Step 4: Staffing

“I launched my campaign at the end of October, and I didn’t hire a campaign manager until January. There were many times during the first few months when I wanted to quit. Getting everything set up, figuring out what needed to be filed, how to find a lawyer, how to find a compliance firm and a treasurer, how to file your paperwork, how to hire staff — with two babies at home full-time — it was just so overwhelming. And once all of that was taken care of, and I had hired a campaign manager and raised enough money to hire staff, then I got to the good part. Once you get to the part where you get to talk policy, that’s when campaigning gets to be fun.”

Liuba Grechen Shirley, 2018 candidate, New York 2nd

There’s going to come a point, not far past your official launch, when you’ll find you can no longer just get by with a little (really, a lot) of help from your family and friends. And so, just as soon as you’ve raised enough money to cover a salary, you’ll need to hire your first staffer. That choice will be one of the most consequential decisions you’ll make throughout your campaign. So let’s go over what you need to do to get it right.

Launching your campaign will be empowering and exhilarating. But then, the hard part begins. As your run for Congress becomes a reality visible to more and more people, you’ll suddenly be heading an enterprise in which, no matter how many people you have behind you, all responsibility eventually pools at your feet. You’ll undergo a level of scrutiny that you never thought possible — and so will your family. You’ll have to run one, maybe two (maybe more) offices — a task that requires a set of skills that you’ve probably never had to use before. And when you’re out meeting voters and donors, you’ll be largely on your own. Stumbling, hopefully not falling too hard, picking up the pieces at the end of each day, and getting ready to start up again the next.

There’s going to be a very steep learning curve. Don’t be surprised if you feel you’re kind of awful at first. You’ll be nervous. (“It took me about six months to be able to say ‘I’m running for Congress’ without breaking into a cold sweat,” Kim Nelson, our candidate for the South Carolina 4th in 2020 once told us.) Campaigning doesn’t come naturally. It’s not always a whole lot of fun — though it often is; in fact, words can’t describe the thrill when everything comes together and you really start to connect with voters.

Our candidates — probably because they are the kinds of people who have dealt with hard work and struggle in their lives before — are quick studies. We’ve been amazed to see how fast they’ve progressed from their first nervous, halting speech to standing in front of dozens of news cameras a year later. They don’t do it all on their own, however. They hire great staff.

Your First Hire

The number one, most important thing we tell each and every one of our candidates about early hiring is this: If you’re a newcomer, running as an insurgent without a lot of money behind you, you should have no more than one person on your payroll in the first month of your campaign. And, if necessary, even longer.

That’s tough advice to follow. At the start of your campaign — and right through to the end — you’ll probably always want and need more staff, because the volume of work will be so overwhelming. In addition, just as soon as you announce your candidacy, all sorts of people will start coming out of the woodwork to try to sell you all sorts of services — mail consulting, media consulting, digital consulting, television consulting. You’ll be told that, if you don’t hire this or that or the other person you won’t be able to function. You’ll be told that, on top of all these specialized people, you’ll need a “general consultant,” who, like a general contractor, can help with your overall campaign plan. You’ll be told that you have to sign contracts and start paying for these services right away, before other campaigns snap the consultants up.

Don’t believe it. In the first few months of your campaign, you need one good person from your life whom you trust, and you need a finance director or a campaign manager who, in either case, can perform the duties of the other job until you can afford to hire a second person. And that’s it. (And anybody who asks you to sign a long-term contract in the beginning stage of your campaign is trying to take you for a ride. Any reputable campaign consultant is going to scale up their fees as you raise more money. Very often, they’ll offer the first month or so for free. Because, if they truly know the business and have your best interests at heart, they’ll know that you need to be spending all your time and resources in those early days on raising money — and that the kind of strategic advice they have to offer on campaigning isn’t yet going to be of much use.)

You don’t want to see your expenses spiral out of control, end up laying people off or going deep into personal debt. Over-hiring will push the pressure on you to fundraise through the roof. And once you get bloated, it becomes very, very hard to slim down.

There’s no more surefire way to sink a nascent campaign than by loading it up with salaries to pay early on. We’ve seen it first-hand. In 2020, one of our candidates — a young, energetic and super-smart woman, running for Congress in a deep red district where no Democrat had seriously competed in decades — almost had to quit for just that reason. She had done a training program and had come away with some good knowledge, but also some very unrealistic goals around fundraising and staffing, which were predicated upon her having access, via her “Rolodex,” to people who’d help her get into six-digit territory in her first couple of months. For her first hire, she’d chosen a recent college graduate who was extremely well-meaning but had no experience in campaign management and budgeting. Right off the bat, that young woman had brought on a political director and a digital strategist, and had retained the services of a very expensive DC-based fundraising consultant who was known to be very good, but also was utterly unused to working with a non-monied newcomer in a district where the median household income was less than $40,000.

By the time the candidate hired a professional campaign manager — a young woman who had spent a few years working her way up the hierarchy in a series of long-shot races — the campaign was nearly $5,000 in debt.  The campaign manager had to call up two donors and ask for a quick infusion of cash just to pay the candidate’s filing fee. Soon after, with less than $500 in her campaign account, the candidate had to face a tough decision: scale her expenses way, way down, or quit.

She chose to stay in. She got rid of the political director and the digital strategist. She downgraded the original staffer to running events, and greatly cut her hours. She stopped using the expensive fundraising consultant and gave his duties to an energetic young man who was only half-way through college but had taken a year of leave and was willing to work for next to nothing. He had extensive campaign experience from summer internships and, unlike the candidate, was a web native; soon, in addition to fundraising, he was charged with the campaign’s digital operations as well. He and the campaign manager became a (low) paid team of two – overseeing a “staff” of 12 high school and college interns and a volunteer field director. By the summer of 2020, they were six months out from the point when it looked like their candidate might have to withdraw. They’d just had their best fundraising quarter ever — despite all the limitations posed by Covid. And their candidate went on to raise more money than any Democrat running for that seat ever had before.

How will you know when and who to hire?  The “when” is easy – just as soon as you’ve raised enough money to cover a first salary. As for the who: someone who can take your fundraising to the next level and who will free you up administratively so that you’ll have the time and mental space to get out and start talking to voters. This person can either be your campaign manager or — very likely, since you’re a first-timer — your finance director, who, when you’re able to scale up further, will ultimately occupy the number two place on your staff, reporting to the campaign manager, who will report directly to you. Note, these are our recommendations for Congressional races, but in a smaller race you may only need a campaign manager.

Hiring a finance director before the person who will ultimately be their boss may seem as illogical as filing FEC Form 2 before Form 1. The reason candidates often do it this way is that finance directors handle fundraising, and money is so crucial in getting a campaign off the ground. So instead of first hiring their highest-ranking people, they hire in order of urgency of need.

To be good at their job, the person in charge of your fundraising doesn’t necessarily have to come out of the political campaign world — though if this is your first campaign, it’s probably better if they do have at least one cycle of experience as a finance assistant or a deputy finance director on a political campaign behind them. They need to know how to make and maintain contact with donors, cultivate new avenues for raising money, keep track of who has given what and when, and have the organizational skills to maintain records in such a way that your compliance firm will be able to do its job. They also, if they’re your first hire, need to know the basics of managing a campaign, which in the early stages means working with you to set strategy for connecting and communicating with voters, honing your message, and making decisions about how you’ll budget your time and money.

Later on, if you have the money to hire more staff, these jobs will become more complex, especially when it comes to management skills. Your finance director may oversee a deputy and/or a finance assistant.  And your campaign manager will — again, if and when you have the money — hire and manage your outside consultants and additional staff. Those later staffers are likely to include a communications director — someone with good writing skills and media savvy, who will help craft and hone your message, draft your speeches, cultivate and manage relationships with reporters, put out press releases and oversee social media. You will hire a field director, who will be in charge of making sure that voters know who you are and hear your message. They’ll identify who and where your likely voters are in your district, create a road map for bringing your message to them through local events, literature drops,, parking lot meet-and-greets, phone calls, text banks, and other sorts of direct communication. Before your primary — and, hopefully, your general election — they’ll oversee your get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts as well. And if your campaign gets big enough, the field director may also manage a paid staff who will implement various pieces of the overall field plan: a field organizer, a volunteer organizer, a GOTV organizer, etc.

For all this later hiring, the general rule will always be: start with the bare necessity of what you need — and be very honest with yourself about what “need” really means. The point at which you’ll be justified in adding a second paid staffer — as with all subsequent hires – will be when, first, your fundraising is going well enough that you can afford another salary and, second, when you and your staff’s level of overwork is so great that it’s actually costing you money in missed opportunities. More concretely: if you’ve reached a point where you could be bringing in a lot more money if the person in charge of fundraising wasn’t spending so much time on other things, then it’ll be time to staff up.

Having said all of this, we want, once again, to urge caution. Campaigns operate at breakneck speed, and every new challenge feels like a five-alarm fire. Your early hires, however, are likely to be the most important decisions you’ll make over the course of your entire campaign.

So don’t rush the process. You have to hire the right people — and the right campaign manager above all. And that’s because the position is one with almost no limits. Your campaign manager will be the person responsible for helping you figure out all the most essential elements of your race — from how much time to spend on fundraising to how you write and edit your speeches to where and when you travel, who you meet, and whether and to whom you grant interviews. They’ll be responsible for choosing what other staffers you eventually hire and for managing them, your consultants and vendors, and your all-important volunteers — essentially translating your ideals and your vision into your campaign office culture. At the same time, they’ll be giving you essential guidance and feedback on how you dress and manage your image. They’ll be in charge of your schedule, essentially managing what (and whether) you eat, and when and where you sleep, and making sure you’re on time for planes, trains and appointments. They’ll keep you hydrated and caffeinated (if needed). And they’ll pretty much be with you from the moment you wake up until the moment you put your head down on the pillow at night.

Overall, they’ll serve as a combination of colleague, porter, office spouse, nag, employee and best friend — which means they’ve got to be someone you trust unreservedly to have your back. Someone — and this is crucial — who is outside of your circle of friends and family who can support you at your best moments and also at your worst, listen to you as you unload and complain; someone you can be completely honest with — even disagree and be angry with — without fear of negative repercussions.  Someone who will listen. Someone — as one of our candidates once put it — who will always make you “feel heard.” Someone who will always make you feel like you’re a real human being, and not just a high-performing, charm-oozing, money-generating machine. And someone who will do all this — for the most part — with grace and good humor.

“You kind of do whatever you have to to make them find the time for what they have to do and feel comfortable doing it,” is how Clara Sandrin, who managed Kim Nelson’s campaign for the South Carolina 4th in 2020 described her job to us, recalling the period, pre-pandemic, when she spent three hours a day in Nelson’s house, keeping the candidate’s kids busy so that she could focus on the task at hand. “We were all kind of in this together,” Nelson later recalled. “There was no ego. It was one team, one fight.”

Finding Great People

“I love campaigns because you can have as much responsibility and control over things as you want to take on. I have never felt like I've known what I am doing. It’s a fake it ‘til you make it profession. And once we realize that no one knows exactly what they are doing and no one is sure of anything, it’s a very liberating perspective. It’s a ton of work, but also a ton of opportunity.”

Anna Brichacek, campaign manager for Liuba Grechen Shirley, 2018; Ohio state director for Elizabeth Warren, 2020.  

The usual way to start looking for campaign staffers is by asking the party — both local and national — for recommendations. In fact, if yours was a typical, high-profile, big-money campaign, resumes would flow your way the minute you started testing the waters. You’d get staffers with all sorts of prior campaign experience, a good familiarity with the party powers in DC, and a “Rolodex” of their own to cultivate for political donations. But the kinds of people who are already well-known to the party may not want to take on a long-shot, low-budget race. And, frankly, you may well be better off without them.

Highly experienced staffers who are used to working on mainstream campaigns will have come up in a system that’s essentially all about maintaining the status quo. They’ll likely think and operate like insiders. They’re more likely to be white and middle or upper middle class, and disproportionately male. And likely many of the candidates they’ll have worked with in the past will have fit that profile as well.

If you’re like our candidates, you’re going to need something very different. If you’re a person of color, you’re going to need people who know how to dress you, light you for a video shoot (if you’re darker-complexioned and you’re backlit, you’ll essentially disappear), and be sensitive to the issues that people of color face on the campaign trail. You’ll need to work with people whose whole goal is to capture and convey the real you, even if — as with all candidates — that means aiming for a slightly more polished and camera-ready version of you. What you don’t want is to pay someone who’s going to convince you that you need to look and sound “more professional,” by which, consciously or not, they really mean “more white.” This means finding people who either share your lived experience, have worked with other candidates like you, or have the mental flexibility, openness and humility to acknowledge what they don’t know, listen well, and learn fast.

If your campaign doesn’t have much money, you’re going to need people who can be flexible and creative in coming up with budget-friendly ways to connect with voters. You’ll need people who can think outside the box, take risks on new ideas and strategies, and recover fast if they fail. They can’t be fussy about what they eat or where they sleep. And — as on all campaigns — they need to be high-energy and high-capacity, people who can keep thinking clearly and turning out really good work even when they’re exhausted.

The ideal potential staffer is going to be someone who will see working with a candidate like you as a fantastic opportunity, even if they have worked on campaigns before. They will love the fact that you’ll have no entrenched way of doing things — and so they’ll have something close to free reign for their ideas and inclinations. They’ll be in on the ground floor from the very start and will have a degree of freedom and responsibility they’d have to wait years to gain otherwise. There will be little, besides common sense and campaign finance law, to limit their imagination and creativity. So many of the successful staffers we’ve spoken with have joyfully remembered this, when they described their first big break in being hired to work on a campaign: “I didn’t know exactly what I was doing, but I figured it out.” This is truly what you need: someone with the drive, tenacity, and quick-learning capacity to help you figure things out too.

To find these kinds of people, you yourself are going to have to think outside of the box. You can start out by trying the conventional route. But don’t over-invest in it, and don’t lose time. First hires are often serendipitous: A friend knows a friend knows a friend. A family member knows someone who does a lot of political volunteering. That person met someone who has a son or daughter — perhaps still in college but loaded with campaign internship experiences stretching back to high school — who is now looking for a paid campaign job. We’ve seen situations where the first friend a candidate relied on for help as a sounding board turns out to be someone they want to move into a more formal campaign role. Or a neighbor down the street who early on offered to volunteer turned out to be really competent both with fundraising and record-keeping.

Keep an open mind. Remember, too, there’s another good thing about all that calling and visiting and digging you did while “testing the waters”: at least some of the people you spoke with are just the type to know other people who do good campaign work. You’re going to want to go back to the folks you first talked with to thank them for their help and let them know you’ve decided to run, so you might as well take the opportunity at that point to ask if they have any names they might want to share. There may be people you came upon while “Rolodexing” who have ideas too — or who might just offer to volunteer for you, as needed. If the offer is genuine, and they have skills your campaign needs, then look into finding a place for them.

Be as creative as you want your staff to be. When you go looking for staffers, don’t just limit yourself to Democratic organizations that have job listings for campaign personnel. Look at online job boards like AngelList and LinkedIn. In addition, in recent years, there’s been real innovation in the non-profit world by people who are really committed to bringing new blood into our political landscape. Arena and GAIN Power in particular now have great online job boards to connect diverse candidates, staffers and progressive organizations. GAIN Power, like Arena, also does in-person (and online) training events, which are a great place to network.

When you write up your job descriptions, we’d suggest emphasizing the basic underlying skills and qualities that we’ve listed above, rather than focusing on specific campaign experience. Widening your search in this way will bring you a much broader — and better — range of job applicants. We know from experience that there are a lot of talented people out there who would love to work on a political campaign, but don’t think they’re qualified to do it, despite really having all the basic skills they need.

When you interview people, be sure to apply that same kind of broad-mindedness. Do your reference checks, of course. Make sure sure you’re comfortable with someone’s level of skill. But don’t be super-rigid on specific campaign experience. Don’t get seduced by fancy schools or fancy references or the perfect-sounding buzzwords. And don’t make the mistake of listening to people who tell you you’ve got to hire the “best” DC insider. You’re looking for a person with whom you’re going to spend just about every waking moment, and so you’ve got to have great rapport. You don’t want to end up with someone who checked all the boxes resumé-wise but isn’t a person you’d want to be around.

We’d urge you to be skeptical as well if you hear too much fancy talk about technology. We love data — and we know first-hand all the good that the newest and best technology can do. But we’ve also seen that if you don’t have the right staffers making decisions about what tech to use, and you don’t have the right people trained on the ground to make use of it, even the best tech platforms aren’t worth a hill of beans. Tech can’t be a campaign’s be-all-and-end-all. Every district is different, just like every candidate. What works wonders in one race isn’t guaranteed to be a magic bullet in another. And all the data and technology in the world just can’t elect a candidate that people aren’t excited about.

Campaign work is so unique that you can’t bring a traditional hiring mindset to your meetings with applicants. People who seek out campaign jobs tend to do so because they’re idealists and want to be part of a concrete push for change. But those who thrive in them — and, very often, get hooked on campaign work — do so because they find the day-to-day reality so appealing. They like the physical camaraderie of working long hours in small spaces with like-minded people who become their family. They love the thrill and the intensity, both emotional and intellectual.

That’s not a skill or exact personal quality — it’s a way of being. And it’s the kind of thing that is impossible to discern from a resume, particularly if you’re considering someone who hasn’t worked on campaigns before. That’s why, when it comes to sizing up applicants, do your due diligence, and then go with your gut.

It’s tough, of course, to get a real deep gut sense of someone during the hiring process, especially on the sped-up, high-pressure timeline of a political campaign. But there are some things you can do to make the time you do have with applicants as productive and telling as possible:

Ask job candidates the same kinds of open-ended questions you had to ask yourself early on. In particular, ask why they’ve been drawn to campaign work and what — if they’ve done it in the past — they most like about it. And make sure that they are, in fact, drawn to you as a candidate, and not just to the job you have on offer: vask why they specifically want to work on your campaign.

  Feel them out on how they make decisions, who they turn to for strategic advice, what they consider to be their greatest successes (and failures) in the past, and what they learned from them. If you can, try to spend time with them outside of your office — going to lunch, driving around, maybe even meeting a few people in your community, so you can get a sense of what they’re like in real life, in real time, outside of the bubble of an interview. If you can see them interacting with voters, you’ll get a sense of how they speak to people who aren’t their bosses — which can speak worlds about their values.

One final thought on early staffing: Once you start working with professional staff, don’t ditch the special people who have stood by you thus far. If a trusted friend has been doing all your support work from the start and wants to continue, on-boarding your first paid staffer can be very awkward. If that’s the case, you’re the one who’s going to need to step in to finesse the transition. Our advice: if their help has been good thus far, if their presence has kept you sane and allowed you to be the best you that you can be, then find a way to keep them on, not necessarily in a leadership role when it comes to day-to-day operations, but with a title — perhaps as a “special advisor” — that acknowledges their value and status as a member of your inner circle.

If your early helper has been a family member, things can be tenser yet when the pros come on board, especially if the family member in question is a parent. Parents are really tough to integrate into a professional team, and their presence can be particularly problematic if they’re involved in staff hiring; after all, no one wants to take a job sensing that they’ll be second-guessed by their boss’s mom.

Parental overinvolvement is often tricky to avoid these days, because a lot of young candidates actually now live with their parents while they’re campaigning. Some do it to save money, if they move back to the district they grew up in in order to run. Others — like so many Millennials generally — are simply marrying later, have been priced out of their housing market, or are paying down student loan debt. 

Your best bet, if you’re young and your parents still play a major role in your life, is: let them cook you dinner. Let them watch your children (if you have them). Let them do your laundry or drop off your dry-cleaning. But don’t have them weigh in how you choose your campaign manager or make major strategy decisions. It just isn’t fair to your staff.

Building Your Team

If all goes well on your campaign and your fundraising really takes off, you’ll have the opportunity to grow your team. At that point, you’ll no longer be on your own when it comes to strategy around staffing, which is sure to be a relief. There are a number of areas, though, where you’ll have to remain vigilant, no matter how great your first hires. One that has caught many of our candidates off guard is just how challenging “leaning in” to leadership in their own campaign offices can be.

It’s  not surprising. Most people, when they start a new job — even a first job — have trained for it for years: in their education, or internships or apprenticeships. When they begin, if the business is run adequately at all, there’s someone on site to train them. And the job tends to have well-delineated duties, with a certain set of hours, and with colleagues to ask for help. When you’re running for office, especially if you’re the underdog doing all you can to raise money and gain name recognition, there are no set hours. Most of the time, there are no days off. And your duties, especially early on, can include just about everything.

In fact, running a campaign essentially means starting up a small business in which, at least at the very beginning, you will be playing all the principal roles. And then once you hire staff, you have to be their manager as well. The kinds of young candidates we generally work with, however, often don’t have much management experience. Their campaign managers also tend to be young and may not have extensive experience at overseeing teams of people. As a result, the biggest problems we see, once campaigns start to really take off, are around management. We’ve dealt with those problems often enough that we have some very strong opinions on how you can set yourself up for success.

Find a mentor. If, like so many of our candidates, you’re still developing your team-management skills, you should really consider finding a mentor — someone in politics or on the outside who has had solid success as a manager and is willing to help you. Young campaign managers should do this, too, because the pressures on them are intense, but with all the attention on the candidate — as it should be — nobody thinks to ask them how they’re doing and feeling and whether they need help. Ideally, you’d find someone experienced in managing a team during a crisis — because campaigns, even when they’re going well, function in perpetual crisis mode. Ideally, too, you’d get this help in place before you even launch, so you’d have someone on call with whom you could problem-solve in real time right from the start.

Set boundaries. Boundary issues are almost inevitable in the sort of intense, around the clock work environment that develops on the campaign trail. At the beginning, when you’re working with just one paid staffer, you’ll be peers, and your relationship will tend to be relatively uncomplicated, provided you get along well and are on the same page. Things will become a lot less simple once you staff up and you’ll need to put a real hierarchy into place.

Our best advice for navigating this thorny area is to take a twofold approach. Early on, put formal policies in place that establish expected norms of behavior and procedural guidelines. You’ll need to have some sort of standard hiring policy. You’ll need a sexual harassment policy, as well as policies to promote equity and inclusion and protect against all forms of discrimination. (Your legal team or compliance firm can help you with all of these.) You’ll need standard expectations for work hours, holidays and time off. And you’ll need a remediation process if things go awry.

And then you’ll need to have very conscious personal guidelines governing your own behavior, and to be very thoughtful about how you interact with your campaign staff. You’ll have to make sure you view your staff as your staff, so that they will view you as their leader and the boss. Some of this will simply involve being intentional about how you spend your time: there’s a difference between having dinner with your staff and going out drinking with them late at night.

Learn to be the boss. For young candidates and, unfortunately, for women of all ages, it can be really hard to put your foot down and be the candidate if you and your top staff have disagreements. It can be especially hard to stand your ground with someone you consider your peer — even your friend — particularly if you’re entirely new to campaigning and they have a lot more experience. We see this all the time, and we always remind our candidates that, no matter what, their campaign is their campaign. It’s their face on the campaign posters. Their name on the ballot. And their authentic voice is the most valuable campaign asset that they have.

At the same time, however, a good boss — a good leader — has to listen to the people they pay to advise them. If you can’t tolerate differences of opinion, you weaken yourself as a candidate. You also run the risk of creating a toxic work environment where staffers are motivated more by their desire to avoid getting on the wrong foot with the candidate than by pushing for big ideas and doing what’s best.

If problems arise, get out in front of them fast. In any workplace there are tensions, and in the high-stress atmosphere of political campaigning, things can get very tense very fast. If your issues with a staffer reach a point where you no longer trust them or doubt their judgment, you have no choice but to take your feelings seriously. Ideally, though, you’ll have some safeguards in place so that problems are dealt with before they snowball.

Don’t let the frenzied pace of campaigning get in the way of regular check-ins with your staff. You’ll need to have some system for checking in with your top staffers, both to provide the positive feedback that so often falls through the cracks when you’re down in the weeds together day after day and also to deal with issues before they fester and get a whole lot worse. And your top staffers need to be checking in with those below them.

Cultivate a climate of competence, not fear. A climate of fear completely stifles the very entrepreneurship and creativity you’ll need as an insurgent candidate. So don’t let it take root. Make sure that lower-level staff in particular have an outlet to be heard. As an added benefit: they’ll treat one another better and work harder on your behalf.

Take care of your volunteers. They may not be trained campaign professionals, but they’re full of energy and idealism and good will — and you’ll need all of that, in large quantities. In fact, if you’re in a tough race in a large district, you’re going to need hundreds of volunteers who will act as your ambassadors, sharing information with voters and answering their questions. Those volunteers are going to put long and exhausting hours in for you. So please treat them well.

Honor their intelligence and their commitment to your common cause. Make them feel like they’re really part of the team. Give them information before they see it on the news. Have your campaign manager get on a call to speak to them directly, share observations and answer their questions. And if a special guest — like you, the candidate — can join the call too, even briefly, the good faith gesture will go a long way.

Make sure that everyone else on your paid staff treats your volunteers with the same respect that you do. In fact, we always tell our candidates that when they interview potential staffers, they should ask at least one question about how the prospective hire feels about campaign volunteers. The degree to which they appreciate their importance, and how much respect they convey, will speak volumes about what they value, on or off the campaign trail. And, as we always tell our candidates, no campaign can work well if absolutely everyone who’s part of it doesn’t share the same values.

Campaign Management Is Political

Until very recently, the campaign world was a real “anything-goes” workplace atmosphere. You were expected to work 24/7 without a single break. You’d miss weddings and funerals and births — pretty much any major occasion that wasn’t directly related to serving your candidate. White-knuckling it through was a badge of honor. And sucking up situations that we’d now consider abusive was seen as what you had to do for the privilege of working in politics. Unsurprisingly, there was a lot of inappropriate, nasty, and downright cruel behavior that came along with this: sexual harassment, bullying, discrimination of all kinds, a basic lack of respectful treatment for lower-level staffers, or who were generally vulnerable in ways that could be exploited, often covertly.

Thanks in large part to the #MeToo movement, expectations around campaign culture have changed. There’s a vocabulary for calling out abusive behavior, and a willingness to both hear and do something about it. There’s more emphasis on paying staffers a living wage and on allowing them to maintain a decent quality of life. There’s also a recognition of the fact that longer hours do not equal greater productivity.

In other words, the culture of Democratic campaign workplaces is finally catching up to the party’s stated politics. We’ve still got a long way to go, of course, and we want to conclude this section with a last piece of advice that is both super-important strategically and as a philosophical imperative. We’re separating it from all the rest because it represents a still-unmet challenge we need urgently to address.

Make absolutely sure that the people you hire, including in senior strategy positions, reflect the full diversity of your district and your ideals. We’re talking about diversity as defined in every possible way: socio-economic, racial and ethnic, gender, linguistic, religious, by sexual orientation and by age.

If you live in a diverse district, it’s beyond crucial for your campaign to have the knowledge and cultural sensitivity that will allow you to truly speak the language(s) of your voters, recognize their needs and hear what they say. You’re going to need people from many different communities to invest in you — and you owe it to them to invest back, by making concrete steps to bring them along with you.

Ask for volunteers in communities where people feel overlooked by their politicians and in neighborhoods where newcomers feel uncertain about their place in the U.S., and quite possibly unwelcome. Make clear that you’re as interested in bringing their voices into your campaign as you are in sending them back out into their neighborhoods with lawn signs. Try to recruit staff or interns from these communities, too. And make sure that your whole staff is educated, to the greatest degree possible, in best practices for appropriate modes of outreach to different groups of people.

Doing this work isn’t just the right thing to do; it’s the necessary thing to do if you want to get elected in a very diverse district. It helps set you up to make the most of all possible opportunities for getting in front of voters and connecting with them authentically and respectfully. It’s how you’ll be aware of holidays, periods of celebration, and mourning or fasting, days when your outreach may be more — or far less — welcome. It’s how you avoid the offense of showing up, uninvited, at a mosque during Ramadan and handing out campaign literature that asks worshippers for money. It’s how you prove you’re not playing the same-old game as the usual white politicians who discover Black churches two weeks before election day.

It’s also how you guard against some of the mistakes made by election forecasters, particularly in 2016 and 2020, who made huge errors by over-focusing on certain segments of the population and making false assumptions about others. Some of the biggest election “shocks” of 2020 came, for example, when pollsters lumped all Spanish-speaking people into one voting category, overlooking the important role that country of family origin would play in how different Latinx voters reacted to attack ads about “radical socialism” — and also ignoring that those voters were deeply divided on the subject of immigration itself.

Having a genuinely diverse staff will also set you up to make the most of your fundraising. Because if your staffers are members of historically underrepresented groups, they are more likely to be able to connect directly with like-minded people who can support you. Fraternity or sorority groups from historically black colleges, for example. National LGBTQ support groups. And those national networks can make a huge difference in helping to drum up support for your campaign.

And now, with all of that covered, let’s get you out of the office and onto the campaign trail.