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It's really hard to run for political office
I ran for office three years ago. I don't think I'm going to do it again anytime soon. The challenges I see are contributing to a more polarized political environment.
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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.¹ I was lucky to have the support of voters, friends, local organizations, and national groups like WelcomePAC. By most objective measures, we ran a pretty good campaign.²
But in the waning hours of the 2022 legislative session, 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 by about a block.³
With no real path to winning, I couldn’t in good faith ask people for more time, energy, money, and support.⁴ So I dropped out.⁵
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,⁶ 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 people⁷ 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.⁸
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 dwellers⁹ who spend 15 hours a day picking fights on social media aren’t even a little bit representative of the electorate. 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.¹⁰
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.¹¹
The most successful candidates—Representatives like Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Jared Golden 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 in 2024,¹² 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,¹³ who ran for Congress in western Wisconsin while waitressing. 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, and in theory, it’s a good use of your time to talk to all of them.¹⁴
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. 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 ran and lost against Ann Wagner in MO-02 and collected a salary through this run; Wagner’s campaign hit him hard for it.¹⁵
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.
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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.¹⁶
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.¹⁷ But this does nothing to help candidates, who almost always end up losing money by running for Congress.¹⁸
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; I did an online Civilization VI stream to try to reach a different set of non-political people.¹⁹
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:
Support²⁰ 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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Trump had beaten Biden by all of 115 votes in the 2020 Presidential election; by presidential vote share, it was the most competitive Congressional district in the United States that year.
In all likelihood we would’ve won the primary, and we would’ve faced a difficult, though winnable, general election against incumbent Ann Wagner.
Wikipedia describes her as a member of the “moderate bloc of her party.” That’s an assessment with which I vehemently disagree. In any event, I do think she probably loathes Donald Trump, at least in private, because it’s forced her into taking some nuttier positions than she'd generally like to.
Based on what I heard from people in Jefferson City, that was targeted at me and designed to keep me from running. I’m one of the few people I know to have been personally gerrymandered, which is about 90% frustrating and 10% flattering.
There's maybe a lesson in here about not running Congressional campaigns in a redistricting year, but North Carolina and Ohio are doing just fine redistricting at their own cadence, so maybe you're never really safe.
I used this poker metaphor a lot: I was comfortable staying in the hand with an open-ended straight draw heading into the river. But I couldn't stay in when my only path to winning was hitting runner-runner aces on the turn and the river. (h/t to Jeff Smith, the Prince of Missouri Political Poker Metaphors.)
State Rep. Trish Gunby, who ultimately won a functionally uncontested primary, lost the general election by about 13%.
Apparently that includes my former boss Charlie Baker, a guy who I admire a ton.
Let me be clear: I’m hardly a perfect candidate for public office! But there are lots of obstacles for nontraditional candidates of all stripes—the sorts of people who, in many cases, do make the best candidates—that we need to address, or political extremism and polarization will get worse.
I've covered this more towards the end of my post, but there's a lot that's wonderful about it too. I don't want to create the impression that it's all bad. But it's definitely tough!
Where people found the energy or the time to think about me that much remains, genuinely, baffling to me. I promise you, I'm not that interesting.
There are a bunch of different examples of this. I remember tweeting in support of President Biden, after he called to “fund the police” in the ’22 State of the Union. Despite it being a hugely unpopular movement, then and now, the only vitriol was pretty stupidly unending.
Not just on this issue, but across the board: I thought the pendulum had swung too far on a bunch of different issues, and voters generally agreed with that in the 2024 election. But the loudest voices are the most extreme—entirely out of touch but with a direct line of communication through your notifications.
Specifically, I worked as a policy advisor for Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) and Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker (R).
This is true for young voters too. The most important issue for voters under 30, by far, was jobs and the economy.
It's no accident that in a district that Trump won by about 8%, Cooke, as a Democrat, lost by less than 3%.
In practice, of course, it’s lower: children, non-citizens, people you’re never going to win over, etc. But even then, it’s still hundreds of thousands of people with whom you could be having productive conversations.
The fact that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch covered the story as such is part of the problem, by the way. It's being treated as a bit of a scandal.
While I don't doubt that there are people who run for office to enrich themselves (people I have written about before, in fact), there are significantly faster, easier, and more lucrative ways to pull off a grift—a branded meme coin, for instance.
Ultimately, I’m lucky that I could afford to run for office. But it’s a tragic commentary on who’s able to run for office that I even have to say that.
When I mention to people I meet—friends of friends, at restaurants, wherever—that I work in politics, I can't tell you how often this comes up when I mention to people that I work in politics.
Data is not the plural of anecdote, but it’s consistent with my own experience: the fact that members of Congress can trade individual stocks feeds into a narrative of self-enrichment and corruption. That alone might be an argument for banning it.
Unfortunately, I could go on here about some of the other personal challenges of running for office. And these are basically true across the board, regardless of one’s political persuasion:
It completely erodes your sense of trust. The feeling of being in public—at a restaurant or wherever—with family or friends, looking over your shoulder to see who might be listening in on a private conversation is pretty exhausting.
On that note, it’s extremely demanding on your family. You as a candidate might sign up for this; your family did not. And they probably take things a lot more personally than you do.
And your prize for winning? You’re right back in the saddle, running again almost immediately. And obviously it’s pretty difficult to get laws passed in Congress these days even if you do manage to find your way to Washington.
Two things:
I'd like to think that I was ahead of the curve on this one, in terms of streaming video games I play as a way of reaching lower-propensity voters.
Shout-out to my friend Jack L., who noted (correctly) that I actually played really poorly in this livestream. I'll chalk it up to being distracted…
With votes, with volunteer time, or with money. Support in politics takes lots of different forms.
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