Step 5: Getting Out There

“An effective campaign is being on the ground, boots on the ground, engaging with your communities. Going to the parts of the district where people feel left out, where people feel like their voice is not being heard. It’s not about the yard sign. It’s not about the buttons. It’s not about the things that you try to sell online. It’s about one-on-one relationship building. Letting people know what’s important to you and what you believe in. It might be old-fashioned, but it works great.”

 Congresswoman Lucy McBath, Georgia 6th

If you want people to vote for you, they have to know who you are. For that to happen, you’ve got to get out into the community. That means meeting voters where they are, and learning what’s on their minds, so that you can really and truly be able to speak their language.

We will stake our reputations on this: There is nothing that replicates retail politics. No ad, no event, no media coverage can compete with the vote-building power of showing up anywhere and everywhere people in your district tend to congregate and talking to them. In the months to come, that’s where you have to be: in shopping centers on the weekend, at county fairs, at farmer’s markets; local sports events, PTA meetings, Fourth of July parades, church cookouts, firehouse fundraisers, fall festivals, tree lightings, fish fries, flea markets, holiday markets, pancake breakfasts, outdoor concerts, county board meetings. Football games, graduations, the opening of a new senior center. Your local Women’s March. Any parade or holiday that seems appropriate.

Whenever you meet people in these situations, you’ll need to introduce yourself, shake hands (if it’s safe, of course), say you’re running for Congress (or whichever office you’re running for), and make small talk — in the course of which you’ll listen to them, and try to get a sense of what’s on their minds and give them a sense of what’s on yours. You should have someone with you gathering names and email addresses and handing out flyers for upcoming campaign events along with some very basic campaign literature that has a short version of your bio, a list of your policy priorities and — just as important — how to support your campaign.

You can’t count on getting the media to do any of this work for you. You almost definitely are not going to get reporters to cover your campaign (“earned media” as people say in politics) so early on. You also, early in your campaign, should not be spending your precious campaign dollars on “paid media” (advertising) whether on the radio or TV or via the newest and sparkliest form of online campaign advertising.

The sparkle won’t serve you just yet. You need first to build up name recognition. And if you’re not in front of voters – interacting with them in old-fashioned, face-to-face ways, you’re never going to build the momentum you need to win. Showing up for voters is important in all political races, but particularly in elections for the United States House of Representatives, where people really do expect those they vote for to, well, represent them. And we know from years of experience that TV is not an effective means of voter contact — at least not until the later stages for a Congressional campaign. It’s particularly ineffective early on for candidates of color, who are not well-served by voters first encountering them via TV or small screens. That’s because when voters encounter a Black or brown candidate for the first time on screen, it activates all their conscious and unconscious racial biases. It also fixes the candidate in voters’ minds as “the Black [or Latinx or Asian] candidate.”  If they meet the candidate for the first time in person, however, they’re more likely to simply view them as “the candidate.”

We feel so strongly about this that we’ll repeat it: no matter how many times people tell you that you need to pay for ads in your early months, because “everyone knows” that it’s the way to win elections, don’t listen. If you don’t get in front of voters and meet them where they are, you’ll never have a chance. And while there are many ways to meet voters where they are, the single most impactful way is by canvassing — knocking on doors.

Finding Voters

Going out to meet your voters is a whole lot easier if you know who they are and where to find them. The place to start is your district’s voter list.

Every state’s board of elections compiles and maintains a state-wide voter registration database, which usually includes registered voters’ names, addresses and phone numbers, plus information indicating whether or not they showed up to vote in prior elections. In some states, you can access that database directly; in most, you cannot. In the latter case, the way that candidates typically get the information is through the state Democratic Party, for a fee.

You’ll use your voter list both to find out where your likely voters live and also to help figure out how and where to find the votes you’ll need in order to win. If you’re running in a very tight race, as our candidates do, then your ability to ultimately win in your general election is going to come down to how you perform among a very specific number of voters. You’ll figure out that number early on when you’re researching the district by finding out, based on voting records, how many voting-age and voting-eligible people there are in the district, how many consistently vote Republican and how many consistently vote Democratic, and how big the pool of people left over is.  Those people — the district residents who fill the “gap” between reliable Republican and reliable Democratic voters — constitute your “persuasion universe.” You’ll need to get a majority of them to vote for you in order to win your district.

What you believe is the best way to win over those voters will determine your campaign strategy. You can put your energy into trying to convince moderate swing voters. You can raise your vote totals by inspiring “latent” voters — registered Democrats and Independents who haven’t been motivated enough to vote in recent elections. And you can expand your electorate by registering new voters.

Which road you take is partly determined by political philosophy and partly based on informed judgments of who you believe the people in your “persuasion universe” to be. In Lauren Underwood’s 2018 race, for example, there wasn’t so much a need to register more voters in the district as there was to reach the larger numbers of Independent voters who had been sitting out recent Congressional elections. For Lucy McBath that same year, however, increased voter registration made an enormous difference.

Making those informed decisions, however, can be very complicated. For one thing, you have to be careful when you create your projections of who’s likely to vote based on voter performance in past elections: turnout numbers can vary a great deal depending on whether you’re looking at a presidential election year (much higher turnout) or a midterm or off-year election, whether there was a compelling candidate on the party ballot, and even the weather on election day.

Connecting in the Field

Once you have the information you need to find your voters, you can start canvassing. As the candidate, you’ll obviously be the most important person to go door to door. But one person can’t knock on every door in a whole district. Eventually, you’re going to have staffers and volunteers doing it as well. You’ll need a field operation — first to bring your name and campaign literature to people’s doors, then to answer their questions, invite them to events and seek their engagement, and then to get out the vote for your primary and — if you win your primary — the general election. If your fundraising goes well, you’ll hire a field director for this and eventually — if you can afford it — a field staff. Early on, though, it’ll be on you and your campaign manager to devise ways to make the most impactful connections with the greatest possible number of people in the most efficient manner. And that will mean, as with fundraising, being really, really smart about building and mobilizing your personal networks — and then getting everybody in those networks to do the same.

One of the best ways to do this is to get your friends and supporters — preferably people who know you pretty well and who have a sizeable network of contacts — to host house parties: casual gatherings in their homes where you’ll mix and mingle, give a quick and easy version of your evolving campaign stump speech, talk about your life and your vision, and, of course, ask for money. These house parties don’t have to be any particular size, or to happen at any special time of day, and they certainly don’t need to be anything fancy. What they should be is warm and friendly, small enough to allow for real back-and-forth conversation, unintimidating and fun.

You’re not just hoping to gain votes or even dollars at these events (though both would be great). You want to pick up messengers and volunteers. People who will have such a great time meeting you that they’ll tell all their friends about you, maybe host their own house party for you and invite a whole other group of people who can eventually knock on doors, write postcards, make phone calls, and help in every way possible to get out the vote. In sum, you’re hoping to inspire real personal investment from the people that you meet — because that’s what’s going to give your campaign energy and life long-term.

There’s a kind of “magic” that makes all this come together: your special ability to just be you. First-time, non-traditional candidates have one very powerful advantage when it comes to connecting with voters: they pretty much have no choice but to be “authentic.” They can’t afford expensive image consultants and stylists. They can’t pay to use polling to predetermine every word and idea that comes out of their mouths. They come to their campaigns directly from lives that, hopefully, look very much like their constituents’. And as they grow and evolve from concerned citizens into candidates, they improve in real time, learning how to campaign effectively while voters learn about them.

In a sense, you’ll have no choice but to let this low-budget authenticity carry over to all your campaign events. You most likely won’t be able to afford high-production value, camera-ringed, stadium-filling (or even high school gym-filling) rallies, at least at first. That’s fine — because you can make low-budget events work for you. Doing free and friendly house parties rather than $1,000-a-plate dinners is a great way to drive home what you’re really about (and if you have a signature dish to add to the potlucks, it’s sure to help you be remembered). If you grew up in the district you’re running in, you’ll have real, concrete connections to places in your community — an elementary school, a house of worship, a House of Pancakes — where you can bring people together and share real memories.

As always, the most important thing is to be true to yourself. And yet, you do have to carry out a funny kind of balancing act. You’ll be talking about yourself — your life, your way of being, your experiences — but all with the goal of highlighting the points of commonality that you have with the people you’re now hoping to represent. Bringing together the “public you” and the “private you” in a way that makes sense and sounds real isn’t necessarily easy — no matter how genuine you are. Hannah Rosenzweig, the director and producer of the 2020 documentary Surge, and a campaign ad-maker who specializes in working with untraditional candidates, has a good way of putting this into words: “It takes a while to find who you are as a candidate and to know how to ‘present’ to the world as that person,” she told us. “And 'that person' has to be a combination of your true self and this new role you’ve taken on.”

Kim Nelson, our 2020 candidate for the South Carolina 4th, dealt with the challenge of self-presentation by very intentionally facing it head on — and was able to demonstrate both her specialized expertise and her regular-mom empathy in the process. In many ways, she was a misfit for her district: a progressive Democrat running for a longtime red seat, a recent Masters of Public Health graduate who didn’t spend a whole lot of time on her clothes and her hair, running in a part of the South where women usually opted for a more high-maintenance look. She frequently encountered men — particularly older men — who took issue with the leather jacket she wore in her official candidate photo and were “horrified,” as she put it to us, by the sight of her naturally curly hair on the campaign trail. But she stuck with her look — for reasons that went way beyond aesthetics. "There's no visual shorthand for women to communicate that they're tough and hard-working,” she told us. “That language doesn't exist, and so we created our own."

One of her biggest personal struggles as a candidate, early on, was balancing the demands of fundraising and campaigning with her desire to be with her kids. Adding campaign events to the mix could have meant way more time apart. Instead, her campaign team brought them along — and made the events family-friendly so that other parents could do the same. Whenever possible, they held them in locations where kids could safely run around, like public parks or outdoors at breweries. Her staff set up children’s activities, like pumpkin-painting, or making Valentine-cards for seniors. They’d put out juice boxes and snacks — and they marketed the events directly to parents’ groups on Facebook. This became a great voter outreach technique: the promise, for parents, of having a little time to pursue their interests uninterruptedly, without having to leave their children at home. (It helped that campaign manager Clara Sandrin had formerly been a camp counselor, was full of ideas, and didn’t think it was beneath her to get her hands dirty doing arts and crafts with the children.)

Nelson also held low-budget happy hours and coffee hours in popular local cafés and restaurants, spreading the word by social media that she’d be hanging out for a while in this or that spot, and inviting people to stop by and say hi. When the coronavirus hit her area — the very week that her campaign was set to launch its field operation — her volunteers quickly regrouped, stayed home, and called local senior citizens, asking how they were doing and seeing if they needed help. Uncomfortable about asking people for money at a time of massive layoffs, the campaign suspended call time, and Nelson and her staff joined the volunteer efforts to reach isolated elderly people, too.

With a dearth of good information coming from her state, Nelson turned her campaign website into a public health resource where district residents could track local cases, find links to reliable information, and find instructions for staying safe, with resources both in English and Spanish. The campaign sent out emails telling local residents to wash their hands and social distance. Nelson went on Facebook Live to explain what to expect as the virus spread, and also made formal appearances (via Zoom) with other public health experts — something that normally only an elected official would do. All of this showcased her public health background — a smart strategy for authentically modeling how, if elected, she could serve her community – but also provided her campaign with a way to really do something at a time when many were feeling panicked and powerless. “We were struggling to find a way to help,” campaign manager Clara Sandrin later recalled. “And this was something tangible that we felt really good about and that we could do.”

That’s exactly the right spirit. In your own campaign events, as in everything else, you have to be guided by what feels right. Do what seems like an organic outgrowth of who you are and what you’ve done all your life. You have the advantage of not yet having been “managed” by consultants or “burned” by the media. Think of your newness as a superpower, not a vulnerability. The ability to act from the gut can be an incredible source of strength for you, and it’ll become increasingly hard to access once big, important-seeming people — who you’ll increasingly encounter, if your campaign takes off — are telling you to do otherwise.

The people you need to listen to are the residents of your district. The school parents who are worried about their kids’ education or about gun safety.  The essence of grassroots politics is listening to your people. You’ll be talking to them too, of course — but, especially early on, you want to listen more than you talk.

You have to get a solid sense of what’s on voters’ minds before you try to dictate policy solutions in your campaign speeches. You don’t want to come off as a high-handed know-it-all. You want to engage people by hearing about their challenges, and then demonstrating that they’ve been heard. People want leadership — and, particularly in a period such as the Covid outbreak in 2020 — they want answers. But the best possible way to bring them with you in thinking about policy is by coming up with solutions together.

Meeting voters where they are, after all, isn’t just about showing up at their doors or getting in a room with them. It’s also about learning enough about them to understand where they’re coming from. That means finding ways to speak their language, both literally — if you’re running in a district that contains a large number of voters who don’t speak English as their primary language — and figuratively. If you are not multilingual, you’ll need to find volunteers and, ideally, staff who are. If you’re in a district with voters on both sides of the political spectrum, you’ll likely have to make an extra effort to understand what lies behind your more conservative potential voters’ worldview. In either situation, you have to be very thoughtful about finding ways to communicate on common ground — and very intentional about making an extra effort to breach your gaps.

Our candidates have been incredibly resourceful in showing how that work can be done. Candace Valenzuela, who ran a high-profile, closely-watched and well-funded race that came very close to making her the first Black-Latina ever elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, grew up in the El Paso area and experienced homelessness as a child. She ran in 2020 as a self-avowed progressive against a white Republican woman to represent the Texas 24th, a seat that for many years had been considered hopeless for Democrats.  When skeptics asked her how she could possibly connect with majority-white moderates, she had a clear answer: she’d grown up in the state, she lived in the district, she was a school board member who shared the everyday concerns of her neighbors, and she knew how to talk Texan. “My progressiveness is just an extension of my life and my pragmatism — and Texans value pragmatism,” she told a group of Square One supporters. “And when you’re able to talk to them about what this means for their lives, they understand.”

Sri Preston Kulkarni, the son of an Indian immigrant, grew up in white, conservative Texas and built a career as a foreign service officer. Aftr returning to the U.S. — horrified by the 2017 outbreak of white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia — he decided to run for Congress. He ran in the Texas 22nd, where nearly 40% of residents were people of color and almost one-quarter of potential voters were immigrants — and where Republicans steadfastly held onto power due to the outsized influence of (mostly) white suburban conservatives and a belief among mainstream Texas Democrats that “immigrants don’t vote.” Disgusted by that neglect of a key potential voting bloc, he made speaking to those communities a top priority, recruiting volunteers and interns representing as broad a swath of the district’s electorate as possible.

By the time of his 2020 general election, his campaign was engaging in outreach to voters in 27 different languages, and had put into place a very successful program of “relational” organizing. It involved tasking volunteers with getting the word out about the Kulkarni campaign, and then later getting out the vote, by instructing them to go through their own local phones contacts, call their friends, family, fellow church, temple or mosque members, and then urge the people they called to do the same. When early voting began before the 2020 general election, the volunteers automatically received a daily email indicating who among their contacts hadn’t yet voted and needed another call. The message then went out down the line, in ever-widening circles. This kind of high-impact, low-budget organizing is enormously valuable for insurgent candidates in any election year. In 2020, with Democratic in-person canvassing shut down by the pandemic, it was absolutely essential. And an unexpected, positive side-effect of the Covid shutdown was that people, stuck at home, were actually willing to answer the phone, and stay on to talk.

Scaling Up

As your primary approaches, every aspect of your campaign is going to have to ramp up. You’ll need to pay for yard signs, radio spots (if they make sense in your district), email campaigns, text and phone banking, postal mailings and flyers and the highest visibility, best-publicized local events you can manage. You will, of course, have been posting from the start on social media. (Under designated accounts for you, the candidate. You may want to consider taking down your personal accounts before you declare, if you want to protect your privacy.)

You’ll also now want to create ads and video content where, for a pretty low cost, you can package your own content in a way that puts your point of view front and center. One way to do this is by establishing your own YouTube channel and posting low-cost videos of yourself talking about healthcare or education or global warming or gun violence or jobs, or whatever other issues are central to your campaign. Posting on YouTube won’t bring you an audience, so, once again, you’ll need to seek out and target your voters where they already are on social media. You might, for example, edit down and package your videos into short digital spots that you distribute online via targeted lists to reach your potential voters.

In the weeks before the election, you’ll need to mount your first get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts. You’ll want to do relational organizing of the sort we described previously. You’ll want to be absolutely everywhere you can be meeting voters, and you’ll want to have a team of volunteers canvassing, handing out campaign literature, texting, emailing and phone banking for you as well.

None of this is cheap. The more heated the primary becomes, the more expensive it will be still, in terms of your need for staff and for advertising when appropriate. That’s the irony of running for office the first time: the better you do, the harder it will get. But that’s okay. By the time you get to this point, you’ll have your staff in place and you’ll be more skilled in every aspect of campaigning. When the challenges come, you’ll be ready.

Now that you’ll have done all the work to introduce yourself to voters as you are — a real person, with a real person’s problems and challenges — fundraising should feel a lot more natural. People will see that you have to ask for money because you really are just like most of them, and don’t have a small fortune lying around that you can draw on to self-fund your campaign. Owning that — and speaking about it openly — may even become a useful point of contrast with your opponent (or opponents, in a primary), if those on the other side are wealthy and seem out of touch with the day-to-day financial stresses regular people face. Bear in mind, however, that until you’ve advanced pretty far in your campaign, it doesn’t serve you well to go super-negative. The main emphasis always has to be on you — and in an overwhelmingly positive way.

Sometimes, that really won’t be easy. You’ll be exhausted and frustrated and frazzled by one too many hours of call time, too much Diet Coke and too many takeout meals. It will be a big challenge just to stay awake, not to mention projecting the confidence, competence and comfort in your own skin that you’ll need to show voters. Because no matter how confident you are, no matter how good a person and a candidate, there will be days when a lot of negativity is going to come your way. At times like this, be sure to lean on the trusted people who love and believe in you. And remember that the voters — if you’re doing things right — believe in you too.