After the disastrous election of 2016, the Democratic Party and its affiliated operatives and activists were left to sift through the wreckage and figure out what had gone wrong. Some diagnoses became clear over time, including that Democrats had ignored state and local races while Republicans had built enduring, powerful majorities in legislatures; the leadership and donor class had focused on national races while ignoring and underfunding down-ballot candidates. One glaring sign that the party was simply not running enough candidates was that Republican Rep. Pete Sessions easily won reelection in his Texas district even though Hillary Clinton carried the presidential vote there—no Democrat had bothered to register to run against him.
Run For Something was one of several new groups that emerged from that time of searching and reassessment. Founded by two veteran Democratic strategists, the organization’s mission is deceptively simple: It wants progressives under 40 years old to run for local and state offices. To achieve this goal, RFS spends money on ads that encourage first-time candidates to enter the political arena and offers varying levels of support to candidates who RFS identifies as especially promising. To date, it says it has brought over 90,000 people into its “pipeline,” endorsed 1,800 candidates, and helped elect 637 candidates.
RFS is different from a lot of other organizations in that it doesn’t target swing states. Its power-building strategy is longer-term than that: By electing Democrats at the lower levels of government, RFS hopes to not just get good people in vital but oft-ignored positions like school board members and election officials, but also build a bench of experienced progressives who will go on to win higher office. It also hopes to make Democratic officeholders more diverse by breaking the cycle of local Democratic parties recruiting candidates who look like candidates who have won before (white men who have networks to draw on for fundraising).
No one is doing what RFS is doing, and it occupies a key position in the progressive electoral ecosystem. Blue Tent highly recommends donating to Run For Something, and considers funding the group a priority.
What are its core strategies?
To achieve its overall goal of electing young progressives to local and state offices, RFS runs a several-pronged strategy:
It has a relatively new (as of 2020) 501(c)(3) called Run For Something Civics, which is aimed at encouraging young people to run for office and fight back against “American gerontocracy.” RFS Civics provides some basic tools for would-be candidates, allowing them to look up offices that they can run for based on their location and giving them state-specific guides about starting a campaign.
It runs online ads, video series, and events like National Run For Something Day to get people excited about running for office.
RFS Ascend is a program that steers funds to a select group of candidates for local office in key states like Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Texas, with an eye toward building power and supporting people who may eventually run for higher office in the next decade or so.
At the core of RFS’s work is building a pipeline of candidates through a multi-step process that has been refined over the years. First, someone fills out a questionnaire explaining who they are, where they live, what office(s) they are considering running for, and why they want to run. (You can also recommend someone to run for office.) Prospective candidates then get onboarded through one-on-one calls with volunteers who ask them about why they’re running and a conference call with the RFS team. After that, candidates can take advantage of a variety of online resources (including a Slack channel) and be connected with “mentors”—campaign professionals and others with relevant experience who can offer advice in particular areas. This form of support is particularly valuable because first-time candidates especially may need help with the fundamentals of campaigning, like how to acquire and use a voter file, or what forms of voter outreach are effective for their sort of race.
Candidates can also apply for an official RFS endorsement, which carries with it an additional level of support, including advice from an RFS regional director and guides not available to non-endorsed candidates. This is where RFS is more selective—over 90,000 people have entered the RFS pipeline over the years, but as of 2021, only 1,813 candidates have been endorsed.
In 2022, RFS is focused particularly on school board and election administrator posts. These, even more so than state legislative races, are in the weeds, and often overlooked— for example, there’s no official national Democratic committee in charge of winning school board seats. But these positions are vital, especially as conspiracy-addled Republicans try to take over these posts as part of decentralized, chaotic schemes to sabotage election results and stir up moral panics about public schools.
RFS supports and endorses candidates everywhere, and this includes candidates running in deep-blue cities, as well as candidates primarying Democratic incumbents (provided that these challengers can articulate a good reason for running against a fellow Democrat). This reflects the goal of electing young, energetic progressives—including in cases where these dynamic young politicos are trying to unseat a Democrat they don’t think is doing a good job. When this happens, RFS will give the local Democratic Party a head’s up that they will be backing a challenger, but sometimes this news isn’t unwelcome; there have been instances where the local party is quietly happy that an incumbent who isn’t doing a good job is facing competition.
How does it spend money?
In 2021, RFS had a budget of $3.1 million. A portion of that is donated directly to candidates through Ascend, but the majority of its money is spent on staffing. That’s the opposite of how most PACs operate, which are often focused on independent expenditures in the most prominent federal races, which means millions dumped into TV and online ads.
By contrast, Run For Something’s most important contributions are non-monetary. Candidates often cite the hands-on help they get from RFS and mentors as being particularly important, and this makes sense: at higher levels (statewide and congressional races) campaigns have relatively large, experienced staffs, but candidates at the school board level may need help figuring out how to get on the ballot or calculating their win number.
With more money, RFS could continue to ramp up its operations, endorse more candidates, and provide them with more support.
What is its track record of achieving its goals?
When RFS began, it was sort of an experiment—its initial plan in 2017 called for recruiting five strong candidates. This goal had to be revised upwards, as thousands of people answered the initial call to run for office or volunteer. RFS says that its most important metric is the number of people who run for office (more on that below). By those standards, this has been a runaway success, recruiting or inspiring thousands of candidates with a modest budget.
Does it have strong leadership and governance?
Its founders, Amanda Litman and Ross Morales Rocketto, have been at the organization’s helm the entire time, which has helped RFS maintain its clear vision. RFS emphasizes not doing work that is duplicative of other Democratic-aligned nonprofits and PACs, and it has stayed very focused on its core mission even as it has partnered with other organizations and launched a companion 501(c)(3). The next step for it will be to expand its full-time staff.
What metrics and milestones does it use to measure its success?
One interesting fact about RFS is that its win rate among endorsed candidates was highest in 2021, a down year for Democrats overall. One takeaway from this is that the types of local elections RFS is involved in are not totally nationalized—a quality candidate with a good support system can still win. But the RFS team really doesn’t care too much about win rate. In fact, a high win rate is actually proof that they aren’t being ambitious enough in their endorsement process. Most first-time candidates lose. Hopefully, a lot of those candidates will come back and run again, and win—and RFS is helping to encourage that process through the Future Winners partnership with Sister District and EMILY’s List.
The primary metric for RFS, the group’s lodestar, is how many people it can encourage to run for office. The goal is to make half of those people women, a quarter of them people of color, and a quarter of them LGBTQ. RFS’s endorsements in 2021 were 53% women, 55% POC, and 26% LGBTQ candidates.
A 2018 Data for Progress analysis of the intake forms RFS collected showed that around 10% of people who expressed interest in running actually ran. That indicates how wide of a net RFS needs to cast in order to put candidates in the field.
How transparent is it about its spending, results and learning from its mistakes?
Run For Something is one of the most transparent PACs we’ve looked at, issuing detailed yearly plans that break down how much money the group has spent, the number of candidates it has endorsed and where, and what its plans for the future are. Sometimes, this includes notes about what tactics didn’t quite work, like the in-person candidate recruitment events it put on at one point.
This sort of transparency is common among post-2016 progressive groups, which are much more open about their tactics and strategy than the buttoned-up official party committees. But RFS is even more transparent than most of these, which its founders say is because no one has built an organization devoted solely to down-ballot candidate recruitment—in order to build trust, they say, RFS has to be an open book.
Is it committed to racial and gender equity both internally and in its strategies?
As noted above, one of RFS’s core goals is to diversify Democratic officeholders. From the beginning, its only hard requirement for the candidates it recruits has been age—the ceiling used to be 35, but that has been moved up to 40. But youth is a shortcut for all kinds of diversity, because the younger generation of Democrats trends less white and more likely to be LGBTQ. This diversity is on display in the slates of endorsements RFS has released.
Does it collaborate well and is it respected by its peers?
RFS is very emphatic about not doing things that other organizations are already doing. This is a rare attitude at a time when high-spending PACs tend to cluster around a handful of federal races and progressive organizations concentrate their efforts on a limited number of swing states. RFS is involved in races that no other national organizations are thinking about, and provides support to candidates who need it the most. Sometimes its candidates at the state legislative level wind up being supported by other organizations, but RFS gives them tools from the very beginning of their candidacies, and sometimes inspires them to run in the first place.
RFS partners with other organizations on occasion, for instance, the aforementioned Future Winners program. It can also come into conflict with the Democratic Party when it backs candidates who are primarying incumbents, but it doesn’t have the same innate pugnaciousness and thirst for conflict that the Justice Democrats or other anti-centrist organizations do.
Does it have clear and realistic plans for the future?
Run For Something has spent the last few years in a rush to scale up its operations, building the plane while it’s in midair. 2021 was its biggest year ever in terms of candidates recruited into the pipeline, and 2022 could be bigger still as it focuses on school board and election administration posts, offices that progressives are going to be highly motivated to run for in order to stop Trumpists from filling them. RFS’s unique role in the progressive ecosystem and its stable leadership makes it likely that it will continue to grow and recruit candidates in all 50 states.
Conclusion
Giving to Run For Something is an investment in the future. RFS-endorsed candidates may not be running in major races, or even in key state legislatures, but one of Democrats’ problems in the past decade has been an unwillingness to play the long game. Everyone is worried about who will control Congress in 2022 and 2024, but we should also consider who will control Congress in 2030 and 2040. RFS’s pipeline will help ensure that battle-tested progressive candidates are running for office in those years.
Additionally, at a time when the Democratic Party is swimming in money, RFS has a relatively small budget and needs funding to expand its operations. Donors give tens of millions every cycle to Senate campaigns that have little chance of success and are unlikely to have any long-term impact. RFS deserves more money to continue its good work.