My thanks to Something the Dog Said, aka The Top Dog, for letting me jump into this series. As he indicated, I will be adding my persective as a campaign staffer/manager. While I have run for local office a couple of times myself, my background is as a campaign volunteer & staffer for 20+ years in California. I have worked on races ranging from school board to Congress, and practically everything in between. My most recent stint was as field director for a successful state Assembly candidate. Hopefully, this background will help me in writing these entries. Now, on with the show!
So you have decided to take the next step in political activism and now you are running for office yourself or helping your fellow progressive do so. Having taken this leap, you are panicking because you have no idea what to do. The training academies by DFA and Wellstone aren't near you this year, and you don't want to wait for the Dog's series to finish. Fear not. There are several good campaign manuals available for sale on the Internet or at your local bookstore. (There are also some that are complete guano, but we're skipping those.) I will suggest a few in my personal collection.
I will tell you in the beginning that most books cover the same basic topics in the same basic way. They discuss targeting your voters, writing a campaign plan, developing your message, recruiting a staff, fund-raising, field operations, media, and so on, and there is a lot of similarity in their advice. However, different authors will take different approaches based on their own experiences, and of course each one has some unique features. Choosing a manual or two comes down to personal preference.
Caveat: While these books are helpful, there is nothing like talking to people experienced in running campaigns in your area. You may live in a media market so expensive that even a run for city council costs $100K-$250K, or an area so rural that campaigning "door-to-door" requires a 4x4 with a tank full of gas. Or, to cite the situation becoming increasingly common in parts of California, so many people vote by mail that a traditional GOTV effort misses two-thirds of the electorate. Campaign manuals are good as guides to help organize your thinking, but slavish adherence is probably not the way to get your candidate elected. Rule #1 is always "Do what works in your area."
The first campaign manual I read as a young volunteer was Winning Local and State Elections by Ann Beaudry and Bob Schaeffer. This book was first published in 1986, and although it was re-issued in 1998, it wasn't updated. Don't expect to see much discussion of computers or the Internet! However, its emphasis on low-budget, high-volunteer campaigns, and its clear explanations of the various elements of campaigning have kept it on my reference shelf despite the dated nature of some specifics. It is largely technical and shows no partisan or ideological slant.
How To Win A Local Election by Lawrence Grey was first written in 1994; it's now on its third edition. Like Baudry's book, it is nonpartisan, as evidenced by the forwards written by the 1993-94 national chairs of both parties. This was written by a former office-holder who uses many examples from personal experiences to illustrate concepts. Topics are presented in easily-digestible chunks for the comparative novice, and the book flows from the larger questions of planning the overall campaign, through the "mid-level" topics such as planning, calendar, staffing, and fund-raising, to low level elements such as literature, advertising, and lawn signs. It is sold in book stores as well as online, and makes a good overall campaign guide.
The third general manual I suggest is The Campaign Manager: Running and Winning Local Elections by Catherine Shaw (2004). Shaw is also a former elected official and political operative. This book is stuffed with samples and examples for each topic, but the narrative structure is weak. As a reference manual, it's helpful on a subject-by-subject basis, but it doesn't paint the overall rhythm and structure of a campaign clearly, and is perhaps too dense for the novice.
Politics the Wellstone Way (2005) and Winning Your Election the Wellstone Way (2008) approach campaigns from a distinctly progressive point of view, and much of the content will be familiar with graduates of the Wellstone Academy. As might be expected, these books do have more to say about technology and the role of computers & the Internet in campaigning than the older works. However, they do not delve as much into specific campaign tools as the other manuals. I would suggest the Wellstone books in company with one of the other texts.
There are several other manuals published regularly on this topic, but these are a few that are widely available. As of the time of writing this, all can be purchased at the leading online sites, and several can be found in the larger bookstore chains. Feel free to suggest your own.