Charlotte Alter
Updated: Oct 11, 2017 9:04 AM ET | Originally published: Oct 10, 2017
Election
Night was rough for Amanda Litman. As email director for Hillary
Clinton's campaign, she remembers hearing senior staff reassure the team
that their Midwestern firewall would hold, then watching Michigan,
Wisconsin and Pennsylvania slowly turn red. She remembers Clinton
campaign chairman John Podesta telling staff that they would fight until
every vote is counted, then getting an alert that Clinton had called Trump to concede. The whole evening was a "nightmare," Litman says.
A few days later, something lifted Litman out of her funk: an old friend sent her a Facebook
message, saying she was considering running for Chicago's city council
to fix the city's failing schools. "She was like, 'Who do I ask for
help?'" Litman recalls. "I didn't have an answer." The Cook County
Democratic Party likely wouldn't invest in a rookie candidate. National
political organizations wouldn't care. Organizations like Emily's List,
which support progressive women running for office, typically don't
invest in candidates running low-level local races.
Litman,
27, saw an opportunity. She began asking political friends whether any
organizations supported young people who wanted to run for local office.
"If it doesn't exist, it must be hard," she reasoned. She connected
with Ross Morales Rocketto, a political operative married to one of
Litman's friends from the Clinton campaign, who had been toying with a
similar idea for years. Together, Litman and Rocketto built Run For Something, an organization dedicated to funding and supporting progressive millennial candidates running for local office.
The
new group launched on Inauguration Day. During its first week, 100
potential candidates reached out. Over the next nine months, that number
has swelled to nearly 11,000 young first-time candidates. (The group
provides support to about 75% of candidates who ask.) So far Run For
Something has raised some $400,000 from roughly 5,000 donors, including Clinton's Onward Together PAC.
It has partnered with the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee to
try to turn state legislatures blue. And on Oct. 2, Litman published a
book, Run For Something, essentially a how-to manual for young people to run for local office.
Run
For Something is just one of several new political organizations that
have cropped up since Trump's election to help advance progressive
politics outside Democratic party structures. Sister District , Swing Left and Flippable direct volunteers and resources towards progressive candidates in down-ballot races. Indivisible
has harnessed activist outrage to pressure members of Congress to
resist Trump's agenda (thousands of Indivisible members staged protested
ACA repeal at town halls across the country, which contributed to the
bill's first failure in the House.) But so far, Run For Something is the
only new group that is explicitly and exclusively focused on building a
new progressive bench of young political talent.
Litman
hopes the assistance her organization provides will help young women
and minorities, who are often more wary of running, take the plunge into
politics. "When I talk to old white male donors, they say ‘I’ve thought
about running for Governor or Congress,'" she says. "I’m like, ‘Of
course you have. You know who hasn’t? The young Latina woman who
should.'"
While
early funding can be critical in local elections, Run For Something
isn't just about cash. It's about providing a much-needed support system
for young candidates to swap tips about everything from how to canvass
to how to communicate. The group has an active Slack channel with dozens
of private conversations where first-time campaigners can compare notes
and receive guidance from more experienced operatives.
"A lot of those lessons I probably would have learned, but it would have been the hard way, through messing things up ," says Kellen Squire,
a 32-year old emergency-department nurse and father of three who is
running for the Virginia House of Delegates. Squire, who lives near
Charlottesville and works in a hospital that treated victims of the Charlottesville violence
in August, says guidance from Run for Something helped him at the
"nascent stage," when many campaigns struggle to get off the ground. Now
he's raised about $70,000 through mostly small donations, and says he
has a real shot to oust the Republican incumbent he's challenging. "It’s
like the UVA football team going up against Alabama," Squire says. "You
can win if you play right and you don’t make too many mistakes."
Garlin
Gilchrist II is running to unseat a 3-term incumbent in the race for
Detroit City Clerk this year. Gilchrist, who worked on the Obama
campaign, is a voting-rights activist who wants to bring better
management to the city's troubled election process. But running for
office while raising 4-year old twins is challenging, and Gilchrist, 35,
says he leans on the Run For Something network to help him figure out
how to balancing canvassing with childcare.
"Having
a national organization saying that these races matter locally, and
specifically this race matters in Detroit, and this is the guy we
support, that’s really helpful for my campaign," he says.
Most
first-time candidates for office lose. But that doesn't dissuade
Litman. She cites Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton as examples of
political hopefuls who have lost elections but still made a contribution
to democracy. And with the Democratic Party still reeling over Trump's
election, she thinks it's time to empower a new generation of candidates
to step in.
http://time.com/4974562/amanda-litman-run-for-something/
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