I ran for board of education and it was an amazing experience. I went door to door in my small town, talked to hundreds of people, showed up at every town event wearing my blazer and nametag with "candidate for board of education". No BOE candidate before me had spent money on lawn signs - but they had to after me. I gave speeches, raised money, bought voter lists from the county and loaded them into our Oracle database at work (into my own DEV schema, of course, this was before I had cheap MySQL hosting) to identify the folks most likely to support me, used Google Maps and other mapping tools to map them out for personal visits.
And then I lost, and it was crushing. On election night when I stood in the election office and heard the precinct numbers come in one by one, I realized I'd never failed at anything significant before. But I'd do it all again - I will once my kids are older - it was one of the best experiences of my life.
Why? You've got no idea what his policies were! They could have been absolutely appalling, oppressive dystopian ideas, standing for everything you're against (I'm sure they weren't, exhilaration).
We desperately need more people to care enough to run. Since most of the power got concentrated in Washington, local politics is way to isolated from the rest of us. I'm poor, and I'm considering a run for a local office.
This last election day, only 4 of the races on my ballot were even contested. The policy could have been to chop up all logsfromblammo into kindling and use them light fires under wicker cages filled with crying children, and I still would have voted for it, just because it wasn't for the smug, major-party incumbent.
So yeah, thanks for running. Because of you, someone was able to make a choice.
When you're running on your own against incumbents who've been in office for years (decades sometimes) you've really gotta work hard and build up the kind of contact data the big campaigns have easy access too. For example, I had trouble asking for people's phone numbers so I could call them (or robocall them) on election day - that was my own weakness, I bet someone with more sales skills could have done a better job there but I'm just an engineer. I had no e-mail addresses either. I should have also visited the retirement homes in town, I only went door to door. The churches never returned my calls but I did try to visit them. Lots of factors - I'm sure my South Asian name also lost me some votes but hey, I bet I can get past that next time.
Three things, their voting record, their party registration, and any demographic information you can figure out.
The voter lists I've seen in NJ and PA tell you what elections voters have voted in, so you can eliminate registered voters that don't bother to vote. Additionally, in NJ, the school board elections were on a different date (in the spring) than the general election, so you could really target the 3-4% of voters who actually bothered to vote for school board.
Party registration is provided and be helpful if you want to position yourself as the democrat or republican, even if the race is technically nonpartisan.
If you want to target particular ethnic groups (latino, south asian, korean, chinese) you can do searches for common first or last names. Grouping by address can help you figure if there's a family living here - you also get date of birth - and maybe they've got a kid that just graduated from high school and might be more interested in a particular school issue. Some basic SQL skills can go a long way here.
A google search turns up this website that claims to have voter lists by political district, party affiliation, gender, ethnicity, wealth, among other things.
I ran for office (Redmond, WA City Council) and got 39% of the vote, and I didn't do nearly as much (press releases and the like) as the author did. I showed up for the "voter's forums" and the like, and the newspaper endorsement interviews. I spent money on yard signs, and spent many an evening putting them out. And I went door-to-door, using voter data to better target the doors upon which I knocked.
I do wonder how much you get for just having your name on the ballot. Here's what I told my wife during the campaign: "meh, I'm only running so that my opponent doesn't run unopposed. But if I weren't running against him, I'd vote for him." IOW, my opponent was a decent guy who held office for mostly the right reasons. And I still got 39%.
Anyone can run for office, fill out the form, pay the fee. How much you want to do after that is up to you. But if you don't have a track record (volunteer for the Parks board, head up the local trail improvement group, etc.), you won't get an endorsement. No one in the local political "machine" knows you. So go buy some signs, put on your walking shoes, and start knocking on doors. Have a few platform items that you think are important, and stick to those without getting distracted by things like "are you an R or a D?" for a non-partisan office. Ask questions of those you meet. What do they think is important? Do you think it's important enough to have a response?
Mainly, have fun. If you don't like meeting new people (which I don't), aren't able to think on your feet (I am), politics might not be for you. But despite my aversion to people, I found it fascinating and kind of fun, interspersed with large periods of boredom.
You would have to run candidates with different names, in this case we have a Jewish name (author) running against a somewhat Hispanic name, I imagine some percentage of people would vote just on perception of ethnicity.
That's definitely true; maybe if you know there's an anglo-sounding unopposed candidate and you have an anglo name, you can probably find an anglo friend to run alongside you.
I noticed that there doesn't seem to be a Republican candidate in the race. Not to degrade the author's efforts, but I wonder how much of the vote for the author was due to their being the only non-Democratic candidate.
Edit: I only mention this because "get 31% of the vote" is part of the headline. Part of it may be running in a race unopposed by the other major party.
Edit 2: My mistake, the percentage was part of the thread's original title, not the author's chosen title.
if counties in Florida are like certain Northern states there are agreements in place between the two parties to run or not run in some districts. Granted in some there is no point to run but then that is an area where its allowed to give the other guy face time.
Watching my cousin go over the ins and outs of moving from city to county was more than enlightening for me, as in frustrating and aggravating. For the most part who gets the seat is all about connections or worse, to get someone out of the way to a place many will think them harmless. There is also "owed a seat" mentality.
tl;dr two party politics has got to go. the level of manipulation at the local level is shocking and more widespread than many understand. there are break out candidates but even some of them are engineered
In my experience, Florida is pretty evenly divided.
Sure, there's the rural Republican areas, the urban Democratic areas, conservative retired communities, and the liberal immigrant neighborhoods, but I still doubt there's much of what you describe.
There are so many states each with their own unique political cultures it's very decentralized and "the party" isn't a unified entity as much as it is a group of people forced together by the historical accident of the two party system (just look at how many competing factions and ideologies there are like the tea party, evangelicals, libertarians, neocons, etc.). It's loose hierarchy that is largely held together by networks of donors and their relationships within communities. Nothing really stops you from running as a "Republican" or "Democrat" without support from party leadership except at the federal and state level because local election laws don't generally have the two party system baked into them.
Assuming the local/regional party machine backs him and provides campaign funds, he'll likely be required to at least call some major donors soliciting support for other campaigns that the relevant leadership is interested in or for the party organization itself. Congressmen at the state and federal level spend an absurd amount of time doing these calls on behalf of their own and others' campaigns because those elections are expensive to fight but at the local level, the elections are far cheaper and the allegiances to parties are looser. He would have to cater to his supporters in order to get their support for the next election but he wouldn't be obligated to do anything.
Besides the obvious ostracizing on behalf of the party, I wonder what would happen if I ran under a party banner, and then refused to do anything they asked of me along those lines.
The Log Cabin Republicans (Republican LGBT advocates) declined to endorse the party's presidential candidate in 1992 (Bush), 2004 (Bush) and 2016 (Trump)...except in 2016 a lot of local chapters that reversed the national organization's decision (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log_Cabin_Republicans#History).
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So....there's a lot of deviating from party lines. Candidates have run on multiple political parties at various times. But presumably, you'll usually get the most support if you run elbows with the side that you agree with most. And feigning political beliefs is possible, but ew.
I know that 31% is not insignificant but... it's not great either. If this was an incumbent, then there's probably a fair number of people who would've voted for _whoever_ the opposition candidate was.
I do like the idea of always running opposition candidates though, to force the other person to raise & spend campaign funds.
>I do like the idea of always running opposition candidates though, to force the other person to raise & spend campaign funds.
Needing to raise campaign funds is a big issue. Some congressman feel that it's almost a full time job calling donors. I rather not have that scenario and have them actually reading and considering legislation.
Soooooo to give you an argument ad absurdum, wouldn't it be ideal to have a monarchy/dictatorship so that our leaders can spend time thinking about legislation rather than those pesky elections?
Another alternative would be longer terms. Like 10-year, 20-year, or life-long terms?
I'm trying to think of an honest solution to the problem you've raised and I haven't found one that seems better. Maybe donors should be more humble, and be okay with an aid-to-the-legislator calling them for money?
If they were consistently responsible and accountable, a monarchy or even a dictatorship would be a better option. Campaigning is overhead loss; it's not desirable in itself, but is done because the obvious alternatives for maintaining accountability are significantly worse.
A high emphasis on fundraising is risky: a candidate who wins on donor money is going to be beholden to those donors (or won't get the money next election). I think there's a non-partisan case in favor of the state funding political campaigns, and limiting how much money goes into them.
"Falsehood" in formal logic means "a contradiction", not "a condition impossible to fulfill." It may be impossible to get a good dictator (except Cincinnatus, Sulla, and maybe Octavian Augustus), but "good dictator" isn't contradictory (as opposed to "neutron star not containing any neutrons" or the like).
And I mentioned a few examples of good dictators in that parenthetical, which suggest some of the requirements necessary to get a good one.
Your argument ad absurdum doesn't make any sense in this context because the problem isn't with elections but with how much they cost to compete in. A senate campaign in a competitive state like Florida or Pennsylvania costs tens of millions of dollars that candidates have to waste time raising from major donors instead of listening to the whole electorate and representing their interests. The more their opponents raise, the more they have to raise and it becomes a vicious cycle that only benefits whoever sells the candidates all that ad space.
There is a very obvious solution: publicly funded elections.
Cool, coming back at ya: (and the other sister comments suggesting campaign finance funding & limits)
The problem with publicly funded elections is that it gives the two major parties another way to lock-out independent/3rd-party candidates. There's usually some limit on who gets campaign money based off of past performance-- and if there wasn't a limit on who gets campaign money, then people would figure out how to run for Senate, and then spend their government-granted 10mil buying ads on their friend's podcast network.
It also runs into problems with free speech & Citizens United. Michael Moore tends to get noisy every election-- and in the most recent election he was able to explicitly say: "I prefer Clinton". In previous elections, before Citizens United, he would focus on political footballs that are highly partisan, so that his support for an issue was an easy proxy for support for a candidate, but it did not violate campaign finance laws. But it did violate the spirit of the campaign finance laws at the time, since he was raising money for a film that supported a candidate by proxy? But we should also be okay with that b/c free speech? You get yourself tangled real fast.
As with all major decisions there are many compromises to be made. When our representatives spend hours every day raising money throughout their political career I think we have clearly made the wrong ones.
> The problem with publicly funded elections is that it gives the two major parties another way to lock-out independent/3rd-party candidates. There's usually some limit on who gets campaign money based off of past performance
This is already a major barrier because the federal government provides tens of millions of dollars in funding to political parties whose presidential candidate gets a certain minimum percent of the popular vote (I don't remember if it is 5% or 15%). This publicly funded party infrastructure is what makes raising millions of dollars for a campaign possible by centralizing critical information like constituent data and donor lists. As far as independent/3rd party candidates themselves, publicly funded elections actually help them because it puts a hard limit on how much other candidates can use their financial advantage. It's a lot easier to compete using a volunteer ground campaign when your opponents aren't dumping millions into TV and radio ads as fast as they can raise it.
> and if there wasn't a limit on who gets campaign money, then people would figure out how to run for Senate, and then spend their government-granted 10mil buying ads on their friend's podcast network.
This happens all the time and there are already laws against it in many cases because its campaign finance fraud. It doesn't matter whether it's the tax payer or private donors. Publicly funded elections are worth the cost to the taxpayer of a few cases of fraud if it leads to better governance (which would lead to better protections against this kind of fraud).
> It also runs into problems with free speech & Citizens United.
That's not a valid criticism of publicly funded elections as a solution, only specific implementations and their feasibility. If federal publicly funded elections were implemented as a Constitutional amendment it would override the first amendment in a variety of ways depending on how it was worded. At that point any relevant precedent would be open to review at every level of the judiciary until the Supreme Court makes further decisions interpreting the new amendment's effect on precedent.
Don't know why it is absurd. Monarchies and dictatorships are forms of governments that either have been tried / still in power.
Longer terms is a possible solution. Think of house vs senate (2 vs 6 years). The house basically spends 50% of their time campaigning, because election year is every other year.
>Maybe donors should be more humble, and be okay with an aid-to-the-legislator calling them for money?
The largest donors aren't just humble, they're aggressively donating/investing their money into parties/people. Your suggestion to this is meant for people like Sanders who gains his donations from "normal" people instead of the rich.
There isn't a solution I can think of. To the first point, when we talk about gov't and politics, we talk about power. The pull that power has on people, the wealth that can be attained, and human greed. There are pros and cons to different types of gov'ts. Single decision makers can change directions quickly, get things done faster, but fail faster too. Democracies are made to be slow with checks and balances, but sometimes it's too slow, can't adapt quick enough, and just because there are more people doesn't make it immune to corruption.
> wouldn't it be ideal to have a monarchy/dictatorship so that our leaders can spend time thinking about legislation rather than those pesky elections?
There can be some reasonable arguments made for this to be the case. The future ruler could be educated in proper statesmanship, wouldn't have to pander to the masses, would arguably be more difficult to bribe, could focus on governing, etc.
But the failure mode of such a government seems to be much worse than a democracy's.
Similarly, we could just leave the current system alone except for one change: Pass laws requiring various media-flavored organizations to give equal airtime to every candidate. "Dear ESPN: If you want to operate in America, you must give each of these N candidates Y minutes of ads for free."
Strict campaign spending limits, ban tv advertising make all published literature have the candidates name or his/her agent and have the FCC mandate party political broadcasts.
I know that 31% is not insignificant but... it's not great either. If this was an incumbent, then there's probably a fair number of people who would've voted for _whoever_ the opposition candidate was.
See my other comment somewhere in this thread: IMO, the author got their arse kicked. I received 39%, didn't do nearly as much as the author, and I consider that a pretty solid defeat (but conveniently just shy of what I consider an arse kicking <g>). Somewhere there must be a study with hard numbers, but I figure X% just because I wasn't the other guy, Y% from voters who just randomly chose because they didn't really pay attention to the race, and 0.Z% from those that just screwed up the ballot. Leaving me with, I dunno, 20-25% who actually thought I was the better choice based on what they knew of me and the conversations we had. That's not a very good number. :-)
Not to take away from the main point, though. You want to run for office? You think you can do a better job? Then go do it. The barriers can be quite low for local offices, a bit higher for state offices. You'll get your arse kicked the first time around most likely. That's called "experience" and if you truly want to hold office, you'll be worlds ahead for next time. Most importantly, the vote is not a mandate on you as a person. I was soundly defeated, and that's fine: the people have spoken, and they said "come back in a few years when your better at this". Or they said, "the incumbent is doing a fine job, we see no reason to take a chance on someone new." But I never took it to be, "we just don't like you personally, mikestew."
In two-candidate races without write-ins, the minimum that any candidate got was 18.22%, and from scanning the numbers it feels like the median is in mid-30%s.
//edit also if someone at a PAC is reading, what they should really do is an analysis comparing campaign funding vs. votes received. Find the candidates that are making the most impact with the least amount of money. The candidates you agree with are the people who need support next election, and the candidates you disagree with are the dark horses you need to watch out for.
> I lost, but I got 31% of the vote and I only spent $3000. My opponent got 69% of the vote and spent $100,000.
I could be wrong, but I highly suspect that the curve connecting those two points isn't linear, and going from 30->40% is a lot harder than going from 10->30%.
For those interested in running for office in your area, https://www.runforoffice.org is a great resource to find open positions and get you started. I'm not affiliated with them, just think they're a great cause.
mix socially, especially with those of higher social status.
synonyms: associate, mix, fraternize, socialize, keep company, spend time, go around, mingle, consort, network, rub shoulders, rub elbows;
Shea capitalized the term every time he used it on the blog, and specifically mentioned tables and events. It made it sound like there's a specific event or organization beyond the generic term.
It looks like it's the name for a kind of straw polling / political event. Googling it shows a bunch of events in FL, I live here and have never heard of it, but seems to be used throughout the state.
I've been thinking about running for office in the next few years. To be honest though I want to understand more about the roles available and where I would benefit the community the most.
I don't know. During the campaign I found out my wife is pregnant (with our first :D ). That's such a life changing event, I have no idea what I will do in two years time.
And then I lost, and it was crushing. On election night when I stood in the election office and heard the precinct numbers come in one by one, I realized I'd never failed at anything significant before. But I'd do it all again - I will once my kids are older - it was one of the best experiences of my life.