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David Beard:
Hello and welcome. I'm David Beard, contributing editor for Daily Kos Elections.
David Nir:
And I'm David Nir, political director of Daily Kos. The Downballot is a weekly podcast dedicated to the many elections that take place below the presidency, from Senate to city council. You can share your thoughts with us by reaching out—drop us a line at thedownballot@dailykos.com.
David Beard:
And please subscribe to The Downballot wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you don't mind, leave us a five-star rating review. But let's go ahead and dive into today's episode. What are we going to be covering on today's show?
David Nir:
Our guest on today's show is Amanda Litman, one of the co-founders of Run for Something, a new group that sprung up in the wake of the 2016 elections that's devoted to helping young diverse progressives run for office at all levels of the ballot. But before we get to our conversation with Amanda, we have our weekly hits where we are going to be talking about North Carolina, North Carolina, North Carolina, and South Korea.
David Beard:
I love North Carolina, so let's go ahead and get started.
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David Nir:
It's time for our weekly hits, where we discuss some of the stories making news or not making so much news in the world of downballot elections. Beard, what have you got to start us off this week?
David Beard:
I'm back in North Carolina, which I promise won't happen every week, but there's a lot of interesting stuff going on in my home state, so that's where I'm going to start. There's a competitive Senate primary on the Republican side with former Gov. Pat McCrory and Congressman Ted Budd being the two leading candidates. There's a couple of others with former Congressman Mark Walker being the other third candidate in the race, but it's really primarily between McCrory and Budd. McCrory is the more pre-Trump GOP establishment candidate, while Budd has been endorsed by Trump and he's definitely more the candidate of the Trumpist wing of the party.
David Beard:
McCrory just released his first TV ad of the cycle on Wednesday, where he actually attacks Budd for some positive-sounding comments that he's made about Vladimir Putin. The ad quotes Budd saying, "Putin is a very intelligent actor," in reference to Putin. And also Budd saying, "There are strategic reasons why he would want to protect his southern and western flank. We understand that." Then the ad goes on to ding Budd for voting against sanctions on Russia and ends with McCrory saying “I don't compliment our enemies” in a very tough voice. Now you don't see foreign policy play a major role in U.S. elections very often, particularly legislative elections, but the McCrory team who released the ad clearly believes that the really strong anti-Russian invasion response that's sprung up from the American public really across the board has given them here an opportunity to go after Budd.
David Beard:
And if that's true, if this does end up being something that's hurting Budd in the polls as the election gets closer, it's something we could see develop in other races as well. Budd's comments are actually relatively explainable. It's not like he's clearly praising Putin for being an amazing leader or anything, which we have heard from some on the far right. The comments that he's made are explainable and the Budd campaign has attempted to explain them by saying that they're simply observations about Putin as opposed to praise. But Trump obviously has been very complimentary of Putin for years. Fox News host Tucker Carlson has been complimentary. There are many in the Trumpist wing of the party that have praised Putin for any number of things in recent years. Similar to Budd, JD Vance made some comments before the invasion that he probably wants to take back now.
David Beard:
He said that "I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other." Vance, of course, being one of the GOP Senate candidates in Ohio. And that's really not where the mood of the country is since the invasion has taken place for obvious reasons, so this could turn out to be a real problem for one or more of particularly the Trumpist GOP candidates. And we could see it become a divide in the party if it ends up hitting home.
David Nir:
Beard, it reminds me of that old tweet from the Twitter account Dril where he says, "Issuing a correction on a previous post of mine regarding the terror group ISIL, you do not under any circumstances, got hand it to him." I think you could say the same thing about Vladimir Putin, whatever was going through Ted Budd's mind. No, under any circumstances you do not got to hand it to him.
David Beard:
Exactly.
David Nir:
This week, the United States Supreme Court rejected Republican appeals that they intervene in two cases, one decided by the North Carolina Supreme Court, the other decided by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. These are two redistricting cases. In both situations, the state courts implemented congressional maps that are by all metrics quite fair, which is why Republicans are extremely upset, especially in North Carolina where the legislature passed its own maps only to have them twice struck down by the courts, and then the court imposed a new map that is much fairer. In Pennsylvania there was a deadlock, so there was no map for the court to overturn and it just simply imposed a map there as well. The U.S. Supreme Court said it wouldn't block either map from taking effect this year, but as far as we can tell, the only reason why it didn't intervene is because of how late it is in the election cycle. But that's not really why I wanted to talk about either of these two cases.
David Nir:
The real reason is a dissent that Sam Alito, one of the most extreme far right justices on the court, wrote in the North Carolina case. And it's downright terrifying. And I really don't use that word lightly. Alito endorsed a radical, totally extreme, and anti-democratic legal doctrine called the Independent State Legislature Theory. And what this theory says is that when it comes to federal elections, only state legislatures and no other body in the states can decide how those elections are run. That includes voter registration, voting procedures, and redistricting. In other words, state legislatures have supreme authority to draw lines for their own districts and not even state courts can police them. Not even state courts interpreting the state Constitution can say these lines violate our Constitution. And this obviously would hand massive power to state legislatures. Many of which are already gerrymandered themselves. And it seems like the court is really on the verge of endorsing this.
David Nir:
You had two justices sign onto Alito's dissent. That was Gorsuch and Thomas. You have Brett Kavanaugh who wrote his own concurring opinion saying that he thought it was really too late to get involved, but he's definitely very interested in this theory, this independent state legislature doctrine. And then you have two other conservatives, John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett, who might well be very sympathetic to this. I think that we are going to see a case before long where the Supreme Court adopts some version of this crazy doctrine that says that when it comes to redistricting, state legislatures have absolute unfettered authority to do whatever they want.
David Beard:
And the hypocrisy here is really that a number of these justices signed on to a recent opinion a few years ago that said that they couldn't get involved in any partisan gerrymandering cases, because there was no way for the justices to rule on it fairly. And in that opinion, they pointed to things like independent commissions as a way for the public to deal with nonpartisan gerrymandering, if that was what they wanted to enact. But if they enacted this new concept of independent state legislatures, they couldn't even create independent commissions, which was the very thing that they had pointed to as a way to resolve this. They're basically shutting every single door to prevent partisan gerrymandering one by one.
David Nir:
And it's no surprise that this is happening once again, out of North Carolina where Republicans have engaged in some of the worst abuses both in redistricting and in election administration in general. And it's no surprise that we are once again talking about North Carolina, a state where Republican behavior regarding redistricting and election administration in general has been truly the worst of the worst. And we are going to be talking about yet another North Carolina Republican in our next weekly hit. That would be the notorious Madison Cawthorn, whose eligibility to appear on the ballot this November has been challenged by a group of voters under an unusual and interesting North Carolina law that is based on the 14th Amendment.
David Nir:
The 14th Amendment, which was passed right after the Civil War, says that no one who has "engaged each in insurrection or rebellion against the United States can hold public office." And for a time, at least, this provision was used to prevent former Confederates from running for office after the Civil War. But the 14th Amendment is still good law and North Carolina has a law on the books putting into effect these words from the amendment. Voters have said that Madison Cawthorn in his actions on and during the insurrection on Jan. 6 is therefore ineligible to hold office per the Constitution. Madison Cawthorn really said some outrageous and horrible stuff that day he spoke at the "Stop the Steal” rally where Trump whipped up his minions to go and attack the capitol.
David Nir:
He had said, "If you don't support election integrity, I'm coming after you." He said that voters should "Lightly threaten their representatives." And then he even said that the "Battle is on the House floor," after the insurrectionists had breached barricades at the Capitol. And based on this record, these voters are saying that Madison Cawthorn is barred from the ballot by virtue of the 14th Amendment. Well Cawthorn of course disagrees. And he filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging the very notion that he could be ineligible on these grounds. He had the good fortune to appear before an extremist Trump judge named Richard Meyers and Richard Myers issued a ruling the other day that is completely bonkers.
Myers said that because Congress passed a bill in 1872 that gave amnesty to these former Confederates and a pretty shameful piece of legislation that was, but Myers said that because of this bill passed 150 years ago, that it was a prospective amnesty being granted for people who weren't even born yet up to and including Cawthorn. In other words, Myers was saying that this piece of legislation somehow essentially repealed the 14th Amendment.
Yeah, if you remember your civics class and I'm sure you do, you know that an act of Congress cannot repeal a part of the Constitution. It's completely ridiculous. They are likely going to be appeals and just to give you a sense of what kind of lunatic this Myers is, when he was delivering his ruling, he said, "The federal court is tasked with protecting the soap box, the ballot box, and the jury box, and when these fail people proceed to the ammunition box." In other words, he was saying that if he doesn't let Madison Cawthorn the ballot, some people might start shooting and therefore that is why he won't enforce the law.
David Beard:
It's truly a wild ruling and I certainly expect we'll see more developments in this case, as it develops likely on appeal. Now, I'm going to take us pretty much as far away as you can get from North Carolina.
David Nir:
Finally.
David Beard:
I would love to spend the entire episode. Maybe we'll do a special North Carolina episode someday, but I'm going to take us all the way to South Korea. Not South Carolina, South Korea. South Korea had a presidential election on Wednesday. So let me give everyone a little bit of background on South Korea if you're not imminently familiar with their political system. They have a presidential system like we do with a president who holds executive power and a legislature that passes laws. South Korean presidents are limited to a single a five-year term. So the current incumbent President Moon Jae-in came to power in 2017. After the previous president was impeached and convicted in office, he can't run again. So he's finished his five-year term. And so all of the candidates who are running now would be a new president.
David Beard:
So there were two leading candidates, one from Moon's party, which is the more progressive party. And that was Lee Jae-myung. He's a former governor of one of the larger states in South Korea and he's from, as I said, President Moon's more progressive Democratic Party. And then the other leading candidate was Prosecutor Yoon Suk-yeol of the opposition People Power Party, which is the more conservative party. So Mr. Yoon has just come out today that he's very, very narrowly won the election by less than a percentage point with all of the votes provisionally counted, but the opposition Democratic Party has conceded the election, so he's expected that he'll officially win and take office. So Yoon came to power as a prosecutor. He prosecuted the previous president, the one who was felled by scandal before President Moon came to office. He's one of the sort of mini new right-wing candidates that we've really seen pop up across the world. There have been a number of comparisons to President Trump. Most notably he complimented the former South Korean dictator, Chun Doo-hwan, and he's also claimed that systemic gender discrimination no longer exists.
David Beard:
So along these lines, he promised that he's going to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, and he's also promised harsher penalties for wrongfully accusing men of sex crimes, which we all know will not actually do anything positive, but will discourage women from speaking out when sex crimes have occurred. And all of this is part of a broader antifeminist movement that's been taking hold among many people in South Korea, particularly young men. Despite South Korea having the highest gender wage gap among wealthy countries, nearly 79% of South Korean men in their 20s say they were victims of serious gender discrimination, according to a recent poll.
David Beard:
Now, this is not obviously the main issue here. The main issues are the rising costs of housing, rising inequality, and a lack of jobs. But as we've often seen in these situations, people look for scapegoats to blame when they're in these difficult economic situations. And this has really developed and become a big problem in South Korea, where these young men are looking for a reason why housing costs are so high, why there's all this rising inequality and they're struggling to find jobs. And feminism has really been the scapegoat that a lot of these young men have found to blame all of their problems on instead of dealing with a lot of these economic inequality issues.
David Beard:
And Yoon has really taken advantage of this. A lot of his campaign supporters were based around this, and unfortunately he's very, very narrowly won the presidency. And so that will be an ongoing issue in South Korea as he's the president for the next five years. One saving grace here is that the Democratic Party, which is outgoing President Moon's more progressive party, still controls the legislature through at least 2024 when the next legislative elections are up. So Yoon will be constrained in passing new legislation until then, but as we've seen here in America, the executive can do a lot outside of that. So it's definitely something to keep an eye on moving forward.
David Nir:
We're going to take a quick break. And when we return, we will be talking with Amanda Litman, who is the co-founder of Run for Something, an organization that helps young progressives run for office at all levels all over the country. Stay with us.
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David Nir:
Welcome back. We have with us today Amanda Litman, who is the co-founder and co-executive director of Run for Something, an organization that recruits and supports young, diverse progressives to run for downballot races all over the country. Welcome to the show, Amanda.
Amanda Litman:
Thank you for having me.
David Nir:
So why don't we start with just a basic rundown of what Run for Something is and how it works.
Amanda Litman:
So Run for Something was born of the ashes of the 2016 election. I worked for Hillary for two years prior to this. My co-founder, Ross Morales Rocketto, has worked in campaigns for about 15 years. About a week after Election Day, I got a message from somebody I went to college with: "Hey, Amanda, I'm a public school teacher in Chicago. I'm thinking about running for office. What do I do? You know this world. You've worked in politics for 10 years. What do I do?" I didn't have an answer for them, because at the time, if you were young and newly excited about politics and wanted to do more than vote and more than volunteer, there was nowhere you could go that would be guaranteed to take your call. And that to me felt like a symptom of really big problems, both with the Democratic Party and with our democratic system at large.
Amanda Litman:
So I reached out to a whole bunch of people—one of whom became my co-founder, Ross—and we wrote a plan and we built a website and then we launched Run for Something on Trump's Inauguration Day, thinking it would be really small. We would get maybe 100 people who wanted to run for office in the first year. This would be a cool hobby. When we launched, 1,000 people signed up in the first week. As of today, we're up to more than 110,000 young people all across the country who've raised their hands and said, "I want to run for local office. What next?" So we've built a program that does just that. We recruit and support young, diverse progressives. So for us, it's folks 40 and younger who are running for the first or second time for positions like school board, city council, coroner, state House, state Senate, community college board of trustees, boards of education that are the real building blocks of the democratic process. And in the first five years, we've endorsed nearly 2,000 and helped elect 637 people across 48 states, mostly women, mostly people of color.
David Nir:
That's incredible. And one of the things I find really interesting and positive about Run for Something is that, as you said, it came out of the ashes of the 2016 election. It launched on Trump's inauguration, but there was so much energy at that time. And there was a lot of good things all across this sphere that developed, but Run for Something really took a long-term view. So how did you see and how has developed the long-term look at Run for Something, because these are candidates who hopefully get elected at a very local level and then someday may run for higher office. And so this is really, as opposed to looking at the 2018 elections or looking at the 2020 elections, this is an organization that really looks at the next 10, 20, 30 years in America.
Amanda Litman:
We say that investing in local politics, like what Run for Something does, is good for politics and good for policy and it's good today. And it's good in a decade. It is good generally to help build political power at the local level by getting candidates to run for office. And if they win, great, that's good. We love winning. Winning is excellent. Losing is terrible, but even if they lose, the act of campaigning, the act of knocking doors and making calls and pushing on the issues and cultivating talent through the campaign organization is how you get from a 70/30 district to a 60/40 to a 55/45 to one that’s flippable. That's how you do it. It doesn't happen overnight.
Amanda Litman:
So we think about this in long term in two ways. One is building talent—the folks that we've worked with in 2017, 2018, 2019, are even now starting to run for higher office. We're seeing New York State Sen. Alessandra Biaggi running for Congress. Jevin Hodge, who ran for and even lost his race for Maricopa County Board of Supervisors in Arizona, running for Congress. Malcolm Kenyatta, state rep in Pennsylvania, running for Senate. And a number of others like them. Even Jennifer Carroll Foy, who ran for governor in 2021 and the primary, was one of Run for Something's first candidates back in 2017. Now we are seeing their talent move up the ladder, but we have also seen our folks run in districts and just move the needle, get a little bit closer. So when you think about the long-term vision for what we're trying to build, it's both a bench of talent, but also a broader way of understanding where Democrats can and should be competing.
David Nir:
Yeah. That philosophy dovetails very closely with ours at Daily Kos. For instance, when we supported John Ossoff in 2017, that was another one of those districts that had long been neglected. And this was about giving voters a choice. We didn't really have an expectation of winning. And of course he came really close and now we call him Senator Ossoff. So that's one of my favorite stories of races that I've been involved in. But I'd love to hear from you, Amanda, about some of your favorite success stories, whether in the short term, or looking more longer term like you were saying.
Amanda Litman:
Okay. It's like asking me to pick which is my favorite flavor of ice cream. They're all good flavors. There's no such thing as a bad flavor of ice cream. There's no such thing as a bad Run for Something candidate we've worked with. I could do this for hours. A few of my faves: Judge Lina Hidalgo in Harris County, Texas. When Lina signed up with us back in 2018, she had just moved home to Houston from finishing up at the Harvard Kennedy School. She came back to—
Amanda Litman:
—Houston from finishing up at the Harvard Kennedy School. She came back to the town where she grew up because she wanted to do more on emergency response budgeting, because Harris County, the third largest county in America, had a really crappy structure for how they were prepared to respond to things like the now consistently once-in-a-generation flooding they were seeing every couple years. So when Lina moved home, she's looked at the landscape and realized the position that handles these kinds of offices is the county executive, which in Harris County is called the county judge. It's the judge of the commissioner's court. She said, "I'm going to run against the Republican incumbent." Everyone said, "Good luck, God speed. Democrats, we don't win those seats. We don't win countywide positions in Harris County. Got to be with you, but we're not going to be with you on this." Run For Something along with our partners over at the arena deeply engaged in the race.
Amanda Litman:
We helped Lina stand up for campaign, helped her hire staff, helped her build out an incredible structure. And she's an amazing candidate, but you didn't know how to do this, because if you've never run for office before, you don't know how to file the paperwork and know in which order to get the P.O. box and the filing fees and the petition signatures and the bank account that you need. It's not easy. So Run For Something worked with her. She was able to win in a grassroots victory in 2018, she's proceeded to do things like ending cash bail, revolutionizing the approach to homelessness in Harris County, rejuvenating public transit, and added $13 million to the election administration budget in Harris County, which then helped turn out in 2020 in the county jump, including early vote numbers doubling over the most previous presidential election, because she made sure that they were able to open 24-hour polling centers and expand access to the polls through drive-in ways during the pandemic.
Amanda Litman:
Lena I think is proof positive of these small offices that are actually not small at all and have huge responsibilities. Another one that I'm really excited about is down in Florida, state representative Anna Askamani, outside Orlando who flipped a seat red to blue in 2018. When she ran for reelection and won, she continued to win, even winning over a couple precincts that Trump also won in her district. She's been a furious fighter for things against the abortion bills in Florida, against the "Don't say gay bill," in Florida. But in the meantime, her constituent services have been incredible. Her team has helped nearly 50,000 Floridians access unemployment benefits at a time when the state intentionally made it difficult for folks to do so. They're just so amazing, and it's very cool to see these people run and win and lead and then make a difference in people's lives in a way that, like the baseball term, the value over replacement is so high.
David Nir:
That is a concept we definitely understand very well here, the value over replacement. What you get when you replace a Republican elected official with a Democrat and a progressive, really the difference can be truly amazing. Amanda, you alluded to this a little bit in talking about the Hidalgo race. What are some of the top questions that you typically get from first-time candidates? What exactly is it that they need to know that they don't know?
Amanda Litman:
Well, there's the philosophical ones, like how do I know what office to run for? When do I run? How do I figure out how much money I need? Am I right for this? Can I win? Then there's the logistics ones, like how do I actually get on the ballot? Which order do I do things? They tell me I need 1,500 signatures, but I can't start collecting signatures until I open a bank account. I can't open a bank account until I've officially filed, but I can't file until I have the signatures. How do I do this? And then there's stuff like writing a campaign plan. How do I get the voter file? What is a voter file? Who gives it to me? And what software do I use to keep track of it?
Amanda Litman:
How do I figure out who on that voter file to talk to? What do I say when I talk to them? Campaigns are basically small businesses that are meant to explode after Election Day. And if anyone who's ever listened to this has started a small business, yes, a lot of it is the philosophical belief and the vision you have, but a lot more of it is just logistics, that if you've never done it before, you don't even know where to start.
David Beard:
Yeah. Having worked on campaigns before it is so strange how much you focus on building up this incredibly complex machinery up until Election Day, and then assuming your race doesn't go to a runoff or a recall, or if it's too close to call something, for the vast majority of elections afterwards, everyone just sort of sits around the next day and they're like, "Okay." If you won, there's some planning for the office that you've won, but then if you've lost, it really is just like, "How do we close this shop that we spent so much time building, in usually a short amount of time?"
Amanda Litman:
Yeah. It's one of the things we've loved doing is working with folks who win or lose, and need to figure out what's next. We worked with a guy in 2017 who was running in a small town in the Midwest for a city council position because he really cared about climate, and he wanted to bring his small town over to solar energy, that was his big issue. And after his campaign, which he came up short, I believe he came in fourth and the top three won, it was by maybe a couple dozen votes. He turned his campaign into a nonprofit. He took the organization he had built, he took the infrastructure he had built and then turned it into a Facebook group, a nonprofit, an organizing vehicle, a recycling program, and then was able to leverage that a couple years later to this time run and be more successful. It's very cool to see people understand that Election Day is not the beginning or the end of your civic engagement no matter the results, it is just the next step. It's part of the journey.
David Nir:
You're obviously working with candidates at different levels of the ballot, in different states, at the statewide level, city level, district level, county level, so on and so forth. So what kind of support does Run For Something offer to the candidates you've decided to work with and how much of it is sort of one-size-fits-all versus how much of it has to be customized to this specific race that the person is running in?
Amanda Litman:
Such a good question. So we think about our pipeline kind of like a marketing funnel, if one was going to apply very pragmatic terms here. You sign up on our website where you can look up what kind of offices are available to you in the upcoming year. You then join our conference calls, we run these weekly. We answer all the basic questions every first-time candidate has, the ones that I talked about a little bit earlier. Then you have a one-on-one with one of our volunteers. And we train our volunteers to both get a little bit more information about you as a potential candidate, but also to make sure you have a little bit more information about us and about the places we've worked and how we engage with people.
Amanda Litman:
Once you've gone through those initial hoops, which are pretty low lift, I would say, you have access to a whole bunch of risk resources from guides on how to file to get on the ballot in every state, written in real-people speak, not legalese or bureaucratic talk. Trainings that we run as well as the ones that hundreds of our partners run from Emily's List to the PCCC, to Emerge, to Collective PAC and Latino Victory Project, Victory Fund, and dozens and dozens and dozens of regional and state organizations that do trainings for candidates.
Amanda Litman:
We do some trainings ourselves. We also do a lot of community building. We also have a network of about 500 folks across the country who will work with you one-on-one. So if you have a question about building a website, you submit it, we will match you directly with someone who said they want to volunteer their time to build websites for local candidates. If you've got a question about housing policy, submit the request, we'll match you directly with an expert in housing policy who will work with you for free. Then once you're on the ballot, you can apply for our endorsement. We have an application, we want to see your campaign plan, your budget, your WIN number, how you're going to get from A to Z.
Amanda Litman:
We do rigorous background checks. We want to make sure you align with our progressive values, but we know that progressive looks a little different, say in Brooklyn where I live versus maybe Iowa City or Oahu or Anchorage or anywhere else where we're working with candidates. We want to make sure you're running for the place you're in, that the issues are really localized and that you have a vision for how you're going to talk to as many voters as possible. We endorse about half the people who apply, and endorsed candidates work directly with our regional directors. So this is begins with a conversation. Where are you? What do you need? How can we help you? How can we make sure that the state party who isn't answering your emails understands how important it is? How can we get your field director training? How can we get you a designer to develop a palm card or a piece of lit for you?
Amanda Litman:
What do you need? Is it someone to listen, someone to vent to? Do you need help from building a volunteer base? We are there for them in whatever capacity they require. Every person we endorse also gets matched with someone we've endorsed in a previous cycle, and we call this our alumni mentorship program, because what we've heard is that running for office really sucks. It's super lonely. It's super scary. You can't complain to your partner or your staff or your family, because you're asking them to do something hard. You need someone you can commiserate with. And 60% of candidates identified a relationship with another candidate as their greatest source of resiliency.
Amanda Litman:
So we try and enable that within our alumni mentorship program. So the college student who ran in 2018 will work with a college student who ran in 2020 who's now working with a college student running in 2022. Endorsed candidates are who we track through to Election Day and who we recommend to reporters and to other organizations and who we amplify on social, those are the people we consider part of our alumni community. So it is a real soup-to-nuts, beginning to end, hold your hand all the way through experience. And some of it is definitely broad and applicable to every race because at the end of the day, mechanics of campaigns are basically the same, but we also do a lot of one-on-one coaching and support, or one-to-few coaching and support.
David Beard:
So for aspiring candidates who have expressed interest, they've sort of gotten along at that first level, what would you say to them is sort of the key things to focus on both in terms of their campaign and in terms of looking to get Run For Something's endorsement at that stage?
Amanda Litman:
We want to make sure that every candidate we work with has a really strong vision for how they're talking to voters. So are you knocking on doors? Are you making calls? Whatever way makes sense for the safety in your community, but do you have a vision and a plan for grassroots engagement in a meaningful way? Because the most important thing a local candidate can do, and this is especially true in a place where it's going to be really hard, is building a personal relationship with voters. Then we want to make sure that candidates can really clearly, really answer the question, why are you running for office? And not just why are you running, but why are you running for this office? What are you going to be able to do in this position that you couldn't do elsewhere that you can only do here to make progress on the problem you care about, and why should voters want you to win?
Amanda Litman:
Which is different than why do you want to win? You want to win because winning is great. Voters want you to win because you're going to deliver for them in a meaningful, practical, tangible way. So we really want candidates who, as they're thinking about engaging in this process can answer that question and then are willing to do the work. Everything else from how to get on the ballot, to what to do when you're on there, we can teach you, but we can't teach you to care and we can't teach you to have work ethic around this.
David Beard:
For sure. Now, one of the issues that I found a lot working in politics that you've touched on a little bit, but I wanted to delve a little more into is Democrats in really deeply red areas. We've seen this really get worse as polarization has increased. Particularly in the Trump area, where you find Democrats who are afraid to go out and tell people in their community that they're Democrats, they're like, "I don't know any other Democrats, I don't want say anything like at the restaurant or at some sort of community area, because everyone's a Republican and half the people are extremely aggressive about it." That makes it really difficult. How do you work with these candidates? How do you advise them on these deeply red areas, where A, it's going to be hard just to run and B, they have next to no chance of getting elected? How do you talk to them about that?
Amanda Litman:
Well, I think we really want to make sure people understand that as a Democrat living in a red community, you are the best messenger to your Republican neighbors, because they might not like the Democrats they see on Fox News or hear about on the radio or see on TV, but it is much harder to hate the person you meet at your home. I think a lot about how we worked with Chloe Maxman, who was first a state representative in Maine and is now a state senator there. She flipped a seat red to blue in both places, and was I think in her first one, the first Democrat to ever hold the seat, or was one of the first Democrats to hold it in quite a long time in the state House, and then again, in the state Senate. She represents one of the oldest, most rural, whitest districts in Maine.
Amanda Litman:
When she first ran, she was in her mid-twenties and a climate activist, not really what you'd expect to be able to win this kind of district. She was like a 20-something young woman who really, really cared about divesting from fossil fuel or divest campaigns on her college campus. She told me about one of the ways she was able to compete and to win in these districts was that she knocked doors. She talked to voters, she tried to listen more than she spoke. She tried to find common ground. She tried to make sure that they didn't feel judged, that there could be disagreement without disrespect. She made sure that her campaign was doing incredible service for work.
Amanda Litman:
In particular, when she was running for state Senate, her campaign, I believe talked to every senior citizen in the district, every single one. Just to do check-ins and this was early pandemic, to see how it was going for them. You know what I think about how do you deliver for people and how do you make sure they feel seen and heard, especially when they don't agree with you or like you, or think you're part of a good political party or process? It's making sure they see you as a person first and a partisan second. It's hard. It's really hard. I don't have the temperament for it and I don't think everyone does, but for people that do it can be really powerful.
David Beard:
We've been talking about races all up and down the ballot here at Daily Kos Elections and certainly The Downballot, we love talking about obscure races. The more obscure, the better. Are there any positions that you were surprised to learn about or maybe what was the most unusual elected office that someone came to you and said, "I want to run for this?"
Amanda Litman:
Coroner. Coroner was one I didn't know had come about until we started doing this work; there are 1,300 counties about that still elect coroners. We worked with a number of them. I had a conversation with one of the women we worked with who ran for and won a position as coroner and Pennsylvania. She talked about how it is one of the elected officials that you never want to hear from. You never want to get a call from your county coroner, because if you do, it's probably a bad scenario. It is in the case of a loved one having passed away whether by natural causes or not. This is the kind of elected position that deals with people in a moment of true pain, and it really matters that's someone who has deep empathy and compassion for people and who could run a competent office.
Amanda Litman:
We worked with another coroner candidate out in Colorado who wasn't able to win, but his campaign was running on the idea that the current coroner had been misgendering trans people on their death certificates. Which makes a real difference when you think about the way that crime statistics are reported and the fact that trans folks are disproportionately victims of crimes. It really matters that you have someone in this office that is willing to see people with the dignity, he called it like dignity in death as dignity in life. We've seen this now with the pandemic too. There's been coroners across that country who have refused to put COVID as a cause of death on death certificates. It also comes up a lot in criminal justice issues. Thinking about police brutality, what is determined as cause of death really does dictate sort of how it is treated moving forward. I have been fascinated by that. I am also obsessed with library boards. I think library boards are deeply interesting. Similarly school boards. Those I sort of knew I would be excited about as we started doing this work, but coroners really shocked me.
David Beard:
Given that 2022 is coming up and it's likely to be not a great year for Democrats, it's the first time Run For Something has been in existence with there being a Democrat president and a Democratic Congress, so there's really a good chance that there's going to be some Republican wins. How has the organization sort of adjusted for that? How are they looking at the playing field? Knowing that in 2018, there were all these great opportunities, picking up a bunch of seats everywhere, so that made it a little bit easier than in more neutral year. Now going into what may be a bad year, how are you maybe adjusting your practices for that?
Amanda Litman:
If anything, we're not, we're deepening and broadening our work. For us, the focus especially post-2020 is as hyperlocal as we can be, because we have seen a lot of success, even in places where Trump won that we can elect Democrats to positions when the maps are not gerrymandered, and when the races are nonpartisan, and we can elect people who really share our values. That creates a lot of opportunity because as you all know, there are half a million elected offices in the United States. Most of them are non-Congress. Most of them are not even in state legislatures. There's a lot of other places where we can build meaningful power. As we looked to this year in particular, we really wanted to focus on the two places where we thought there was the biggest crisis and the biggest opportunity.
Amanda Litman:
The first is school boards. There are 21,000 school board positions on the ballot this year, but half of them are up in November, but the other half happened throughout the course of the year. We know this is where Republicans and QAnons, and Proud Boys and Moms for Liberty and the Leadership Institute are focusing a lot of their effort. We want to be able to fight back in a way as meaningful as possible, especially understanding that what happens in a school board ripples out because it determines the kind of people our kids grow up to be.
Amanda Litman:
The second is local election officials. There are about 5,000 across the country, across 35 states that are elected local election administrators, which is a very complicated way of saying a bunch of people who control how elections are meaningfully run, that we then get to decide at the ballot box. Run for something as working in as many of those races as possible, because we know as Trump has told us, they care more about who counts the votes than who's on the ballot. They are trying to rig the elections and to undermine trust in democracy, by ensuring that people like Nazis and conspiracy theorists and QAnoners, and even the woman who I guess just yesterday was charged with a crime for sharing secure election data with conspiracy theorists online.
Amanda Litman:
This is not great. These are not the people we want running our elections, and this is what election subversion is going to look like in 2024. The elections that we have this year will determine who is in charge of protecting democracy two-and-a-half years from now. Long way of saying our big focus for this year is our school and library boards, and local election administrators. We are doing everything we can to recruit as many candidates as possible for as many of these positions as possible before it's too late, which it almost is, but it's not late, not past the deadline yet.
David Beard:
Amanda Litman, this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation. At Daily Kos Elections, we're constantly talking about the data side of things, the new side of things, but where you are at is really where the rubber meets the road of how campaigns actually happen in these downballot races that seldom get enough attention. I would like to ask you before we sign off, if someone is interested in supporting your work at Run For Something, or if they're interested in becoming a candidate and would like Run For Something's help, what should they do? How can they get involved?
Amanda Litman:
If you are the kind of person that listens to this podcast, you're the kind of person that should run for a local office, we would love to help you. You can go to runforwhat.net. You can look up the offices available to you in 2022. As soon as you sign up, you'll start getting emails and text messages from us, not asking for money, but making sure that you have the information you need to get your campaign off the ground. Whether it's this year, next year, or five years down the road. If you do want to give us money and we would love your money, because we're trying to build something big and unprecedented and important, runforsomething.net/donate is where to find us. Every single dollar means the world to me, means the world to our team. It is helping what I think is, and maybe I drink my own Kool-Aid a little bit, but what I think is the most important mission the Democratic Party could tackle right now, which is building both short-term and long-term sustainable power from the ground up, so thank you.
David Beard:
Amanda, thank you so much for joining us today.
Amanda Litman:
Thank you for having me.
David Beard:
That's all from us this week. Thanks to Amanda Litman for joining us. The Downballot comes out every Thursday, everywhere. You can reach us by email at thedownballot@dailykos.com. If you haven't already please like, and subscribe to The Downballot and leave us a five-star rating and review. Thanks also to our producer, Cara Zelaya and editor Tim Einenkel. We'll be back next week with a new episode.
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