First, a programming note: We’re going Live!
Today — Monday, February 24 — at 11:00 a.m. Eastern, join us on Substack Live with scholar of fascism Ruth Ben-Ghiat. And on Friday, February 28, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll talk with Stephen Wertheim, the historian and theorist of America’s place in the world. To join us, download the Substack app and turn on notifications. You’ll get an alert when we’re live and you can watch from your iOS or Android device.
Chances are, you’re frustrated with your leaders right now. You might even have calls out to them. You might even have tried protesting them. Trying to wake them up.
Here’s a better idea. Run for office yourself.
We’re not only talking about senator and congressman and governor and mayor and jobs like that you hear about on the news all day long. We’re talking about running for the thousands and thousands of elected offices that form our political infrastructure.
“Don’t boo. Vote” was the old mantra. The emerging one may be: “Don’t boo. Run.”
If you did, you would not be alone. Since Election Day 2024, 20,000 people have contacted Run for Something, the organization that political strategist Amanda Litman co-founded in 2017 to help new candidates run for office. They are calling to ask about running as Democrats in state and local races across the country. And Litman’s not the only one who sees how important that is.
The Trump-Musk(-Vance?) agenda might be unpopular, but no matter how unpopular, the Democratic brand has suffered a serious beating, and it’s going to take a new generation of Democrats to get in the fight if there’s going to be any hope of Democrats taking back the House in 2026. The Republican Party played a very long game to get where they are, slowly building power by winning seats on school boards and city councils for decades, even as Democrats spent more of their time and money on national races — creating a situation where in many districts, Republicans run unopposed nowadays. And if you run unopposed, it doesn’t matter how unpopular your policies are.
Amanda Litman wants to put a stop to that. Beginning with the understanding that winning nationally starts with winning locally, she’s focused on recruiting and supporting younger Democratic candidates at the state and local levels — and she has helped a lot of them win. The organization has managed to elect 1,500 of its candidates since 2017, and some of them — Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett, for instance — have since become nationally visible leaders. Clearly, Litman is onto something.
We’ve heard a whole lot that we’re the only ones who are coming to save us — and as Anat Shenker-Osorio told us the other day, “If you want to, you’re a leader.”
So if you want to, now is a great time to act. You can join a call for prospective candidates this Tuesday at 8 p.m. Eastern (sign up here). Or visit runforwhat.net to check out races near you and sign up to begin the process. Not quite ready to commit? You can help financially — as you might have read, Democratic organizations are facing a fundraising crunch, especially at the state and local level where Run for Something works — at runforsomething.net/donate.
Also of interest: Litman has a new book coming out this spring, titled When We’re in Charge: The Next Generation’s Guide to Leadership. In it, she aims to bring her insights on what younger leaders need to know about running organizations to a broader audience, in and out of politics.
Read on for our conversation with Litman about what Run for Something is doing to serve its new class of potential candidates, why Democrats need to think like influencers, what we can learn from JD Vance, and why internet-native millennial and Gen Z candidates are poised to deliver the wins of the future — and the future itself.
20,000 people have reached out to ask about running for something since Election Day. That’s…a lot. How does that compare to an average year?
And as of today, it’s about 8,000 just since the inauguration. So Run for Something, as you know, launched on Trump’s first Inauguration Day. In the first week of Trump’s first presidency, we had about a thousand people sign up. In the first year, we had about 15,000. 20,000 in just about three-and-a-half months is an unbelievable number.
These are people who are thinking about running in 2026, which is incredible because that is a year in which we should prepare to win big.
Are you hearing from a lot of people who want to run in red states, in purple states?
We have seen it in all 50 States. We’ve had sign-ups from everywhere. It’s mostly commensurate with population, which is not surprising, but we’ve had folks ranging from rural Oklahoma and Georgia and Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas. Over the years we’ve seen incredible interest in Kansas as well as obviously in New York, California, Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan. You name it. Any place where you’re having sort of the changing nature of communities you’re seeing people want to run, to really speak to that change.
I don’t know if at this stage people are expressing this clearly, but what kind of races are people looking at?
I see a lot of people talking about state legislature, which is great. We have a huge number thinking about municipal elections, and I think the biggest driver for a lot of that is housing. They want to tackle the housing crisis and zoning, and the municipal governments are a great way to do that. And then school boards — we’ve seen a ton of interest. That’s both proactively on our part trying to find people who want to run for school board, as well as people looking at what happened in their schools.
That’s really interesting, that this emerging YIMBY movement is having an effect.
You know, because we work with primarily folks 40 and under they engage in the housing market in a very different way than boomers. They are experiencing it first and foremost as renters or first-time buyers, but really as renters. And it’s something we want to explore. A lot more of in the weeks and months to come, how we can really engage those folks to enter government and bring their lived experience with them, because when you have a room full of either homeowners or landlords, you have a very different perspective on what it means and why it matters to build more housing, and in fact you might be disincentivized from wanting to do that for any number of reasons.
Something else I’ve been hearing about are people who are coming to you after having been fired from federal jobs. These are people activated directly by what’s been going on over the last 4-5 weeks. What are they looking to do?
They share the same kind of sentiment of wanting to fight back because they’re not seeing their leaders do so. And if you think about it, folks who work for the Federal Government are for the most part people who are motivated by public service, who could have done the same thing in the private sector for much more money.
We saw just in the last weekend an 80 percent increase in sign-ups over the weekend prior. I suspect that’s because the termination notices and Fork in the Road emails were finalized, and you saw a whole bunch of folks saying, “What can I do now?”
I think that if you have worked for the Federal Government and your campaign pitch is “Trump, and Elon Musk illegally fired me for fighting for you or for working for the American people,” it’s a pretty compelling argument.
Yeah, the ads write themselves, really. You maybe can look at what Trump and Musk are doing as the ruling class defending its interests — but why do they want to radicalize everyone and create what amount to revolutionary preconditions?
Yeah, it’s really only effective if the goal is to destroy government. But the downstream effects of that and the people that you’re radicalizing against them, I think, is going to come back and bite them in the ass.
It’s basically incentivizing people to strengthen government.
Yeah, the loss aversion is really high when you start taking away public services and goods that people are used to getting they’re gonna get really pissed. And I actually expect in the next couple of years — assuming democracy survives, and I believe it will, I’m hopeful that it will, and I will work so that it will — you’re gonna see a pushback towards people who want to build our institutions back in a way that is better, stronger, and more effective. And people are really gonna understand what government has been doing for them all these years.
We’re going to see state and local leaders either being very clear about the failures of federal government, or the failures of the Trump administration and being able to really articulate to their communities how this has harmed them.
I think a perennial problem for people running as Democrats has been an inability to call out the problems because the national party has not really been very clear about it, in terms of being able to name names and say, “Look, here is what we’re working against.”
Yeah, I think it allows for a very clear story of enemies, which is something that Democrats have struggled with in the past.
In the short term there are special elections; you have some candidates involved. We’ve been talking about 2026 so far, but can you talk a little about what’s at stake right now?
Well, there are special House races, obviously to fill some of the vacancies Trump has created, and I think every single one is an opportunity to flip a seat, even if some of them are long shots. But there’s also just about 100,000 other elections — totally normal elections — happening this year. Run for Something is gonna have candidates in many of them. I think that every election this year, no matter how big or small, is a chance to prove that the GOP’s bullshit has electoral consequences.
We saw this in the Iowa State Senate race earlier this year, where Democrats flipped a seat in a district Trump won by 21 points. We just won 2 municipal offices in Oklahoma in the last couple of weeks. These are chances to practice winning in a way that will beget more winning. It builds momentum. It proves out the case. I think it will start to scare Republicans, and I think it will mentally help fortify, hopefully, members of Congress, but elected officials at every level.
Trump may have won the popular vote. But what he is doing is not popular. That will turn out Democratic voters.
You’re even seeing expressions of concern from Republican reps. Certainly about, “Oh, this is affecting my district in a really bad way.” And if any of those districts are districts where there is a special election to fill a vacancy this year —
That’s a big deal. There are school board races, about 20,000 this year. There are municipal races. Over 5,000 cities have mayoral elections this year, New York being one of them. San Antonio, Fort Worth, Omaha. Red states, blue states, all of these places. There’s something like 30,000 open city council seats this year. Just over a thousand judgeships, open state appellate court judges, state trials, county courts, including districts in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee. That’s a big deal, especially since every single one is a chance to build a bulwark against Trump.
So asking on behalf of our readers, some of whom I would imagine are on your list, but we hear them asking a lot about practical steps they can take right now. Not ready to do this, or they feel like they can’t, for whatever reason. But everyone wants to get out there and do something. What can they be doing?
I think everyone should consider running for office at some point now or in the future, and you can always look up what offices are available at runforwhat.net.
If now is not the right time, or if you know your vision is 5 years down the road. Engaging locally, in local politics, can be incredibly meaningful, and you could win. Both of those things are true. You get to know the candidate, you get to know the staff, or you might become the staff or the campaign manager. You get to live the impact of your election in a way that can be really meaningful and fulfilling.
I live in New York, and I think about how many people in New York took buses to Pennsylvania to knock doors who had never knocked a door for a municipal election in their life. I’m not saying that was a bad thing to do, but it is part of the reason — that attitude and the mentality that that represents — why Eric Adams is mayor today.
That’s why we have people running major cities who don’t represent the people who actually live there.
The other thing is that basically every Democratic organization is suffering for money. There is a huge funding shortfall on the left. It’s understandable. People just spent literally billions of dollars in 2024. They feel paralyzed by choice. They don’t know what the future is.
So if there is an organization doing something you like, whether it’s Run for Something (I hope), or anyone else, set up a recurring donation of whatever you can afford.
People are asking, “Where are the Democrats?” And some of the things that people are saying about Democratic members of Congress I agree with. But when they ask, “Why aren’t they running ads here? Why aren’t they organizing protests there?” That shit costs money. Where do you think the money is coming from?
I think a lot of people resent being asked for money now, they see Chuck Schumer talking about the price of tomatoes or something that is like that which is not really salient, and they wonder exactly what they’re supporting. It’s a real question for people.
It is. And I share that frustration. I will say basically, everything that wasn’t the presidential super PAC or the Presidential campaign had funding issues in the last two years. There were voter grassroots organizing groups that had to do program cuts. Run for Something had to do program cuts.
I get it. Everyone has priorities. You should give to what you think makes a difference, and the Democratic Party has structurally, for as long as I have been working, failed to invest in the kind of year-round, long-term infrastructure-building work that is not sexy and not flashy — but when you need it, you will wish you had built it.
If all of those grassroots groups and voter contact groups and media companies — if all of them had been fully funded, would we have won in 2024? I don’t know. The anti-incumbency, the inflationary period, probably still would have come. But would we be better positioned now to fight back? 100 percent. And would we be better positioned to fight on tough Senate terrain in 2026, to prepare for a totally insane electoral college realignment after 2030, when they redo the census, and all of a sudden the electoral college math is totally turned around?
If the Democratic Party had invested more in municipal races and local races and state-level races, in those states the ability of their Republican representatives to act as they are could have been much decreased even now.
You can think about this discourse about, “We need better messengers.” Who do you think a messenger is but a candidate, an elected official? We need better people who are willing to run as Democrats. This is not rocket science. We need to ask them to run, help them do it. We need the kind of people who want to do this, who want to run, to be interesting and genuine, and able to show up online as themselves, and to understand that the Republican party is not on the level because they are not. They need to be ready to throw punches strategically, but also ready to be compassionate and authentic themselves.
We talked to Chris Murphy the other day and we were talking about various proposals out there, that there should be a shadow cabinet, that the DNC chair needs to do more, that there needs to be a Joe Rogan on the left. And he said, no — what you actually need are more AOCs, more Jasmine Crocketts.
Jasmine Crockett is a Run for Something alum, a perfect example. I saw someone — I think it was George Conway — on Bluesky saying, “I want to order a hundred more Jasmine Crocketts, please, and thank you.” And I was like, I’ll give you 1,500 of them.
And out of 1,500 Run for Something alums, I can name probably 20 or 30 who have become national names over the years. It’s not a bad ratio. The next generation of Democratic leadership, if given the opportunity to take the baton, are gonna fucking sprint with it.
They certainly have the conditions to do it. This environment, as bad as it is, gives you a ready-made way to make the case.
It takes effort and money, and it takes boldness, it takes spine, and it’s not even that unique, because honestly, any 27-year-old who’s been on Instagram for the last 10 years, knows how to do it.
You have to know how to walk the line between public persona and real person. I think AOC is a really good example. I think Maxwell Frost is a good example of this. Sara Jacobs and Lauren Underwood do a really good job. Suhas Subramanyam, a Run for Something alum who’s a new member of Congress from Virginia
If you look at their social content, you can see like, this is a real person. And even if I’m not getting all of them I’m getting enough of them that I know who they are and what they believe, and I can trust them, and also they can enter non-political spaces and not be robots.
I think that there’s a whole generation of Democrats in Congress for whom, when they ran for office, the skills that you needed were not the same as what you need to succeed now.
And that’s the real story behind the idea of a gerontocracy. It’s not that they’re old per se; it’s that they came up in a different era of broadcast media. They’re not equipped for this.
You know, one reason Run for Something focuses exclusively on candidates 40 and under is to combat the gerontocracy, because the only way you can break it down is by having a really broad field of younger leaders who are ready to rise.
Younger people have built-in media skills because you have to, just as part of being a person navigating the world now.
If you’ve been thinking about what it means to have set up an AIM profile and then a MySpace, and now you’ve been on Reddit or Instagram, all of it. It is in many ways thinking about public curation of self. You know how to be a real person in public.
And when not to be. I think that’s important, because I think it’s different from the notion you should “bring your whole self.” AOC has been very good on this on her social channels, for example, understanding how to make that distinction, talking about what of yourself you bring to other people.
There is, I think, a really millennial and Gen Z rejection of this idea that you should bring your full self. Not every space is where your full self belongs. What you should have is a really clear sense of self, and then know how to calibrate it, for where you are, and that is something that millennials, and Gen Z in particular, having done so online for the last 20 years, know how to do.
Code-switching, really, is what it is.
And it’s doing so in a way that still holds true to your core self, that feels authentic and real.
Like, I fucking hate JD Vance. I think he’s an odious, soulless monster. But he’s really good at this. His online presence, the way he shows up, his dunks and racist tweets, versus the way he showed up on the debate stage against Tim Walz. The dude knows how to calibrate himself for the space he’s in. He’s a blogger.
And when I think about who on the left could take JD Vance in 2028 — it’s certainly not anyone over the age of 55. It needs to be someone who is the right amount of online.
It’s funny, because, by traditional measures, Vance is quite unpopular. His poll numbers are low. He is roundly disliked.
As we’ve seen, to win an election you don’t need to be well-liked. You just need to be liked enough by the people who you need to show up.
Donald Trump is super unpopular. But part of the thing with Trump that actually gives me a lot of hope is that we have seen the rest of the Republican party try and adopt his shtick, and they can’t.
The difference is that JD Vance can rebuild that same brand using social media in five. He can run it at lightspeed.
But then in the Democratic camp, you have Crockett, Ocasio-Cortez. There are people who are good at this. The question is whether they can make the case in this very negative information environment.
And that’s where you want to make sure that they have as many possible messengers working on their behalf, and that means more electeds. That means more candidates. That also means more media companies. That means more influencer relationships. That means thinking more about how we engage with A.I., all of that. But you gotta make sure that when people think Democratic Party they think AOC or Maxwell Frost, and not Joe Biden or Chuck Schumer.
Nancy Pelosi could never go on one of those Instagram lives, or do a TikTok in which it wouldn’t seem like, “Hello, fellow youth.”
Joe Biden certainly couldn’t. That was part of the problem.
They don’t speak the language. But Crockett or Ocasio-Cortez or Frost can and do.
And on the local level, you can think about Anna Eskamani, down in Florida. Malcolm Kenyatta in Pennsylvania. There are hundreds of others who have such clear senses of self, concrete personalities, and visions for what is possible. If good people enter government and can go into places, can go into nonpolitical places and make a political case, they can be the Trojan horses, so to speak, for our values.
It’s not even a Trojan horse. It’s just making it clear that everything is political. The right takes that for granted. And Jasmine Crockett has been doing this so well as she’s been making the rounds of the TV shows.
She has a really clear understanding of who her audiences are, and she does a good job of treating all communications like strategic communications. I think one of the problems for some of the other older members of Congress is that if you do not have a clear sense and story of self like that it’s really hard to figure out how to translate it in different contexts. You have to know what the original text is.
I think of Schumer’s attempts to talk about the price of groceries on social media, and how that rings false. It’s working backward from an idea of who the audience might be rather than having something to say, and saying that something that’s to people in a different way, depending on who and where they are.
What you post on social media is not what you put in a TV ad. Maybe your TV ads are all about eggs. I think that’s the fight of the last election. It’s not what you put on the Internet. And that’s a fundamental misreading of the purpose of these tools.
They miss the balance between how parasocial the relationship needs to be and the need to promote things they’re doing.
You want it to feel parasocial. Politicians should behave like influencers to a certain extent. What is an influencer, if not someone who has built trust with their community and can drive them to take action? That’s what you want to do as a politician. You just want to do it around voting and calls to action, around civic engagement, as opposed to like. “Buy this lipstick.”
And I think that’s what’s behind the weirdness of seeing Democrats talking about needing their own Joe Rogan, because — they don’t. He’s just doing what they could be doing. He’s just doing it better.
He’s doing it with personality. His audience knows what they’re gonna get with him. And he knows what his audience wants to see.
I write about this in the book — and this is for leaders at large, both politicians and in business — that you need to have responsible authenticity, an understanding of how much of yourself to show in order to serve your team’s goals — because it’s not actually about you. It’s about them.
Amanda Litman’s new book is When We’re in Charge: The Next Generation’s Guide to Leadership.
Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images for MoveOn; Amanda Litman portrait by Barb Kinney
This post was originally published on The.Ink.