My dad called me excitedly last Tuesday night to tell me there was a very smart woman named Amanda Litman talking about the Massachusetts primaries on MS NOW and that I should ask her to do my newsletter.
Fortunately for both of us, I’m a longtime admirer of Amanda’s work and had already asked her to connect this week.
As Co-Founder and President of Run for Something, Amanda has played a role in helping 200,000 progressive leaders run for offices up and down the ballot. Along the way, she’s become one of the party’s most vocal advocates for changing how we show up for voters, how we speak to them, and even who we put in front of them.
I hope you’ll be as excited as my dad and I are to read Amanda’s thoughts on not being an asshole to other wings of the party, candidates giving flash tattoos, and the two questions every candidate should ask before deciding to run for office.
THIS IS ON BACKGROUND
5 short questions. 5 quick responses featuring the wisdom of Run for Something Co-Founder and President Amanda Litman.
Amanda, Run for Something has had a lot of success helping Democrats flip state senate, city council, and school board seats, where candidates don’t have the luxury of reaching voters through daily news coverage. What can candidates higher up the ballot learn from that success about getting their message out beyond traditional media?
This is going to sound overly simplistic but the best candidates we’ve worked with can very clearly answer two questions: (1) Why are you running and (2) why should the voter want you to win?
That second one is particularly important because it’s not about why you want to win -- you want to win because winning is great and losing sucks. The voters should want you to win because something specific in their life is going to get better in a way they can feel. Campaigns that can answer those two questions at any size are going to be grounded in a tight, specific message.
How you communicate the answers to those questions is a different story, and tactically, what works in a 3,000 person or even 30,000 person race doesn’t necessarily scale up to a 300,000 or 300,000,000 race.
But! One of the strongest motivations for someone showing up to vote is whether or not they feel like they have a personal relationship with the candidate.
In local politics, that can mean literally knowing them -- they coach your soccer team, you go to the same gym, you have mutual friends -- or meeting them IRL throughout the campaign.
For bigger races, everything you do should aim to replicate the intimacy of that one-to-one relationship -- work toward cultivating what is essentially a parasocial relationship with your voters. They should feel like they know you and trust you, even if they don’t agree with you.
To that end, I am obsessed with Maria Hinojos Pressey and Sara Duncan, two RFS candidates running on a slate together for Marion County Commission in Oregon. Their content is fun and engaging, and their campaign tactics reflect their personalities - they’re doing a Dungeons & Dragons for democracy game as a fundraiser; earlier this summer they did a flash tattoo event to “get ink, fight fascism.”
You’ve talked a lot about the importance of being a big-tent party, and you’ve pointed to Florida, where a DSA candidate and a former Republican are at the top of the ticket. How should more moderate candidates communicate in situations like that without going out of their way to attack other folks in the party?
Disagree respectfully -- don’t be an asshole about it. Good candidates should be able to say plainly: “I may not agree with my colleague on every issue but I look forward to winning and working together on the goals we share, like making housing and health care more affordable (or whatever it may be.).”
A family fight may be satisfying to wage but it rarely serves your goals of building an effective coalition that can win and then actually govern.
Run for Something backed Aparna Raj, who has leaned into her own experience with housing instability and a bad landlord in her (likely successful) campaign for D.C. Council. What advice do you have for communicators trying to help their bosses use their personal stories in a similar way to speak to the issues frustrating voters?
This gets at what I was saying earlier: Campaigns are better when the candidate has a strong and specific reason for running! It’s not a good sign when the team is debating what the candidate believes instead of how to communicate what the candidate believes.
Not every candidate needs to have a sob story or a personal trauma that brings them to this work, but every candidate should have the thing that made them say “screw it, I’ve got to run for office to fix this.” Even if that’s not the focus of their campaign, consider the feelings behind that moment -- part of the reason the personal stories resonate is because it helps voters understand that the candidates share their emotional truth. (Especially right now: Voters are pissed, and they want leadership that’s just as mad.)
What do you want to shout from the rooftops?
Apologies in advance to all the staffers reading this but: I tend to believe the things we (the operative class) obsess over are often the things we can control, not the things that actually move the needle or change outcomes.
We stress out over the exact words in a policy position, or whether or not a candidate is on TikTok, or exactly how many GRPs they run on which TV stations because those are things we feel like we can control. And that’s fine! But we should regularly acknowledge: Candidate quality (meaning: who the candidate is, their values, story, and whether or not they can connect with voters) and the political environment (e.g,.: for a number of economic and cultural reasons, 2026 is a good year to be a Democrat, generally speaking!) are the biggest drivers of election outcomes.
That doesn’t mean your work doesn’t matter -- in close elections especially, everything might matter. But we should all practice discernment about what we devote our energy and time to. (And, ahem, we should all do what we can to get better people to run for office in the first place -- everything is easier if the candidate is great!)
Lastly, anyone else you think we should make time to talk to?
Danielle Butterfield at Priorities is one of the smartest thinkers in our party about how to reach voters who otherwise aren’t tuning in to politics. Yasmin Radjy at SwingLeft is running a stellar program through their Ground Truth canvasses -- and I love her honesty about what did and did not work in previous cycles. And for thinking about how to reach young voters in particular: Ben Wessel is one of the foremost youth vote comms experts in our party and Dakota Hall at the Alliance for Youth Action is so so smart about how to be strategic and intentional about organizing (while having fun!). Jesse Lehrich’s newsletter about the 2028 Democratic primary is mandatory reading and he’s got a great perspective on what’s going on in that hellscape. Can’t go wrong with any of them.
Thanks for your time, Amanda.