Daily Kos is a mix of the highly informed and the highly opinionated, with a variable overlap between the two. I keep seeing posts about contesting every election at every level, a goal I agree with. But far too many of them ignore the difficulty of candidate recruitment, so I felt that someone who has experience in the area should probably address the recruitment problem.
Why me? I have been the target of multiple recruitment attempts, some of them successful, some not. Until quite recently I was city councilor. I am also a county board supervisor, and within the purview of the latter, county board chair. In each case I was originally recruited or convinced to accept the honor and responsibility of the office rather than running of my own accord. I have also been (unsuccessfully) recruited to run for mayor, state representative, state senator, and for city councilor twice before I finally ran for and won that last office.
What makes a good recruitment target? This is the first place where you run into problems in making sure every election at every level gets contested. The best candidates are people who are personable, articulate, and have demonstrated success in a field other than politics. As it turns out, those people are in high demand, and recruiting them means convincing them that politics is a better use of their time. This leads us to discussing all the factors that go into the decision of whether or not to run for office.
We’ll start with the double-edged sword of nonpolitical success. It turns out that convincing people who are already experiencing success in their chosen field to leave it for a shot at getting elected—which frequently pays less than they are currently making—is a heavy lift. Take me, for example: I am a successful novelist with 16 books in print including 14 from large New York presses and a number of editions in translation. The pay is a bit more spotty than a similar level of success in a corporate field, but I have dedicated 30 years of my life to getting here.
Convincing me to take on the relatively thankless and not particularly well-paid job of county board chair was not easy. I was already juggling my role as a successful local politician with maintaining the writing time I need to make a living. I took a lot to sell me on the job—and that was knowing if I said yes, I was pretty much guaranteed to be elected chair. If I’d had to campaign for the job with a highly unpredictable chance of success, I would have said an emphatic no.
Which leads me to: Campaigning takes an enormous amount of time and effort and, if you lose, it feels like wasted time and effort. Even when the odds are pretty good, convincing someone to do all that work and take that risk when they could just keep doing their current rewarding job isn’t easy. Doing it in one of those elections where they are going to have to fight a serious uphill battle is incredibly difficult.
One of the reasons I’ve said no when candidate recruiters for higher offices have come calling is that I know that investing a year of my life and vast amounts of time in running for a severely gerrymandered state district or senatorial seat here in Wisconsin comes with a huge opportunity cost for all the other things I could be doing with my time. It also comes with a very low chance of success. I can’t speak for anyone else in my circumstances, but given that I already have a job that I love and that rewards me, I’m not seeing an enormous amount of upside in signing up for a losing battle that will also inevitably degrade my performance in my main career.
Most people who are successful have gotten pretty good at things like time management along the way, and part of that is being aware of opportunity costs. If, for example, I were to run for state representative, it would likely cost me something between 50-100% of a novel’s worth of writing production time. If I had even a reasonable chance of success, my cost/benefit analysis might still come out on the side of going for it because I possess a pretty robust sense of civic duty. Given that my chance of winning such an election with our current level of gerrymandering is probably below 10%, I really can’t justify the time and effort.
Some other issues in recruitment include:
Travel/time away from home. Getting involved in an election that isn’t entirely a local position means a lot of time spent traveling around the area meeting voters, which is time not spent at home with family, friends, and pets. Then, if you do win at the state or federal level, you’re going to be spending a lot of time not just traveling around your voting area, but effectively living away from home. Again, I can’t speak for anyone else, but I love my home and I love spending time with family, friends, and beloved pets. When I have been recruited to run for state representative or state senator, one of the factors I have considered is the enormous amounts of time spent away from home.
Emotional costs of losing your election. This one seems especially prone to dismissal by the people who act as if recruiting candidates to run for seats that they’re unlikely to win is easy. Nobody likes to lose; at best, it’s painful and disheartening. Asking someone to run for an office, with all the associated time and opportunity costs of campaigning when both of you know that they are almost certainly going to lose, is a really big and tough ask. I know that part of the reason for running in those situations is that it helps boost everyone at every level. That’s incredibly important, but it’s also asking someone to take one for the team.
Compensation. Many elected jobs compare very unfavorably to private sector jobs on the compensation front. I’m an author, so the fact that local politics pays basically nothing isn’t a huge step in the wrong direction, though I am definitely losing money ot the job. If I were in a corporate role with a commensurate level of success in my field, the offices I’ve been recruited to run for would all involve taking a huge loss in pay. For people who are the primary income earners for their families, that’s another huge ask, and more so if there are children or other dependents to care for. Too often here at Daily Kos people focus on national congressional and senatorial salaries when they talk about political jobs, and not the ~$4,500 a year stipend plus per diems I get as a county board chair. State-level representatives and senators are usually doing better than that, but rarely get compensated with a wage comparable to they would make or were making in the private sector, or even at NGOs.
Risk assessment. This one gets glossed over as well. When I am sitting at home in my day job as a writer, my chances of catching COVID or some other virus approximates zero, and the answer is similar for most work-from-home jobs. It goes up for service-sector and more public-facing jobs, but it’s a factor that anyone who is recruited to run for office now has to think about. So is our increasingly polarized and sometimes quite threatening political environment. Death threats have become a pretty routine part of being an elected official, and anyone really thinking through what running for office means in today’s world needs to take that into account.
Concerns about actually doing the job. This isn’t necessarily a factor for everyone, but if your recruit doesn’t spend some serious and soul-searching time thinking about whether they have the skills and talents necessary to actually successfully make policy and shepherd the public funds, you probably don’t want them running for the job anyway. The skill set for being a successful citizen legislator in charge of policy and oversight for the county and city has very little overlap with the skill set I possessed when I was first recruited. Basically what I had going into the political realm in terms of in-place skills was good communication and a lot of practice at absorbing and integrating information. Different recruits will have different sets of skills, but there is going to be a lot of on-the-job learning for most people after their first election. This is one of the reasons that it can take years to make a good legislator.
Vote counting/understanding powers and limitations. Assuming I get elected, will I be able to accomplish anything? If you’re taking a serious look at running for office, one of the factors that you are almost certainly going to look at it is how effective you can be at the job. If you’re a Democrat looking at the Wisconsin Legislature, for example, you have to ask yourself how much good you can do even if you win. Are you willing to live with going to work every day and losing fight after fight after fight? It takes a special kind of will and disposition to do that without becoming incredibly depressed. Smart potential candidates will know this, and convincing them it’s worth it is a challenge.
Finally, if you know anything about politics, you know that by and large nobody thanks you when you get it right and everybody yells when you get it wrong. This is especially true of local politics and it takes a thick skin to accept that.
TL;DR: Should we contest every election? Yes, if at all possible we should be trying to get someone to run for everything from weed inspector on up. Is it going to be easy? No. Despite the blithe disregard for the difficulties of recruiting good candidates that is frequently displayed in Daily Kos comment threads, it’s quite a hard problem to crack. So, maybe we could cut the people who are actually out there trying to recruit good candidates some slack and not treat the entire process as though it’s as simple as waving the good-candidate wand and leaping out of the way as they come pouring in the party doors.
Editor’s note: This Community story has been lightly edited by staff for clarity.