free). To avoid that cost during the testing the waters there are some public sites that provide quality data.The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has a page on its website where you can find the number of people in a state, a county, and even a zip code who are participating in Obamacare, which we’ve found is a potential indicator of good will toward Democrats in general. Your county elections office or Secretary of State may also provide voter data for free, with basic information like party affiliation.

You should also do some initial research to find out how strong or vulnerable your current representative appears to be.  If that person is extremely popular and is doing a good job in meeting constituents’ needs, you probably don’t have an opening. But if their win-margin in recent elections was narrow — or if it was wide because their opponents were under-resourced, unknown, or simply unappealing — then that’s another story. If you’ve been living in your district for awhile, you’re likely to know at least some of that information. In addition, all the basic information about the win-margins, going back for years, as well as overall fundraising numbers are available online on sites like Ballotpedia.

In other words, you don’t need to pay for fancy professional research at this point to get a solid sense of the lay of the land. Much of the information is out there, if you’re willing to dig. That said: There’s only so much you can and should do online and on your own, however. If you really want to get a feel for the district you hope to represent, you’ve got to get out into the community.

Meet Your People

Talk to the local leaders — school principals, PTA heads, or members of the clergy, for example — who have their finger on the pulse of their communities. Find out how they feel about the person currently representing them, and why. Hear in their own words what the big issues of concern are among different members of the community, and what they’d like to see changed. Find out what they want, what they hope for, what they lack and regret, what and who inspires them and makes them dream. What makes them laugh, what makes them nod, what makes them look doubtful, or maybe tune out. Listen for the words they use and the stories they tell, and the real-life examples of the way that policy — federal policy — makes their lives better or worse.

You’ll need too to get a read on the political atmosphere, and on the climate of party politics that you’ll be entering. You’ll need to reach out to your district’s power brokers and organizers and political influencers, too: the Democratic Party county chair, for example, or the precinct captain, or a local Democrat who ran for the district’s congressional seat in the past (if that makes sense — not if they’re running again and there’s going to be a primary), or local mayors, county commissioners, members of the school board.

You should meet for coffee or for lunch with local donors and people who have worked on campaigns in the district in the past — anyone and everyone who will sit down with you and give you the lay of the land. They’re going to be your people; see if you click with them. Find out what sorts of Democratic or progressive organizations exist outside the party proper. Get a sense about whether they’ll support you — and to what extent. Find out what kind of primary challenge is likely, what alliances are already in place, how much money and loyalty are already sewn up.

These early getting-to-know you conversations are crucial, and when you’re having them you’ll see why it was so supremely important to find a way to tell your story well — both comfortably and convincingly — before you even made your first phone call. If you want people to support you, you’ve got to catch their interest and come across, right from the start, as a compelling and promising possible candidate. You can’t do that if you don’t really know, or can’t quite articulate, what you’re about. People will tune you out before you even get around to sharing with them what you have to say.

In addition to calling your local Democratic officials, it’s time now as well to reach out to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) — if you’re running for Congress — and let them know that you’re considering a run. You may be able to have an initial conversation with someone there — or, more likely, they’ll say, call us back when you’ve raised some money. Don’t worry about that. The important thing is to give them the heads-up, as a matter of basic protocol and courtesy. Because the unfortunate truth is: if you’re a newcomer, and especially if you’re a non-traditional candidate, no one within the Democratic political establishment is going to open the door and say, here’s a seat at the table. This will make things harder than if you came to politics with your money and connections and pedigree all tied up in a bow, but it can also serve you well as a fire in the belly. As Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm used to say (and Hillary Clinton liked to remind us): “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.”

The early brushoff that you are likely to get from the Democratic establishment (at least until you can show them the big money) is why it’s going to be urgently important for you to cultivate a grassroots coalition — or build upon one that already exists. Nothing drove this home for us more clearly than Liuba Grechen Shirley’s experience testing the waters and as a Democratic candidate on Long Island in 2017 and 2018.

She knew everyone in her local party hierarchy from the days and weeks and months after the 2016 presidential election. She’d wanted to volunteer for the party then, and to help rally other Democrats into a local resistance group. She’d met the county Democratic chair and all the party commissioners — and had ended up forming her own activist group, in large part, because the local Democratic establishment leaders had all been so unresponsive or unhelpful. That effort proved enormously valuable, however, once she became a candidate, because she knew the local power structure inside-out.  She not only knew she knew every person who had any influence, she knew why they were motivated to act and make choices the way that they did; she knew the details of their history and their allegiances and their life stories. She had enough of a complex understanding of just how the system worked that she could figure out how to be an insurgent candidate within it. She also had amazing grassroots support already in place — hundreds of volunteers who could seamlessly start volunteering for her campaign. That’s why she was able to definitively win her primary — despite the party’s efforts to maintain the status quo by strenuously supporting her primary opponent, DuWayne Gregory, who had lost in 2016 to Republican incumbent Peter King by 24 points.

If you encounter a similar lack of enthusiasm from the party at the outset of your campaign, don’t let it stop you. Despite all the high-profile wins in recent years by non-traditional candidates, old ideas about who’s “electable” die hard. We’ve seen or heard of any number of talented candidates who were discouraged from running because they were told they weren’t “right for the district” (because they didn’t look like the people there) or were “not ready” or “needed to wait their turn” (because there was someone with institutional support lined up before them).  There have been times when we’ve been laughed out of powerful people’s offices because of the districts we were targeting and the kinds of candidates we were supporting. But when those candidates started winning their primaries, those skeptics took another look. They started sending endorsements. And, if our candidates were lucky, they provided funding as well. Bottom line: don’t listen to naysayers.

The people you should listen to now are the ones who can be concretely helpful. If there’s an elected official (or former candidate) whom you particularly admire and feel an affinity with, see if you can get a half-hour of their time to pick their brain for your own potential run. Worst thing that can happen is that they’ll ignore you or direct an aide just to give you some cursory attention. But if there is indeed that affinity you suspected, they’re very likely to do more: share inside knowledge, perhaps, make introductions, and, if you’re really lucky – perhaps offer to serve as a mentor.

This could also be a good time, if you haven’t done so before, to try one of the training programs offered by organizations such as Emerge America (for Democratic women), Higher Heights Leadership Fund (for Black women), Latino Victory (for Latinx candidates), EMILY’s List (for pro-choice Democratic women), and Arena. These are group programs, and as such, they aren’t perfect — every district, every candidate, and every race, after all, is different, and one-size-fits-all lessons can only go so far. But our candidates have found that they do offer great opportunities for networking and for finding like-minded friends. Lauren Underwood and Sarah Feldmann, a then-investment consultant who went on to become the Congresswoman’s first campaign manager, for example, met and became friends at a 2017 Arena training, bonding as they tried to get their heads around “the strange and relationship-based, and very opaque” world of politics, Feldmann recently told us.

Once you’ve gathered the insights you need about your district, and have talked to enough people to see if you can count on your community for support, you should have a solid sense of whether your candidacy makes sense. If the answer is yes, then: hooray! It’s time to declare yourself a candidate and start campaigning.

Before you move on, though, a couple of last words, just in case you start to get some pre-announcement jitters: Putting yourself out there authentically and putting your hopes and dreams in the hands of the electorate can be a terrifying prospect. Virtually every one of our candidates has called us the day before filing and asked, Am I making a mistake? And we always say no. Because we know that if they’ve worked with us, and have gone through all the steps we’ve laid out so far: the soul-searching and storytelling (and retelling); the examination of (and problem-solving around) the good, bad and ugly; the conversations with employers and family members; the accounting of time and lost income;  the district research and analysis; the meetings with powerbrokers, grassroots leaders and “regular” people alike — if they’ve done all that, understand the uphill battle before them and still want to run, then we know that they’ve got what it takes to stay the course and have a good shot at winning.

 And if you do all that work, you will, too.