It’s another Saturday, so for those who tune in, welcome to a diary discussing the Nuts & Bolts of a Democratic Campaign. If you’ve missed out, you can catch up anytime: Just visit our group or follow Nuts & Bolts Guide.
Over the last two months, we’ve talked about recruiting for local races, from school boards to district attorneys. Before we move on to statehouses and beyond in April, this month we are going to talk about identifying candidates early and establishing people within your organization, at any level, who specialize in candidate recruitment.
Anyone can run for office, and anyone can recruit candidates. With few exceptions, the party can’t stop someone from paying a filing fee or listing themselves as a candidate. Many organizations will focus on recruiting candidates. Some of your efforts should focus on finding the people within your organization who know how to recruit and build the relationships you need to keep new candidates coming forward.
Candidate recruiting is a skill
With unpopular Republicans elected to office, a lot of organizations believe that recruiting will be easy. Everyone will want to run for office to oppose them! People are eager to change things! We’ll have a line full of potential candidates to run everywhere! Before you get too excited, candidate recruiting, even in a good political environment, is more than just opening the doors and waiting for candidates to step forward.
Candidate recruitment is often about building a personal relationship with potential candidates and working on a plan for them to file for office. While anyone can carry out the conversation, using that conversation to create an actual candidate can take a mix of experience, practice, and knowledge of the offices sought in order to be successful. This doesn’t mean that there are no opportunities to build more candidate recruiters; it just means that often this skill comes from working with those who have done successful recruiting in the past, or with prior successful candidates.
Continuously working on developing new individuals who understand recruiting and what it takes to be a good candidate is important, not just in one set of races, but for all races up and down the ticket.
Work together
As we learned from 2016 and 2018, primary contests can help build the Democratic base, excite donors, and grow interest in participation. Nothing wrong with any of those things. Local races, however, can be very different from national or federal campaigns. When it comes to local campaigns, the first candidate to announce can often clear the field by taking pressure off of anyone else to run in a race like school board, water board, or city council. Having a good pattern of getting people into local races can make sure that you don’t step on other people’s toes and waste time and money.
Building a recruiting system that checks in with others allows for more cooperation and better use of resources. If you are confident of a candidate in a district, it gives other organizations time to move on and work on other races elsewhere.
Build a calendar
Part of developing someone who understands how to do recruiting is to always be ahead of races. We’re in 2019, and the general assumption I hear from people is that we are all in on recruiting for 2020. While it’s true that 2020 recruiting is happening now, recruiting is such an ongoing effort that great recruiters are building relationships that will help them identify candidates for 2022 and beyond. Community relationships and building a bench aren’t always about the next election; they can also be about building the community connections that find candidates for future elections for years to come.
Candidate recruitment occurs every time your recruiters advance their knowledge of a community. That is the way they create more opportunities for future recruiting. In other words: The best recruiters are social butterflies who pack their calendars with party and community events that provide them opportunities to meet civic-minded individuals.
Your recruiting calendar isn’t just about meeting candidates for today. It has to be about attending functions that help you groom candidates for future races. Keep track of the events your recruiter or recruiting organizations attend, and keep track of attendees who are supportive of our issues. This helps you identify the pool not only of potential candidates, but also of people who will recommend future candidates. If you have several people who are helping with your recruiting, build a shared calendar in online apps like Office 365 or Google Calendar to keep track of community events and who is attending them, and share information that comes out of those meetings.
Next week: Do. Not. Do. These. Things.