Running For Office

Candidate recruitment is an important practice, but contrary to the popular myth about how candidates are identified and supported, someone from the DNC does not appear on your doorstep one day out of the blue and proclaim that you should be the next state rep from Omaha. Good candidate recruitment takes interested parties, both on the candidate and organizational side, who care about their community and organizations and want to see real change.

Campaign training can make the difference between a winning and losing campaign—especially training for volunteers. Although it’s important that you have a good candidate, campaign manager, or volunteer coordinator who can gather the volunteers, if those volunteers are not provided with training, they might not be of any help. When volunteers can provide much of your people power on a campaign, it’s important to make sure they know what they’re doing. A simple and effective way to get your volunteers up to speed is to send them to a campaign training!

Daniel Hernández Jr. was born and raised in Tucson, Arizona. He's a first-generation college student who attended the University of Arizona and while in college, interned for then Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and was the first to administer first aid to her on that day of the tragic attack on her life. Daniel was inspired by Congressman Gifford's commitment to public service, so he decided to run for office and was elected to the local school board, becoming the youngest school board president in the district's history. I do remember that starting in 2017, Daniel then went on to serve at the Arizona State House as one of the youngest members ever elected. As a representative, Daniel co-founded the House LGBT Caucus and worked with both Republicans and Democrats to pass bills to protect survivors of sexual assault. He also worked to secure over $20 million for counselors and social workers to help pass a bipartisan budget to invest in K-12 funding in Arizona. Daniel is currently serving as the Government Affairs Director at Stand for Children in Arizona. This week, we asked Daniel 7 questions about his career path and experiences.

You can listen to the interview with Daniel Hernandez on how to run for office on the How to Win a Campaign podcast. 

In the world of political campaigns political power is often achieved through the party convention process. Whether you are running for state representative, county office, or President of the United States conventions still matter in many places.

Runoff election season is here. After a hard-fought election, your campaign made it into the runoff election. Depending on election law, these runoff elections could be held weeks or months after the original election. The type of voter who turns out for a runoff is different from other types of voters.

The process for finding good political candidates doesn’t involve filling out a job application. When a candidate decides to run for office, they may not realize that the time commitment requires hours of work and many more hours in the day. Sadly, the time commitment it takes to be a political candidate is not changing anytime soon.

While there has been a lot of hype that says Democrats have the 2016 Presidential Election in the bag and the electoral map is stacked in our favor, a simple look in the history book says otherwise. In the history of the modern presidency, after being in power for two terms, the party in power has flipped more often than not, with a couple notable exceptions.