Political Candidates Can't Do Everything

by Joe Fuld (He/Him)

Good political candidates delegate

Political Candidates Must Learn to Delegate

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.

Prioritizing tasks as a candidate, campaign manager, or political campaign staff is critical to running any political campaign.  Delegation might be the scariest part of running for office for a political candidate. Handing your life over to a team of people and losing a lot of autonomy over your time and schedule is not easy. However, delegation is a necessity for winning. If you as a candidate insists on having your hands in every aspect of the political campaign, nothing will ever get done and the political campaign is doomed to fail.

You as a political candidate will have many obligations throughout the political campaign, but you’ll need to focus only on answering two simple questions about any task to determine its level of priority.

1. Will this gain another vote toward my vote goal?

2. Will this raise money to use toward more voter contact?

Now not everything will fall perfectly into a yes or no category, but it will definitely help to keep these basic questions in mind when prioritizing tasks. Every political campaign ends on Election Day and whoever has the most votes wins. In order to clinch those votes, you as the candidate must be focused on raising money to reach more voters to achieve their vote goal.

This is also very important for the campaign manager to know as well because they will ultimately be the person ensuring that you are in fact raising money or garnering more votes.  It also helps the campaign manager delegate tasks to other staff.

As a political candidate, you will have a lot of people pulling you in a thousand different directions, but if you can make sure that any task passes muster with the two questions above then you will be on the right track.

Have experiences with overburdened political candidates staying on task in the heat of a political campaign? Add your story here: