7 Questions with Amanda Litman
We had the lovely opportunity to be joined by Amanda Litman, co-founder and president at Run For Something, an organization that recruits and supports young, diverse progressives to run for down-ballot races and build long-term political power in communities across the country, on our podcast, How to Win a Campaign.
In addition to her work with Run for Something and Run for Something Civics, Amanda has written a couple of books, which we’ll link to in the show notes, she served as email director on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, as the digital director for Charlie Crist's 2014 Florida gubernatorial campaign, was the deputy email director for Organizing for Action, and was an email writer for Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign.
She sat down with us to give her answers to 7 Questions.
To start us off, can you share a bit more about yourself and Run for Something’s mission?
So I was born and raised in Virginia. Politics is the only thing I've ever known. I grew up outside the DC suburbs. I was one of those kids who thought politics was a good way to make a difference and knock doors for Virginia Democrats. When I was in high school, I went to pro-choice Virginia rallies back when that was not a cool thing to do as a 16-year-old. In my junior year of high school, I skipped a day of school to go see Barack Obama speak before he announced he was running for president. He was doing like a Students for Obama rally at the university across the street from my high school. And I was hooked. I knew I wanted to work for him, and I made every possible choice I could to make that possible later in life.
I went to Northwestern for college. I studied American studies with a focus on gender in politics. I actually wrote my college thesis about women running for office against other women and how it changes gender performance in TV ads. I then got an internship on the Obama campaign during my senior year of school. So I went straight from there to the role on the email team, to Organize for Action, down to Florida for the governor's race, and then up to New York to work for the Clinton campaign in 2015, 2016.
About a week after election day, I started hearing from people I'd gone to high school and college with. Hey, Amanda, I'm a public school teacher in Chicago. I'm thinking about running for office. If Trump can be president, it seems like anybody can do this. What do I do? And at the time, if you were young and newly excited about politics and you wanted to do more than vote and more than volunteer, there was nowhere you could go that would answer your call. Maybe the state party, but probably not. Emily's List was still getting their pipeline program up and running. There just wasn't a place. That seemed to me like a problem both with our Democratic Party, but also with our democracy.
So I reached out to a whole bunch of people with an idea. What if we created an organization to solve this problem? What a fun side project that would be. One of those folks connected me to my now co-founder, Ross Morales-Ricetto, who had been working in campaigns for at that point about 15 years. We wrote a plan, we built a website, and then we launched Run For Something on Trump's first inauguration day, thinking it would be so small. We thought we'd get 100 people who wanted to run in the first year. We were going to do this on weekends. We had 1,000 people sign up in the first week. And as of today, we're up to more than 220,000 young people all across the country who have said they want to run. And by the time your listeners hear this, it'll probably be much more. We have built what we think is one of the largest candidate pipelines in politics. And we've helped elect more than 1,500 millennials in Gen Z to local offices all across the country.
Let’s talk about the brilliance in the messiness. Can you share a moment when things felt especially hard, and how you moved through it?
Anyone who's ever led through layoffs or reductions in force knows how hard it is. I am not the pitiful victim in this story. Layoffs are always hardest for the people who lose their jobs, always. And the experience of having to make those decisions should weigh on you. Any executive who's having to affect people's livelihoods, it should ruin your life for a little bit to have to make those calls. If it doesn't, gut check where your sense of compassion has gone.
That was one of the hardest couple of months leading up to and after that experience, especially the first round. They were some of the worst professional months of my life. There were moments where I was like, "What if we just shut the whole thing down?" Wouldn't that be easier? Just avoid it altogether. Why don't we just call it a day? I would joke to Ross in the moment, after every meeting we'd have about it, my little Apple watch would tell me my heartbeat was racing. It worked as cardio. It was horrible. And it was horrible through and beyond.
I know, looking back on the decisions that we made, it was the right thing to do for the organization. And the critiques that we got from it—some were right, some were wrong, both internally and externally. The things that folks really had negative feedback on, some of it's unavoidable, but some of it was like, yeah, it's because we didn't lead with our values. Because being really clear that when I took in that criticism, the places where they got to me were the places where I knew they were right. Understanding that, and having now made additional rounds of hard decisions over the years, it's important to be really clear that I can armor myself with my integrity. If I know I am in line with my integrity and I'm doing what's right for the whole, sometimes that may cause harm to the individual, but my job as a leader is to care for the whole. That's what I have to do.
How do you stay grounded and connected to the mission while everything is in flux?
I think for me, the thing that has always made this worth doing and that has always brought me joy, and is why I found this sustainable, is the candidates themselves. Getting to know them, getting to hear their stories, getting to see their impact, and to live their impact. I'm represented by a Run For Something alum on the New York City Council. I see her around the neighborhood. It's very fun. Getting to really see it work, like the work is working—that is so motivating. I am really grateful that we get to focus on the future. If you would like to have a good life in politics, focus on the things that are good about it. I feel very grateful to have a job that allows me to be so, be like professionally optimistic as well as personally optimistic.
Similarly, I have a lot of gratitude, particularly in these moments where we found ourselves in a shit dumpster firestorm. Finding gratitude and that like, actually, like I get to work day-to-day and change what that future looks like, or holding the line on what we have. And you're right, it does help to have the longevity and mental fortitude that is needed.
For any of the folks that are listening who might be in the middle of a change or anticipating one coming up, is there any piece of advice that you wish you had going into it that you could offer?
Change is hard, which I feel like is a very obvious thing to say, but it's worth naming. Because when you're going through it, you think it's a personal failing that it feels bad. It's not. Change is hard. I think about it like working out, like lifting weights. If you're doing it right, you might be a little sore. That soreness is the growth. That's the getting stronger. You wanna feel a little sore, because that discomfort is where the progress and growth come from.
The other thing I would say is, especially if you have control over the circumstances of the change, if you get a chance to shape what the new role is or what's given up, it's okay to be a little selfish in this regard. There's actually some of the best advice I got when I was rewriting my job description from some folks who are a little bit more experienced in business. One of them said to me, the thing that is best for the organization is whatever you need to do this job as well as you can. So if what you need is to not manage as many people, shape it like that. If what you need is executive assistance support, great, factor that in. It is good for the whole for you to be able to do your best work. And I appreciated that encouragement, because especially anyone who's not like a straight white dude often feels like, oh, I have to contort myself around and sacrifice or suffer for the cause. And I believe this in basically every other aspect of my life, that my suffering serves no purpose. It's actually a value to be joyful and to be really thoughtful about that.
You have a new book that just came out this spring, “When We’re in Charge: The Next Generation’s Guide to Leadership.” Can you share what the book is about?
So the book is not about politics, which is really fun for me. The book is about work. It's about life. It's about ambition. What it's really about is a leadership book for millennials and Gen Z in particular, that is unlike any leadership book you've ever read, because we are leading in a moment that is so different and requires such a different set of skills and tactics than the bosses we've had before us.
I think about things like, and write about things like, how do you be authentic without giving away your full self to your team or your job? How do you create an environment where people can be their real selves, but not their full selves? Because actually, work is not the right place for your full self. How do you have things like HR processes and work-life balance, guardrails and codes of conduct, and communication norms and decision-making models that are in service of creating an inclusive, psychologically safe, and equitable environment that can get things done while treating people like people first and worker bees second? And how do we, especially millennials and Gen Z, navigate when the ladders we climbed to get to where we are have crumbled beneath us, and we have no idea how to climb the next ones? How do we think about what we want to do with our lives? How do we find joy? How do we practice self-care? How do we build community?
And I got to talk to more than 130 leaders, yes, in politics. I talked to members of Congress and nonprofit executives, but also the CEO of Snapchat and the Teen Vogue editor-in-chief and daycare directors and faith leaders and doctors and lawyers. And it's so funny. The themes echoed across the different places and spaces. The lawyer who was dealing with the eighty-year-old partner who insisted on doing everything through dictaphone versus the rabbi who took over the pulpit for someone who had never taken a day off in the 55 years they'd been in service at the congregation, so she had to reteach the congregation how to respect her time. The daycare director or day camp director who had to create really clear policies about inclusivity and say no to parents who wanted to enroll their kids because they may not have aligned with those policies. They would be upset if their son came home with painted fingernails. She told me she was like, if that's the thing that makes you mad, then don't send your kid to the summer camp. To be inclusive, you have to be a little bit exclusive, things like that. So I'm really proud of the book. And I've loved hearing from people who've read it already and said this is the first leadership book they've ever found genuinely relatable.
What advice would you give to Gen Z or Millennial leaders who are pushing for positions of leadership and finding it hard to navigate or break through?
Again, it's hard because it's hard. It's always worth mentioning my editor, who, with my first draft, was like, "You can't say that in every chapter." And I was like, "But it's true!" And people need to hear that regardless. It's hard because it's hard.
And the most important thing is to know who you are, to have that deep self-awareness, to know what you believe, what you are trying to accomplish, and who your team needs you to be. If you're running for office, it's the same theory. If you know who you are, what you're trying to accomplish, what you believe in, what your team needs you to be, your goal is to find the overlap between those things. You want your leadership persona and who you are as a person to be as close together as possible, but you actually don't want them to be the same thing, because if they are the same thing, you are going to disintegrate into tiny little pieces under the pressure. I don't know anyone who could withstand the kind of feedback, especially if your leadership is in any public role, the kind of response you will experience as someone in charge in this particular moment.
So many of the leaders I spoke to named the feeling of, like, why does it feel like I'm running an adult daycare? Why am I managing all these people's work and their feelings? It's like, because we've asked them to bring more of themselves into the workplace. How do you create this task now of creating containers for that? That is a challenge. I mean, literally thinking back to the moments where I've run into that being like, wait, but this is work and not your life. If you're making those conscious decisions, you have to then provide, like you said, those container spaces and that process for folks to then be in the space how you want them to be. Or, alternatively, decide that work is not the right place for it. Model that, and make it clear what your expectations are. Hold those boundaries, and don't be afraid to stand by them.
What’s giving you hope right now—either in your organization or in the broader nonprofit space?
Right after the election, I was really nervous that people would be so discouraged. There was all this talk of like, the resistance is dead, and RIP resistance. I was really nervous that people would not want to run for office. In the two weeks after the election, we saw 10,000 people sign up. And the two weeks after Zoran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral election, we saw another 10,000 people sign up. We've had more people sign up since 2024 than we did. We'll likely exceed the entire first four years of Trump's presidency by the end of this year. It is unbelievable to me.
I'm so grateful for it, and I see the dashboard every day. I believe the numbers, but that people look around and instead of saying, screw this, I'm out of here, they're saying, screw this, I'm getting in the fight myself. Especially given the threats to personal safety that we have seen elected officials face, I am in awe of that bravery and so grateful for it and more committed than ever to do whatever we can to support those folks.
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