So You Want to Run for Public Office?

A primer on contemplating a campaign for local government

Photo by Michael Carruth on Unsplash.

A topic that came up during the recent municipal election in Victoria concerned campaign preparedness and the seriousness of certain candidates. Former long-time councillor Geoff Young actually published an op-ed in the Times Colonist during the campaign period that suggested finically deposits for candidates seeking office in order to avoid unserious candidates conflating the ballot in the future.

The reality is that campaigning— even at the local government level— takes preparation and planning that begins years before the actual campaign period begins. In fact, if we consider that those seeking office should be proven and experienced known entities in the community prior to running, the process of establishing a campaign can stretch back decades.

In this newsletter we are going to talk about what it takes to contemplate, plan and eventually commence a campaign that is on track for electoral success. We are going to assume you are four years back from a campaign period. This works too because we’ve just finished the election in Victoria and that is the kind of timeframe you would be looking at yourself if you are reading this and thinking about running in the next election.

Community Involvement

Before you run for office it should be obvious that you need some sort of community involvement experience. You might be an accomplished professional in your particular field, or a successful skilled tradesperson, but the reality is that you need a connection to the community you are seeking to become elected within. Being engaged in the community has a two-fold benefit.

First, you get more known among key stakeholders within the city who may support you come election time. These stakeholders are often long in the tooth volunteers or engaged citizens who have broad networks that they can engage on your behalf. They also have insights or institutional knowledge of the local government that can be very helpful for your own campaign.

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The second benefit is that you gain a better understanding of what the community thinks and feels and this is important for crafting your message come campaign time. It is not good enough to be aware of the issues or to be super keen enough to have realistic solutions, you need to be able to sell your message to people during an election campaign and that means understanding what captures their attention and what motivates them. You can only gleam this information from people by being involved in community projects and associations where you can listen and hear from people who experience these issues day to day.

If you are four years back from an election campaign, than you ought have joined a community association or action group or local government committee yesterday. That is how important this aspect of campaign preparation will be for your aspirations of public office. So if you are a hopeful candidate today, you best already be engaged in the community or be in the process of joining something at this very moment. You will make connections that will come in handy during the campaign and will get first hand knowledge of how people in the community feel about issues and, most importantly, how they receive and handle this information.

Money, Money, Money

I’ve worked on campaigns at the provincial and federal level where the candidate was a government minister and spent most of their time outside of the constituency during the campaign period because of their dual role as representative and government member. But even though the candidate did not spend much time doing the traditional campaign work in their riding, they spent a great portion of their time campaigning by phoning friends and contacts and raising money. This is actually a big part of being a candidate: asking for money. If you have issue with it— and most people do— you need to learn to get over the issue before the campaign period starts. The best advice is to start with family and close friends and anyone who has encouraged you to run for office themselves. Before you even commit to running, you need to see if you are able to generate the funds required to run for office. In a modern local campaign for city councillor you are looking at around $10,000 needing to be raised to cover your costs during the campaign period. Two years before you decide to run you should open up a campaign account and begin collecting money from people you trust to keep your intentions a secret. If suddenly you find you cannot raise the money for whatever reason, you should seriously reconsider your campaign. To put this in perspective bluntly: if you cannot get support/money from family and close friends how do you think you’re going to get it from strangers?

There are rules to how money can be raised, what needs to be tracked, recorded and when and also around spending. Elections BC has a lot of great resources on this and as a candidate you need to be aware of not just your role but also that of your Financial Agent and any other staff you decide to have on your campaign. Electors will judge your ability to follow campaign rules and it is also just plain ethical to follow the rules. Spend your time learning and understanding these rules, including speaking to a person who has campaigned or worked on campaigns in the past, before you open an account and start collecting or spending money. You will thank me for this piece of advice at some point during the campaign, trust me.

The Platform

Photo by Jorge Maya on Unsplash.

I am going to be honest with you: platforms in local elections, especially ones where we elect the entire panel of mayor and council, are incredibly silly. They kind of remind me of grade schoolers running for school council with platforms. First of all, no candidate is an island, they all must work together. To say, “I am going to do this” or “I am going to do that” is an empty promise at the end of the day because the candidate has no idea what is possible until mayor and council are sent to city hall from electors. This is why most successful platforms at the local level are simple and deal with values over tangible policies. This does drive some voters nuts but there is a reason for it and you fight the reason as a candidate at your own risk.

The fact of the matter is that no one cares about your platform. You are not part of a political party that can earn a majority in the legislature and put your whole plan through. There is no plan. You’re running to be a city councillor and to commit yourself to representing the interests of the city as a whole while you deal with the day to day mundane issues that arise out of thousands of strangers living together in a safe and efficient way. They care about who you are and what your values are and not to be sold on them but to feel like their values align with yours. This is where your message comes back to the information you gleamed from being engaged in your community. For example, suppose you know that issues related to climate change go over much better and are shared and talked about much more than an issue with leaf removal in the fall. You might care a great deal about leaf removal yourself, it might be the very thing you are looking to get into office to solve, but you need to get in office before you can do anything about it and if leaf remove resonates with no one else you won’t get very far. And this is an important lesson: you cannot achieve anything until you’re elected, campaigning is not about governing it’s about winning. Period.

Former Governor of New York State Mario Cuomo once said, “you campaign in poetry and govern in prose.” And that statement could not be more true when it comes to platform and message development. You might be the biggest policy wonk on the block but that doesn’t matter when it comes to campaigning. Look at former Prime Minister Stephen Harper. No politician around could ever out-wonk him, but his campaigns were not giant exercises in policy development, they were short, flashy and most of all captivating which is what made them successful. They were captivating because they touched on an emotional reality common to a broad base of Canadians. This is what makes lasting messaging which brings me to my next point.

Messaging

Message alignment and development is crucial. And the planning starts at least two years back. You must have an idea of what you will run on, what you will emphasize during the campaign and how you will capture the attention of potential voters long enough to get it all across. This is where you develop your website, the colours and general design of your campaign and the phrases you will use when speaking and engaging with voters. For provincial and federal campaigns this is a long and on-going process that is handled by professionals. For your local campaign it will be you and maybe one trusted advisor who can assist. You need to take what you heard and learned from being engaged, translate it all into a short message complete with phrases that can be repeated over and over and wrap it all in a common feeling campaign that aligns together.

This means that if you are running a business friendly campaign that stresses your leadership skills than your colours and material (signs, handouts) should all look like and convey that same message of competence and business-like leadership. This isn’t something that drops out of the sky and falls on your lap. And it isn’t a matter of opening up your laptop and firing up the paint program and hammering out some .jpeg files. A serious campaign pays serious attention to the messaging because that is all you have. You could have the best and greatest ideas. No one will care or even know if you can’t get their attention and get the message out.

Voter Data

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash.

This is the most important aspect of a local campaign and the most overlooked. Local elections traditionally have below 50% voter turnout which means that the name of the game for anyone seeking to win is bringing in their own voters. If you look at any successful campaigner you will see this happening. They are able to call up, email, or otherwise contact their supporters and get them to the polls on election day. They are also able to use these people as financial supporters and volunteers. This is again why community engagement early on in your intentions to run is so important— you will make the connections that are required. In the final year before the campaign you need to develop a plan to capture the contact information of potential supporters. This can be done through a combination of social media, website traffic and canvassing. There are also great resources online like NationBuilder that help to create websites and social media connections that track potential supporters. You need to know who supports you, where they are and how to contact them. And you need to keep them in regular contact. This is why you get a lot of emails from provincial and federal campaigns because once they have your contact information they want to keep the line open. The trick of course is not to send too much otherwise people will unfollow your campaign.

You need a mechanism to collect data when you are out in the community or canvassing and for this data to be displayed in a meaningful way for you and your campaign staff. How I have seen this done best in the past is a volunteer tasked with data collection and then transposing all collected data on to a large map of the whole jurisdiction. This will give you an idea of a broad view of the city and where your support exists. If there are neighbours that are solidly in your favour without much campaigning, you know you can focus elsewhere. If there are neighbours that are long out of your reach you can avoid wasting your time and energy there. You can focus on getting to whatever magic number of votes needed to win that you and your staff have worked out for the campaign.

It is not good enough to just have signs up or to just hand out card or to just show up to meet and greets in the city. The people who you meet at these events are engaged regardless and make up a very small portion of those who will be showing up to the polls. All of the glitz and glamour of your campaign is about one thing: collecting precious voter information. And your chance of success is based on whether or not you can capitalize on having that information over your opponents. That is all it is about.

When the Campaign Starts

You need a roll out plan. Announcing on Twitter…writing a blog post…super lame. Get some supporters together, have some signs made up, maybe a button or two and stage a traditional campaign opener. It does not have to be public but it should look like there were people there, people who are supporting and engaged in your campaign. That shows momentum and inspires others to get involved too but most importantly it shows you are serious right from day one. You will introduce your message, say a few of those phrases you plan on repeating over and over during the campaign that you’ve worked down to a memorized science. And your supporters will clap and cheer and every one will go home happy.

You need to have a team in place. You cannot run the campaign by yourself. A Financial Agent is required as a minimum staff level but I would also recommend a Campaign Manger or communications advisor of some sort. Roll out your signs on day one and when you are sending signs to home include a brief message of how you expect the sign to be used, who to call if it is damaged/stolen and what to do to dispose of it. I recommend having a volunteer whose only job is to track who gets signs, where they were put up and organizes the plan of removal at the end of the campaign. Do not get bag signs. Do not try and make your own. Order professionally and only use the hard signs that you see most other campaigns use. The plastic bag signs are too easy to steal, the self-made signs never work out. If you are concerned about the environmental impact than design your signs with an eye to reusing them avoiding dates and leaving space to put a “re-elect” over the “elect” phrase and have a plan to collect them all at the end of the campaign and store them over the four years you are in office. You will need mostly small signs, but a few large signs are also helpful. All a sign needs is your name, what you’re running for and maybe a campaign slogan. Larger signs should have an image of yourself but do not have to. Printers charge more depending on the number of different colours you use, and signs do not win voters they are just means of existing supporters to show how much they love you so don’t spend too much on them. That is very important.

Lastly, attend as many events as you can. Do not pass up an opportunity to speak as an aspiring politician, ever. You might feel you have a hostile crowd but a lot of voters are looking for backbone and you standing up for what you believe in might be the push. You also never know when a potential supporter is listening.

As a candidate you have precious little of three things: volunteers, money and voter attention. You can lay the ground work as early as possible to get the most volunteers and money that you can but you will always be limited in the amount of attention you have from potential voters. So use the time wisely, repeat your message often so it gets spread broadly and consistently and don’t waste your time on people who will never support you.

In Closing

There is really so much more to cover here but this is a primer because we are four years back. The reality is that campaigning is serious work and it is not for the faint of heart. Candidates for office require a fighting spirit, and a willingness to go out of their way to get their message out and challenge the opposition because they have a drive believing that what they are doing is right. This is where campaigning starts.