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Three years ago, I was running for U.S. Congress in St. Louis.
When I started running, it was a true 50/50 district. I was lucky to have the support of voters, friends, local organizations, and national groups like WelcomePAC [ [link removed] ]. By most objective measures, we ran a pretty good campaign.
But in the waning hours of the 2022 legislative session [ [link removed] ], the Republican-controlled legislature made the district about 10 points more Republican and, for good measure, drew my house out of the district I was running in [ [link removed] ] by about a block.
With no real path to winning, I couldn’t in good faith ask people for more time, energy, money, and support. So I dropped out.
I get asked a lot whether I’m likely to run for office again. There’s a classic I-wouldn’t-rule-anything-out attitude in politics, but with every year that goes by, it’s less and less likely that I do it again.
We need to find ways to make it easier for good people to run for office. Because right now, it’s brutally difficult—especially for the sorts of candidates whose profiles give them the best chance of winning hard races.
On a good day, only 45% of people hate you
You know that going in, and you know that you’re not going to be able to please everyone. But what caught me by surprise:
There are hundreds of people who commit a lot of time to the act of hating you. It doesn’t matter that you know, intellectually, that the basement dwellers who spend 15 hours a day picking fights on social media aren’t even a little bit representative of the electorate [ [link removed] ]. It’s hard to not let that warp your worldview.
I assumed that, running as a Democrat, most of the vitriol would come from the political right. Some did, but most came from the far left.
I ran because, in a Republican-leaning district, I thought my background—as an unapologetic pragmatist—was a good fit for the district, and better than what we’d been getting:
I’ve voted for both Democrats and Republicans in my life. I came to the Democratic Party disheartened and dismayed by Trumpism, but not all Republican ideas are bad, and not all Republicans are morally bankrupt.
I’ve worked on both sides of the aisle, which is pretty unusual in this political moment.
The most successful candidates—Representatives like Marie Gluesenkamp Perez [ [link removed] ] and Jared Golden [ [link removed] ] who consistently win in Republican-leaning districts—do so by running this kind of campaign: independent-minded and focused on local issues.
To win in purple and red-leaning districts, Democrats have to meet voters where they are—and that very often means finding areas where you can differentiate yourself from an unpopular national brand. That’s especially true right now: the economy was the top issue for voters [ [link removed] ] in 2024, and voters trusted Donald Trump on this issue considerably more than Kamala Harris.
So fighting among Democrats because your message is too politically inclusive? That’s bang-your-head-against-a-wall frustrating when you’re running for a Republican-leaning seat.
It’s all-consuming (of your time and your money)
I have a ton of respect for Rebecca Cooke [ [link removed] ], who ran for Congress in western Wisconsin while waitressing [ [link removed] ]. It is extremely difficult to work while running. Why?
There’s basically no upper bound on how much work you could do: there are 760,000 people or so who live in a Congressional District [ [link removed] ], and in theory, it’s a good use of your time to talk to all of them.
To do the work that you need to run a campaign—meet with voters, raise money, manage press, etc.—it’s borderline impossible to work a full-time job. It’s hard enough to find the time just to sleep and eat.
Congressional candidates are allowed to pay themselves a salary out of their campaign funds [ [link removed] ]. This is a good policy, one that allows people without substantial savings to run for office.
The problem is that it’s used as a powerful political hit. Ray Hartmann [ [link removed] ] ran and lost against Ann Wagner [ [link removed] ] in MO-02 and collected a salary through this run; Wagner’s campaign hit him hard for it [ [link removed] ].
When you consider the views of the American public, I get it. 63% of voters say that some or all people running for office do so to enrich themselves [ [link removed] ].
But no matter how much you have, running for Congress requires you to draw down on savings. It’s a sacrifice treated as an exercise in self-enrichment, which is a tough combination.
Should members of Congress be barred from trading individual stocks? Absolutely. It corrodes trust, feeding into the narrative above, and it’s opposed by the overwhelming majority of Americans [ [link removed] ]. But this does nothing to help candidates, who almost always end up losing money by running for Congress.
There’s a lot that’s wonderful about running too
I’m not a misanthrope and there’s a lot that’s uniquely rewarding about running for office too. The ability to meet people from all walks of life—different neighborhoods, different ages, different jobs, different lived experiences—is unlike anything else you can do.
The fun parts are meeting people who don’t think about politics every day, with whom you can have interesting and nuanced conversations, even if they’re not ultimately going to vote for you.
I went around to parts of the district where there weren’t a lot of Democrats; I did an event at a bar in St. Charles where I was most certainly the first political candidate to show up there [ [link removed] ]; I did an online Civilization VI stream [ [link removed] ] to try to reach a different set of non-political people.
Politics is a game of addition, not subtraction, and these sorts of efforts are critical to winning elections. But given the other constraints of running a campaign—party pressure, fundraising pressure, making it through primaries—it’s tough to do.
Reaching new voters, independent voters, and I’m-not-sure-whether-I’m-going-to-vote voters usually doesn’t become a priority for campaigns until close to the end, at which point most candidates have probably been running for at least a year.
What can we do to make it easier for people to run for office?
There’s no easy fix for this, obviously. But a few ideas for how we fix this:
Support candidates like Jared Golden and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who have a track record of winning because they understand that politics is a game of addition. There are plenty of those candidates out there, running at all levels of government, and they deserve your support.
Don’t stigmatize candidates who draw salaries from their campaign accounts. The vast, vast majority of working-age Americans can’t easily take a year off to run for office—but in many cases, those are the best candidates. Within reason, we shouldn’t be hitting them for supporting their families.
As a candidate, as a party loyalist, or as a campaign volunteer, find the people who are less likely to vote, because they’re busy or distrustful or whatever else. Demonstrate that you show up and that you care.
Get off social media! This is true for candidates, voters, citizens, and just about everyone. It’s pretty clearly bad for all of us…
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