Exclusive: An excerpt from "Run for Something: A Real-Talk Guide to Fixing the System Yourself"

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Friday October 06, 2017 · 9:27 AM PDT

2017/10/06 · 09:27

Screenshot_2017-10-06_12.13.38.png — Run for Something: A Real Talk Guide to Fixing the System Yourself (Atria/Simon & Schuster)

This is an exclusive-to-Daily Kos excerpt from the introduction of Run for Something: A Real-Talk Guide to Fixing the System Yourself by Amanda Litman. The book is available now!

I’m not an inspirational speaker or a motivational writer—this isn’t a self-help book. I’m a campaign hack, a political junkie, and a workaholic.

I was born and raised in Fairfax, Virginia. I always knew I wanted to work in politics—I knocked on doors for senatorial and gubernatorial campaigns as a teenager. I was obsessed with The West Wing and read the Washington Post every morning over breakfast. In high school, I took my first-ever skip day in 2007 to see Barack Obama speak at the university nearby before he even announced he was running. (I was, and might still be, a little bit insufferable.)

I chose Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, for college in no small part because I hoped Obama would win, I hoped he would run again, and I hoped he would run his reelection campaign out of Chicago so I could intern for him. Throughout college, I worked at my local Democratic committee, on Capitol Hill, and at political magazines. I majored in American studies, focusing on gender and politics. My senior year, I got a job interning on the digital team for Obama 2012. They hired me a month before I graduated. When I took a day off to walk at graduation, I spent the ceremony answering emails on my phone, which I’d hidden in my gown.

After the campaign ended (reminder: we won!), I helped launch Organizing for Action, the president’s nonprofit, as deputy email director. My team helped to raise $26 million online in the first year—a third of the organization’s operating budget—and defined what the organization stood for.

I left OFA in March 2014 to work as the digital director for Charlie Crist’s gubernatorial campaign in Florida. I raised $2 million, created a ground-breaking tool to help Floridians vote by mail, almost got charged with ten thousand counts of voter fraud (but, for the record, I didn’t!), and served as senior staff on the biggest gubernatorial race in the country that year. We lost by just a hair over 1 percent after our opponent, Governor Rick Scott, spent $13 million of his own money on TV in the final two weeks leading up to Election Day.

I then took six weeks to drink and sleep, and in January 2015, I started working for what would become Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. As her email director, I managed a nineteen-person team of incredible writers and strategists to help raise more than $330 million online, recruit half a million volunteers, and run the most profitable Democratic store ever. I was younger than nearly all my peers and half the people I managed. I worked 100-hour weeks for two years straight, ruined my personal life, lost an election, and gained a family. Even with the result and even with the day-to-day misery, I don’t regret a single minute of it.

After we lost, I became—and remain—so damn angry.

My anger is indiscriminate. I’m angry at the institutions that have failed me. I’m angry at the people who didn’t believe elections matter. I’m angry at the people who made some kind of false equivalence between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, and I’m angry at the media coverage that enabled it. I’m angry at the old white men in government who think they understand my problems as a twentysomething woman in America but have never had to deal with paying for an IUD or negotiate for equal pay at a job—and don’t get me started on the ones who still have to be taught how to check their own email. I’m angry at a system that makes it so hard to run for office and at a party that perpetually encouraged rich lawyers to run and then seems shocked to find itself without a diverse pipeline of talent.

But very little angers me more than people who complain endlessly without offering solutions or trying to fix the problem. So, after another few weeks of drinking and sleeping, I decided to solve at least one thing myself: I could help young people run for office and rebuild the Democratic bench in the process. I rationalized my decision to myself and others: I’m unemployed, I know politics, I know how the internet works, and I’ve got the rage-fueled energy to do the work. At the very least, I could turn this into a fun hobby while I got a real job.

I partnered with a cofounder, Ross Morales Rocketto, a friend with a decade of campaign management experience, and we found a group of advisers who’d stand by us.

On January 20, 2017, Inauguration Day, we launched Run for Something, a political action committee dedicated to helping young people run for office by lowering the barriers to entry. We launched a website, opened up a bank account, filled out paperwork, and sent a press release to a list of reporters we’d acquired from some friends in PR. Then we emailed our friends, posted on Facebook, and crossed our fingers.

The immediate reaction was astounding. Thousands and thousands of people signed up to say they wanted to run for office. Volunteers started dedicating hours of their weeks to talk to people about running. Hundreds of Obama, Clinton, and Bernie Sanders campaign alumni joined folks from across the progressive movement to mentor our candidates for free. We’re supporting our candidates with resources and funding—and already it’s making a difference in school board, city council, and state legislative races across the country.

Our goal is to change the landscape of the world by planting a whole lot of seeds in the form of young progressive candidates. I hope this book can help.

But I don’t want to sugarcoat this: Running for office is really fucking hard. You’ll be worried about money all the time. You’ll have to make tough decisions, and each choice you make will be dissected. People will dig up your old tweets and cite them in articles. You’ll be a little lonely. You’ll spend hours and hours every day asking for money and votes. If you do it right, you’ll wear out your shoes knocking on doors. If you don’t have unlimited data on your cellphone plan, watch out.

You don’t get a day off on the campaign trail. You might have to quit your job. Your personal life might go on pause until Election Day. You might not sleep. You’ll be living on old coffee and pizza.

And you’ll probably lose. (After all, incumbents win 90 percent of the time).

Winning isn’t necessarily easy, either. You’ll have to get right to work representing your constituents and keeping the promises you made during the campaign, plus you’ll likely immediately have to start working for your next election. You’ll have to balance short-term and long-term priorities, you’ll have to learn about policy issues you might never have encountered before, you probably won’t make much money, and you’ll spend a lot of time on stuff that’s really important—but you’ll get zero credit for it. You’ll deal with donors, press, coalitions, and constituency groups, and you’ll spend a lot of time in meetings with no results.

Do it anyway. Run for office. Even though it’s hard, even though you might lose, and even if you’re scared—especially if you’re scared—if you care about the future of our country and our democracy, you need to run. You can do this.

You really don’t have a choice. Look at the world right now.

As I’m writing this, Donald Trump is president. (Thanks, Vladimir Putin, for that.) In 2017, the Republican Party has total control of twenty-six state governments, runs the legislatures in seven others, and can have its way with the entire federal government.

If these (craven, spineless, shameless) elected officials carry out even some of their promises, we’re fucked.

The “party of Lincoln,” at any given moment, could take away health care from tens of millions of people (if they haven’t already). They could limit access to abortion and health care for women, disenfranchise minority voters, and deport millions. They want to lower taxes for the rich and in the process screw over the same voters who got them into office. At any moment, war seems imminent with at least a half dozen countries. Our public education system suffers while the private-prison industrial complex grows.

Climate change could ensure a sweet early release from this political nightmare since the Republican Party refuses to admit it’s a problem and isn’t doing anything to slow it down. But before the ice caps totally melt, say good-bye to freedom of the press and hello to a newly emboldened group of racists, anti-Semites, bigots, and white supremacists. The fundamental principles of our democracy have been stomped on and thrown out the window.

So, I ask you: Are you as angry at Congress, at your state legislature, at your party—at everyone—as I am? Are you afraid? Are you burned out?

Did you march with women on January 21, 2017, or show up at airports to fight the Muslim ban? Is protest your new brunch? Do you go to town halls during congressional recess? Do you call your members of Congress every single day to make sure they know where you stand on the issues? Are you complaining, and tweeting, and sharing every last video explainer on what Trump’s up to?

Good! Thank you. But that’s not enough.

You have to run for office. Or at least, you have to think about it. After all, you can’t change the game if you don’t change the players.

If you’re a Republican, well, I’m not going to talk you out of running. After all, as long as you believe in facts, you’re probably not as whackadoodle or extreme as Trump. If you’re a Democrat, great—me too—you and I have elected officials who need to be held accountable.

Forget about Congress, though. Focus on the offices that actually get shit done—state legislatures, city councils, school boards, and mayorships. Look at who’s leading the resistance: the local officials who truly understand their communities.

There are more than half a million elected offices in the United States. For context: That’s a lot. There are more elected offices in the country than thereare McDonald’s employees.

Not-so-fun fact: More than 40 percent of state legislative races in 2016 were uncontested, up from nearly one-third of state legislative races in 2012. (That’s infuriating and civically negligent. I could go on about why uncontested elections make my blood boil. In fact, I do: Jump to page 27 for a diatribe about why uncontested elections are a scourge on our democracy.)

Sure, for some of these races, gerrymandering is partially to blame. But not entirely! Many of the candidates in these races go unopposed because our political parties have failed to get more people interested in running. We’ve made it too damn hard to get in the door by professionalizing campaigns to the point that they are only accessible to rich or well-connected people, adding bureaucratic hurdles to jump over, and failing to provide data or information on anything as basic as what the offices are.

Institutions tend to focus recruitment efforts on “flippable” seats or open races and then recruit for fundraising capability (a heuristic used to assess a candidate’s likelihood of winning) instead of authenticity, diversity, or potential—and then in the case of Democrats, find ourselves without a deep bench of talent. The party complains about low turnout but in too many places doesn’t give people actual options to vote for!

So, I repeat: You have to run, or at least think about running, especially ifyou’ve never thought about running before.

If you’re reading this book, you’re exactly what most politicians have to pretend to be: a real person.

Think you’re not qualified? Let me make something extremely clear: DONALD TRUMP IS PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. YOU CAN BE A STATE SENATOR. OR ON YOUR CITY COUNCIL. OR ON YOUR SCHOOL BOARD.

I get it—on the one hand, what kind of egotistical nightmare thinks they’re qualified to represent hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of people in government? How entitled must you be to think you can handle the job?

And if you’re a woman or a person of color, you’re probably second-guessing yourself because you don’t see as many people like you who’ve run and won before. (An aside to women and people of color: Approach this and every decision with the confidence of an entitled, mediocre white man—he’d never even ask himself this kind of question.)

Our elected officials are, by and large, a sea of old white men who don’t actually represent the diversity of this country. You have to fix it.

So don’t worry about your resume. Remember: Barack Obama was a community organizer with a funny name before he was a state senator. Patty Murray was a “mom in tennis shoes” before she was a member of the School District Board ofDirectors, the Washington State Senate, then the United States Senate. If you’re smart, if you care, and if you’re willing to learn and work hard, you can run and you can serve. If you win, you can hire people to help you with the work.

You don’t need to be charismatic. You certainly don’t need to be an extrovert. All you need is a good brain and a willingness to work as hard as it takes.

There are a lot of barriers to entry. It’s expensive. It’s scary. The pay isn’t high enough and the work is hard. But you can fix the system by joining it. You can do something with your outrage and your sadness. You can be fearless.

Pardon the cliché, but win or lose, you will actually be the change you wish to see in the world.

You can do it. And this book will help you figure out how.

Get your copy of Run for Something now — and chip in to Run for Something (the organization!) while you’re at it!

This excerpt from RUN FOR SOMETHING appears courtesy of Atria Books/Simon and Schuster.

This content was created by a Daily Kos Community member.

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Exclusive: An excerpt from "Run for Something: A Real-Talk Guide to Fixing the System Yourself"

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