The NPR Politics Podcast - How To Run For Office

Episode Date: November 29, 2019

In this special collaboration with NPR's Life Kit the NPR Politics team breaks down what are key steps for running for office. This episode: Congressional correspondent Susan Davis, political reporter Miles Parks, and editor & correspondent Ron Elving. Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, real quick before we start the show. Since this impeachment inquiry got underway, the squad here at NPR Politics has made more than 50 daily episodes. Sometimes more than daily to keep you informed about what's happening and why it matters. And we're able to do that and to put it out there for free because of support from listeners like you. You and everybody else who listens to our shows are the biggest source of financial support for NPR's member stations. No matter where or how you hear us every day, the fact is that the stations are the reason this podcast exists in the first place. So if you enjoy our podcast, please take a second to give

back. Donate online to support us and your local station by heading to donate.npr.org slash politics. That's donate.npr dot org slash politics. Thanks. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And I'm Ron Elving, editor correspondent. Miles, you have recently been seeing other podcasts. Occasionally, occasionally. It's not like it's not like that, Sue. I did a couple episodes. I'm back. I'm here. So you've been working on a fellow podcast at NPR called Life Kit. And for the next couple of days, we're going to bring you your reporting from that series. Tell us a little bit

more about it. Yeah. So Life Kit is basically this project that NPR has been doing to help people figure stuff out. Like we have one on exercise, dieting, how to manage screen time with your kids. And I was like, what do I know about? I know about voting. And there's a lot of people who don't vote in this country. So I did one about voting. I did one about misinformation. And then I did one, the one we're going to talk about today, which is about how to run for office at the very local level. People who've never run a campaign before, never even really been involved in politics. I wanted them to be able to come, listen to this, and at least have a starting point for if they want to run for something, a city council or a school board or something like that. They have a starting point for how

this works. So Miles, who are some of the candidates you used to tell this story? So we built this around this one candidate named Bushra Amiwala. She's 21 years old. She ran for office for the first time when she was 19 years old. The sense that I come to this with is that this is a confusing, overwhelming process for people who've never done it before. And Bushra, being 19 when she ran for the first time, she's 21 now, she brought that sense of confusion. She actually Googled how to run for office when she decided she was going to do it for the first time. And I did Google search it, but actually nothing came up. The first thing on the list that I found was understand election law. So that's what I did. So then I Googled election law and no obscene amount about Illinois finance laws and ways to be compliant with the policy specific

to the state of Illinois. And I found that I was almost putting my efforts and I guess my eggs into the wrong baskets in the beginning because I literally didn't know where to start. Ron, it's a good reminder that behind every grizzled political veteran, there was once a one-time novice candidate. Absolutely. Everybody has to start someplace. bid for office at the congressional level or even at the Senate level, running statewide for the first time. So Bushra Amiwala goes on to run for office for the first time. She does. She decides she wants to run for a city council seat in Illinois, and she promptly loses. And she decides to... Also common with first-time candidates.

It's hard, especially she talks all about how, like, she had no idea what she was doing. She says, like, now that I know-ish how to run a campaign, 90% of what I was doing that first time was wrong. And so she... What actually happens, it's really fascinating. The person who beat her for that city council seat calls her and says, you should run again. You have a lot of potential. You should run for the school board seat there, and I will help you. I'll be a mentor to you.

And so he kind of walks her through how to actually get a campaign infrastructure together, how to do all these things. And she ends up kicking butt and winning the second time. And so now she's on the Skokie school board in Illinois. And, you know, there's quite a history to that. The first time Barack Obama ran for office, he lost. And the first time George W. Bush ran for a public office, he lost. It's not unusual. I think it's really interesting, too. Bushra talks a lot about her story and why she was initially motivated to run. kind of fits in with this first time candidate wave we saw in 2018, in terms of she talks about

how she is the youngest Muslim elected official in the country right now. And so she talks a lot about how she didn't see people who looked like her or who had her background in representation, which I think motivated a lot of people over the last couple of years. She's a good example of sort of the candidate we saw a lot of in 2018, which was a political newcomer, a woman, and a woman of color being drawn into politics for the very first time. I mean, 2018 was a year where women not only defined the electorate, but the kinds of candidates we were seeing run for office. The first Muslim women to be elected to Congress, the first Native American women to be elected to Congress. Miles, you spent a lot of time talking to candidates. So how do you run for office?

Well, I'm going to tell you how you don't run for office. Which is maybe a more important thing. Honestly, might be more important. I think there's been this huge focus since the 2016 election, and there was a huge focus on Cambridge Analytica. I don't know if you remember that story, but social media and politics, the mixture of the two has been a huge talking point over the last couple of years. Guess what?

It doesn't matter. In terms of at the local level, elections are still won in person, and it's going to be about the amount of time you take to actually shake hands with voters. Are they going to remember your face? Are they going to remember your two line, 30 second pitch for why you should be their school board representative or why you should be representing them on the city council? Those face to face interactions create lasting memory when they go in three, four, six months down the road, they're going to remember you if you have a good 30 second pitch, social media, people are scrolling all day long, they're scrolling past things, they're not taking it in the same way they are when you actually meet them. I think that's the number one thing that people I talk to who are coaching people leading up to 2020 still say the in-person

meetings matter. How you break through. You know, you can't meet everyone, especially if you're running for Congress or for president, but you can give the impression that you want to meet everyone. And when you meet someone, you can you want to meet everyone. And when you meet someone, you can make them feel like somebody. And when you work a small room or a small group of people, you want to really make an effort to get around to every single one of those people in that manageable-sized group and make each one of them feel as though they really had your attention. This is the beauty, say, for example, of Elizabeth Warren sticking around for hours to do selfies. It's not as though she's piling up a million votes that way, but she's creating an impression of her candidacy that is quite real.

The other thing is technology can still be really useful in targeting which voters you're going to, where you're going to show up. Or how many you need to find. Exactly. Exactly. Because you're going to need to figure out what's called your vote goal, which is you need to figure out the bare minimum number of votes you need to win. This should not be an ambiguous exercise. You need to be saying, if I get 602 votes in this election, I'm going to win. That's how many votes they had the last six elections that won every single year. And so now you have a number that you can work toward as you're every time you meet somebody, you're writing down a name, you're writing on a phone number, an email, you're getting confirmation to people. Yes,

I'm going to vote for you. Yes, I'm going to vote for you. And you're adding that up to actually end up at a number that you feel confident with. This isn't a guessing game. But what is the smartest way that campaign strategists say to meet voters if that touch in-person grassroots thing is still the thing that matters most? You know, there was a longtime successful statewide candidate in Wisconsin named William that touch, in-person, grassroots thing is still the thing that matters most. You know, there was a longtime successful statewide candidate in Wisconsin named William Proxmire. And he stood out in front of Milwaukee Brewer Games and University of Wisconsin Badger Games and every kind of athletic contest that you could go to in Wisconsin. You were likely to run into Bill Proxmire during that season, maybe multiple times. And he also went to breakfasts. He was out at pancake breakfasts. If he was in Wisconsin,

he was at a pancake breakfast pretty much five, six days a week. That's pretty much retail. It's really down at the most common level of people's experience. But that's exactly the brilliance of it. Everybody knew that about Proxmire. He spent, in the last time he ran for Congress, less than $1,000 on his campaign and read no television ads at all. Well, that reminds me too of senators like Chuck Grassley, Republican from Iowa. And part of his sort of persona is he visits every county in Iowa over every year. And he has done that for the past 30 some odd years that he's been in office. But because he has continued to do that work, it's also continued to like feed his reputation as being someone who's accessible to Iowans. But I also understand that if you've never done

this before, that idea can be super intimidating. And sounds exhausting. Exhausting. Exhausting. Yes. Well, that comes down to the thing that I've heard from every campaign manager, strategist I've ever talked to, that the biggest commodity on any campaign is the candidate's time. And how do you spend that time wisely? And that kind of gets you into the whole realm of who manages the campaign, who manages your time, who manages the money, who manages your resources. And are you able to surround yourself with a team of people, a dozen, two dozen people who are just as excited about you being in office as you are? And if you are, you know, if you have a group of those people door knocking, and if they're really excited and really well spoken, they can have a similar effect on that like moment to moment 30 second pitch with

a voter on a door knocking effort as you can in that situation. And so the team element just really matters. How hard is it to find a team, though, if you're a first time candidate, you've never run for office, you probably don't have a lot of resources, but you're going to go ask people to work for you? Yeah, I mean, it's probably your mom or your mom's friend or, you know, somebody who coaches Little League with you, people who have a similar mindset about whatever it is you're running for. If it's if you're running for a school board seat, then it probably makes sense to get other parents who you know at the school that your kid

goes to or something like that. A lot of these situations are not going to involve paid staff. It's going to be people in your circle. Yeah. I mean, volunteer staff seems like it doesn't matter what you're running for. You need some combination of people who are going to do it for free. It might be your college roommate. It might be somebody you knew in school at some point or another. And maybe at some juncture it occurred to you, this is the sort of person who could actually run a campaign for office. If you ever were to run for office, ha ha, everyone laughed at the time. And now it's 10 years later and you're interested

and you're thinking of that person again. Also, maybe if like five people you know don't want to support you run for office, maybe you're not the best candidate. That's real. I heard that from multiple people. That's like when you give that initial announcement to the dozen people you're closest with and there's like crickets in the room and you have to be a little bit self-aware that like, if I can't get these people to give me money or help me out, then getting random people, it's going to be really tough. If my mom isn't going to like my Facebook page, why am I running? Yeah.

All right, we're going to take a quick break. And when we get back, we're going to talk money, money, money. Support for NPR and the following message come from Personal Capital, offering online financial tools to give you a 360-degree view of all your accounts in one place. Want to talk? Personal Capital has registered advisors who can help you invest smarter and plan for retirement. Download the Personal Capital app or start investing today at personalcapital.com. Personal Capital, invest with logic, plan with heart.

And before we get back to the show, a quick reminder, if you haven't already, please pause the podcast and head to donate.npr.org slash politics to support the show and your local member station. Unless you're driving or holding a baby, then you can wait. Just don't forget to do it. All right, back to the show. And we're back. So my question about this is you could be a great candidate. You could have people who love you. You could be the best retail politician in your generation of 21-year-olds in Illinois. But if you don't have any money and if you can't raise money, how can you run? I still think that the ability to raise money seems like the thing that matters the most, no matter what

you're running for. If it's a television situation, if you've got to buy broadcast or at least radio, then yes, then television is going to cost you so much you can't run without that kind of money. So if it's at that level, sure, money is the biggest bar. But if you're starting out running for a local office, or if you're running for a state legislative seat in the lower chamber of your state legislature, television might not really be a big factor. But even if you need $10,000 to run for a local office. Or $1,000. That's a lot of money for a lot of candidates.

And you may have to borrow it. You may have to take a second mortgage on your home. You may have to go to friends and say, this is more money than you would ever have thought of lending out to somebody in this fashion. But I need this money to run. And if you believe in my candidacy, you can give me $500. Yeah, and I don't want to scare people here because campaigns do not have to be this crazy expensive things. And also asking for money doesn't have to be a terrifying thing.

Bushra talked about how the confidence is the big thing that kind of changed her. Here she is. I had so much confidence and I had this extended network and base and support of people to reach out to that I was like, oh, of course, like people will be like happy to receive a phone call from me. Like they should be excited that they have this chance to directly support my campaign. And I would call people and I'd be like, yeah, can you donate $250? And I remember I like would choke at the sight of asking someone for $50. And I was out here like, yeah, like, donate like $500? Her message didn't really change, but the authority in which she relayed that message changed

and it was like when she would have these coffee chats with people and at the end they would be saying goodbye or whatever and they had a great hour-long conversation. She was kind of like waiting for them to say, hey, could you use $100? I got $100 right here if you want it. And that just was not working at all. That does not work.

You have to be like, I need this money. Will you give it to me now, please? Not only I need this money, but you need to give me this money because, wait, you care about your kids, don't you? You want like a really good school board, don't you, Sue? And you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you need to make that ask very clearly. And you need to make it clear to the person what that money is going to go towards. So they don't want to pay for you to, I don't know, get Jimmy John's every single day, even if a little bit of that money is going to go to some Jimmy John's. Campaign volunteers need to eat. But they want to know, like, if you can say campaign mailers have X amount of value in our state, says the party, can you provide X amount of campaign mailers for us? You know, things like that, tangible evidence of where your money's going, I think is really helpful for people.

One of the pieces of advice in the series was always make sure you have good food for the volunteers. It doesn't have to be expensive food, but it has to be good food. And I think that food fuels campaigns as much as it fuels the campaign reporters covering those campaigns. Where can people find the whole series? They can go to NPR.org slash LifeKit and they'll get the three episodes I produced, as well as a plethora of other knowledge on all sorts of other topics as well.

You can learn all kinds of how to's on NPR's LifeKit. Yep. I'm glad to have you back on our podcast. I'm back for the duration. All right. Well, that's it for today. And we're going to be back tomorrow with Miles talking all about how you can prepare for Election Day and voting. I'm Susan Davis.

I cover Congress. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And I'm Ron Elving, editor correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.