Run for Office: Find all elected offices you are eligible to run for
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runforoffice.org
If you are a student, consider running for student office. It's likely (in fact almost certain) that your student government makes more decisions that impact your life and spends more of your money than the national government does.
They typically have multi-million dollar budgets, seats on powerful state-wide committees where tens or hundreds of millions are spent, and the ability to impact academic policy for students of the next generation.
Some also run sprawling field campuses, nature preserves or camps. I'm particularly fond of one that is run by the Albany Student Gov: Dippikill. Very special place.
Students in decades past fought very hard for the power and placement that today's student governments enjoy, and education "administrators" are always looking to carve them out and take them away. They need to be continually defended and used.
County State Population Los Angeles County CA 10,100,000 New York City NY 8,400,000 Cook County IL 5,200,000 Harris County TX 4,300,000 Maricopa County AZ 4,000,000 San Diego County CA 3,200,000 Orange County CA 3,100,000 Miami-Dade County FL 2,600,000 Dallas County TX 2,480,000 Riverside County CA 2,290,000 San Bernardino County CA 2,000,000 Clark County NV 2,000,000 King County WA 2,000,000 Tarrant County TX 1,900,000 Broward County FL 1,835,000 Bexar County TX 1,818,000 Santa Clara County CA 1,800,000 Wayne County MI 1,775,000 Alameda County CA 1,580,000 Philadelphia PA 1,500,000 Sacramento County CA 1,445,000 Palm Beach County FL 1,370,000 Nassau County NY 1,350,000 Cuyahoga County OH 1,270,294 Hillsborough County FL 1,267,775 Orange County FL 1,169,107 Fairfax County VA 1,130,000 Contra Costa County CA 1,066,000 St. Louis County MO 1,000,000 Honolulu County HI 980,000 Bergen County NJ 938,000 DuPage County IL 917,000 Duval County FL 886,000 Ventura County CA 839,000 Pierce County WA 819,700 Montgomery County PA 812,000 San Francisco County CA 800,000 Multnomah County OR 766,100 Washington DC 658,000 Denver CO 649,000 East Baton Rouge Parish LA 445,200 St. Louis City MO 318,400 Livingston Parish LA 134,000 Ascension Parish LA 114,000 Grand Forks County ND 69,000 Lee County IA 36,000
County populations covered: 85,127,576
I'm not sure that's true, but I think that's a presumption that people make when thinking about education politics.
As a counterpoint, Columbia's student government is quite powerful.
There are multiple levels (with different domains of influence), but the most powerful is the student senate - each school is allotted two (I think) student senators, and they have the same level of authority as the senators representing the faculty, etc.
Columbia also has a long history of political activism and public protest, and the University Senate was actually established in the wake of the most famous of these[0], to provide students with a structured outlet for supporting or opposing university policies that did not involve literally occupying buildings on campus.
As far as elected representation within a private institution goes, it's not perfect, but it's pretty well-executed.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_University_protests_o...
Not really, though the degree to which that's true depends on whether you're talking about CCSC, ESC, GSSC, or SGA. The student governments absolutely can effect meaningful policies of their own; I know because I worked on more than one such policy while I was there.
> The truly powerful group was the student-run Activities Board, which distributes student life fees to a hundred or so student clubs and groups
ABC (Activities Board at Columbia) is only one of the four funding umbrellas for student groups. And incidentally, ABC does not fund any student groups related to politics, religion, humanitarianism, or public activism. SGB is responsible for all of those, and SGB's funding decisions are fairly autonomous, as opposed to ABC's, which fall under more direct oversight from the atrociously-named F@CU.
Same here but getting anything done is tremendously difficult. Even something simple like extended hours for the cafeteria (it was a tiny school) takes multiple semesters with being bounced back and forth between administration and Sodexo. My understand is that they'll gladly (one time) throw money at you if you say the right words but they are very cautious about anything that sounds like a long term commitment.
Eligibility to run for student offices is generally not at all tied to where your ZIP code of legal residence, which is the only criteria it uses. So, without substantial redesign of its search model, I don't see how it could meaningfully handle them.
Which isn't to say those offices aren't important at some schools, just doesn't seem like a good fit for the model of this tool.
For example, my results include my state's Attorney General office, despite there being a requirement that candidates be admitted to the state's bar for 5 years prior to running for office. The vast majority of searchers will not be eligible for that office. It seems reasonable that anyone living in a zip code within a geofence around a university could have those student government positions returned, but with eligibility requirements clearly stated.
In general, the eligibility requirements also need to be more clear. In my example, the bar requirement is real but wasn't listed on the site.
So, for most student government positions at universities, would have to show up as possible eligible positions for all searchers with a model which uses zip code of residence as the only criteria and prefers risking false positives to false negatives.
That's pretty useless, which is why I say student government is a bad fit for the model.
Also, knowing you only on HN, but also knowing that means I probably know you better than most voters know any candidate for local office --- I'd totally vote for you.
Thanks for the kind words!
I'm not sure what the discourse/mailing list/whatever group would promote? Tech people getting involved in politics? We'd probably all be so busy arguing on the list that we wouldn't have time to get anything done!
Democracy in a nutshell
There might be tens of us!
I plan on documenting what I learn as I go. Will you do the same? Do you have anything I could subscribe to to stay in the loop?
> This year I ran for Florida House of Representatives District 49 (Orlando). I lost, but I got 31% of the vote and I only spent $3000. My opponent got 69% of the vote and spent $100,000
He open sourced [2] several tools that he used to do this.
He advises participation in local hob-nobbing events (I presume this was a local Florida thing, but your local community may have similar), and More Facebook Advertising. He reminds us that signs should be big, and WILL be stolen. He also advised cultivating good relations with local media by doing press releases.
While he was running for a state office, you could probably use similar tactics for more local things.
0: http://blog.sheasilverman.com/2016/11/how-to-run-for-florida... 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13008071 2: https://github.com/SheaSilverman
I'm a politics nerd that likes local government, and believe it has dormant power for movements. I wrote a piece called The Bottom Carries the Top that explains my thoughts on that stuff.
Anyway, I agree with many of the comments and we think the university positions is a great idea.
If you like, feel free to email me at jimcupples@gmail.com or cupples@nationbuilder.com
Hope to hear from you
Before I share it widely, though, I'll probably wait for it to fix the issue of showing past elections as future, as that is very confusing for people who don't know term lengths off the top of their head.
Edit: Filled out the data entry volunteer form
Great idea, btw
It would be more useful for students if it included age requirements for offices (if any).
It's great to hear what people are looking for. Thanks!
Thanks for putting this together; I'll absolutely be keeping an eye on the site!
> Today, 40% of state legislature races go uncontested and the problem is worse at the local level. There is a crisis of leadership occurring in our democracy. We need more people to lead. We need more people to run for office.
> Run for Office is a free service that provides all the tools you need to launch a successful campaign whether you are a seasoned veteran or first—time campaigner.
You won't "launch a successful campaign" if you are a nobody running against an incumbent who is supported by the dominant political party in a bright red or deep blue state. You'd need to be a seasoned veteran with wide name recognition who is very well connected, well liked, and also wealthy, but then you're not likely to be using this tool.
It's in the races where the incumbent is not running for reelection, the position is nonpartisan, or there's a lot of turnover that someone could say "Hey, I have a chance at that spot."
I think of David Brat beating House Speaker Jared Cantor in 2014 as being the canary in the coalmine.
There's never an apples to apples comparison, but Cantor had Brat outraised by over 20 to 1, and Brat beat him. On top of that, campaign messages are more and more delivered and received via free mediums, like YouTube, which brings the cost of a campaign down tremendously.
Apparently the town council elections are coming up soon, with several slots available. If I'm reading through this data correctly, it would take about 2% of the town's residents to vote for a council member to knock out the incumbents, based on last year's election. Someone somewhat active in the community can probably arrange that.
It's much more efficient to leverage the existing party infrastructure than to run as a solo independent or try to create a 3rd party.
Party elections (for instance, county committee elections) draw much less turnout and can be swayed much more easily by an organized group.
I've found it's remarkably easy to have that conversation with people. Ultimately, telling someone you'd support them if they ran for elected office is a pretty major compliment. And you don't really need any context or permission to bring it up; like saying "that's a nice jacket", you can say it any time. More importantly: when someone they know gives them permission, people actually will consider running.
I would much rather get 10 of my friends into local office around the country than run myself, so that's the goal I've set for myself. I'm making decent progress!
You or your friends should consider (and probably prefer) local administrative offices, like park districts or water reclamation. You don't need to be a subject matter expert to run for these --- that's not expected of you (source: friends who have these jobs). If you're wondering "why bother?", the answer is that having any kind of elected office magnifies your influence with other representatives and stakeholders. It's also great practice.
Running for the kinds of offices everyone has heard of --- Congress and Senate --- is extremely expensive (in the multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars) and, depending on the state you're in, might have a large component of building relationships with your state party. I say this not to discourage people from trying --- especially if you're thinking of running D in an unopposed R district or vice versa --- but to set expectations. Running your first time is easier than you probably think it is, as long as you pick the right office to run for.
If you're on a (recreational) Slack right now, consider opening up a channel and inviting people into it and spontaneously getting a couple people interested in running. I was on IRC channels in the 1990s that started companies that later sold for 9 figures (and the #!w00w00 people can tell you better stories). Getting a couple friends elected to their local library board seems like an extremely reasonable expectation to set for yourself.
If you're organizing something to get people to run for local office, I'm interested in talking/helping. I think there are a bunch of useful applications to be built here, and also a lot of opportunities for people to get together to share encouragement and notes.
(Many contributions have strings attached. Yours doesn't have to.)
My wild-ass guess (not a political science major) is that voters can be bucketed into the following broad groups:
A: People who vote straight party-line, no matter what. A toad could be on the ticket and they'd vote for it.
B: People who vote for whatever name they most recognize.
C: People who actually study the candidate's positions and make a rational choice.
Generously let's say A=80%, B=17% and C=3% of voters.
Whether or not you get A's vote depends entirely on what letter is next to your name--you have no control. B's vote is expensive because you need to carpet the area with saturation advertising in order for them to remember you when they fill out the form. C is so small that it's probably not worthwhile to do the legwork. So you end up spending tons of money hoping that you can get B to tip the scale towards you. At least that's how it looks to me.
Since the parents is discussing running for local office, I'm not sure why you think party comes in to play. Or perhaps this is a regional thing? In my city, party affiliations are not advertised/listed for positions such as city council, mayoral, parks board etc.
Btw - any thoughts on what kind of applications can be built here?
Parties and big campaigns can set such things up for candidates, but could a functional - if less sophisticated - version of those tools be established for potential local candidates?
(Perhaps, I'm just ignorant and such a toolset already exists)
Also, no local elective offices in my jurisdiction.
What people usually don't know about is all of the local government positions that affect their daily lives: many of the things you care most about exist below the level of a city, and yet websites like this throw aside all of the water districts and park districts and commumity service districts as if they don't matter :/.
Honestly, as someone deeply involved in politics at this point, who burns a lot of time into trying to educate people as to how government works and how to get involved, I believe this website--which is so bad it didn't even include city council of a smaller city as a local result, returning only internal democratic party positions--can only do more harm than good.
Thank you for the comments and suggestions. We agree with the comment on student governments, by the way, and would be happy to include them.
Anyone can email me at jimcupples@gmail.com if they like
It cost me about $200 for my campaign, most of which went to GoDaddy for hosting. So don't think that you need a billion dollars to run for office (except if you want to run for US President).
I wonder if there's a way to algorithmically determine how a candidate with subpar funding could beat somebody established with many more (a playbook of kinds). That would be the next step forward -- sure, you can run, but it flips the dynamic when you're smart about running to win.
And I'm sure people in places like Canada, Australia, France, etc would be interested in a similar site for their country as well.
Still, seems pretty neat so far.
For example, for women, there's this course:
I'm sure there's a similar one out there somewhere for Republicans, but since I want them to field bad candidates I will leave finding it as an exercise for the reader :-D
Mostly, we want people to simply know what they can run for and how to get on the ballot.
Inaccuracies on the site are my fault. I work with amazing students, mostly from USC, and we put it together as best we can. The shapefile stuff is also sometimes wonky. A GIS student from UCLA is the awesome person behind that.
https://www.runforoffice.org/elected_offices_search?address=...
As far as I know anything above a very small town position will be full time.
That depends on what we mean by "full-time". Here's a great wiki page regarding the amount of time each state legislature demands from members: https://ballotpedia.org/States_with_a_full-time_legislature
From the stats there, there are 10 states where legislator is 80% of a full-time job (avg. salary: $68,599), 23 where it's 70% of a full-time job (avg. salary: $35,326), and 17 where it's 54% of a full-time job (avg. salary: $15,984). In many of these states, legislators need to supplement their income with jobs in the off-season (only 9 state legislatures are year-round positions, and all of those are the ones that offer the highest salaries).
https://medium.com/theyoungturks/justice-democrats-platform-...
Their energy proposal is fusion research... there are much better ways available.
However, it is showing me a lot of "Next Election" times that were last year. I guess the data needs some cleanup.
Also, President seems to be missing. :)
For example, to run for California Attorney General, one "Must be admitted to practice before the state Supreme Court for at least five years immediately preceding election or appointment to the office".
A similar-concept project was posted here on HN this month:
And the answer to that is to run for your state legislature. It's there that voting rules, and support for incumbent national members of Congress, are set and enforced.
Join the smoke filled room that's close to home.
Many people run for office thinking they can change the fundamental culture entrenched around them. But then they realize that there are so many existing systems safeguarding the status quo, that one person can't do it. You'd need to hire a whole new administration.
Instead, what if organizations would contract with one another for services and respect each other's cultures as a take-it-or-leave-it kind of thing? Then market discipline would apply.
What machine should each of us, individually, build? How will it function in a world where an overwhelming majority of people view their government (broadly) as legitimate? Why is someone in office necessarily a "cog" rather than someone with agency and the ability to influence the machine's overall direction?
Here's an example from my state's motorcycle rider's lobby -- "Would you support a law allowing motorcycles to proceed through red lights under low traffic conditions after making a reasonable safe stop?" (Because motorcycles don't always trip the sensors at intersections.)
That's just a taste. I have a large binder full of mailings from advocacy groups, printing companies (brochures and yard signs) and some of the official paperwork. And that was just the stuff that seemed worth keeping.