Amanda Litman (Run For Something) begins her conversation with Ezra Klein by explaining what most people do not understand about how elections run in this country. In addition to federal races, there are over 3,000 counties in the country and thousands more municipalities with their own election rules and overlapping/intersecting schedules and rules. So many hands on the controls makes it hard to rig elections.
Klein shoots back that the miasma of systems makes it easier to throw everything into confusion.
Run For Something recruits candidates to run for office. Somebody has to, she shrugs:
County and state parties used to do candidate recruitment. They no longer have the capacity to do it. They don’t have the money, they don’t have the staff, they don’t have the time. So they allocate their resources from a place of scarcity which then gets you to a system where, instead of trying to find the most exciting, engaging or compelling candidate for a position, you are, as one battleground state party told us in 2020 or 2018, flipping through the high school yearbook trying to find the football coach and asking them to run.
Defunding the left is why the right variously attacks trial lawyers, unions, and other groups that provide funding to Democrats. It is why North Carolina Republicans removed the party funding check-off box from state tax forms. Government is not the only thing Republicans want to drown in their bathtubs.
Litman continues:
I think the people who are willing to go from mad or inspired to taking action are the ones that can clearly articulate and answer to three questions. Why do I want to run; what is the problem I care about solving? How is the office I want to run for going to give me space to solve it? And why should voters want me to win? … And when you can answer those three questions, everything else about campaigns, especially local ones, are just logistics.
What Litman is doing is valuable. She’s right, there is little local support out there and few resources for aspiring candidates. What there are are not in plain sight. She wants to eliminate party “gatekeepers” whose specialized knowledge keeps the process of assembling a campaign opaque to novices.
But “just logistics”? Another reason it is so difficult to recruit local candidates is that there is little or no party structure extant in many, many places across the country. No local party infrastructure with the capacity to encourage them, support them, train them, and to get out the vote for them. No logistical support. No veteran volunteers reminding voters not to stop voting their ballots before they get to city council or school board races.
At a 2018 Maryland conference for aspiring down-ballot candidates, I asked what help they could expect in the general election from their local Democratic committees:
The question generally drew a pregnant pause, a sigh, and perhaps an eye roll.
One blue-state congressional race staffer described his state organization as “a hot mess,” and county organizations in the district had little more to offer his candidate. A state House candidate from the Midwest explained that members of the local county committee were typically over 70 years old. The local county chair had held that position for 25 years. Attendees from Indiana to New York told similar stories.
This means that while Litman’s group can help recruit candidates and train them in the dark art of assembling their campaigns for office, local candidates are often reinventing those wheels for themselves. If there was local logistical support for their campaigns, they wouldn’t have to. Not alone, anyway.
Still working on that problem here. The 4th edition goes out this week, so stay tuned before requesting.