AMA about running for office

Politics & News
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So I thought for a while whether I was going to start this thread, but I think some people might be interested.

Let me spoil the outcome: I lost my party`s primary. I do realize that this thread is basically an exercise in self-doxxing and I am okay with people knowing who I am. I still do not want this thread to come up in google searches about me or my hometown, so if you are curious and think you have guessed my identity, please do not post about it ITT, but I will confirm whether your guess is correct via PM.

So anyway: I ran in my party`s primary for a seat in our state legistlature. Germany has 16 federal states and there are close to a 140 members of the unicameral state parlamient. The majority is voted for by a first-past-the post system in 87 districts, but the rest are divided among parties proportional to the number of votes each party gets (standard system in Germany).

Parties have closed primaries where only the party members or delegates can vote. In my disctrict a delegate system was used, and of the 55 delegates I received 25 votes. The winner got 29 and one delegate abstained. There were originally three canidates in the race, but the thirs one withdrew from the race two weeks before the convention.

What motivated me to run for office: I have longtime experience with local volunteer politics. I have held local party offices for the last 26 years. I have been a member of my city legislature for five years now, where I am the deuputy mayor and a member of the county legistlature since last fall (all of these are (almost) non-paid positions). In Germany the federal states are in charge of the school system and as a teacher and parent I felt that I could have offered my experience to that field of politics.

How was my experience? First of all, running for office is harder than most people expect. Depending on what other people think about you for your personal/ professional success is stressfull. I knew that I was the outsider in the race going in, as I am from the smallest of three communities in the district, but still the experience was stressfull. We had five debates with party members and I have to say that even though I have held volunteer positions before, I have gained new respect for politicians. You have to be able to formulate a position on basically any topic. It is not really surprising to me, that so many politicians sound like they are bs-ing a lot of the time, as they most certainly have to, if it is not on a topic they have to be briefed upon.

Do I regret running and losing? Not really. I have always been interested in politics, obviously and it was always my strength to analyze. I have improved my people-skills and especially my public speaking skills a lot. One should expect, that a teacher is used to speak in front of groups of people, but there is a huge difference between managing a class and giving a 15-minute talk to a crowd of a hundred people.

What differences between Amercian and German politics do I see. First off all the fact that our primary is closed and only for a rather small number of party members, made it a lot easier to run for office. There are 100,000 people in the district, but had zero expenses (well apart from driving to the debates and the convention), which definitely seems better.
As we have multiple parties in Germany there is also far less polarization than in the US. All three candidates could be called center-left considering the German political spectrum.

So feel free to ask any questions you might have or share your own experience of running for office.

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Beat me to it.

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Not really - actually he felt that it was him being ratfucked. The third candidate was born in our district, but works in Berlin and only moved back a few months ago and worked from home. He told me he had the feeling people were not giving him a fair chance and trying to block him, but honestly local politics is a lot about personal loyalties. If all candidates seem qualified people tend to vote for the one who they know best/ trust the most.
So I think his withdrawal was at least partly motivated by not wanting to have a vote share that might be seen as embarassing.

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What party are you a member of?
How much do political positions/philosophy matter in these primaries?
What would have needed to be different for you to win the primary?
Would you consider to try again?

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Do you feel represented well by your party, and / or what are things you would have wanted to do differently at the local, and Bundes-level?

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I thought calling myself center-left and describing the district as rural kind of gave it away (Socail Democrat).

Not a lot. There were only a few policy differences between the candidates. (e.g. Should we set goals on the areas set aside for wind turbines or rather have general goals for renewables and let communities decide which ones to focus on?) Mostly it was about what policy areas we saw as most important.

I think a longer primary process would have benefitted me as my community is in a different county than the other two, so the delegates knew me the least. I decided to run for this seat two years ago, when the old incumbent was elected to a different position. My plan was to visit as many events, where I would expect party members to be, as possible. Unfortunately a global pandemic happened.
My second problem was that there were two people from the bigger town who had told other people that they wanted to run, but one of them got talked out of it. If both of them had run, I would have had a chance as a compromise candidate between the two.
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I wont rule it out, but as the winning candidate is only in his late twenties and I think he is a favourite to win the district and I think there wont be the chance, as I would not run against a sitting member of parliament of my party (if he doesnt really mess things up, which I dont expect him to).
If he doesn`t win the district I think I will try again in five years.

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Even as a party member you can never agree 100% to your party`s positions. Right now I do not have any major gripes. The biggest one I can think of is not enough spending on a federal and state level.
I know we have balanced budget rules in the constitution on both levels, which are hard to get rid of (two third majorities are needed to change the constitution), but there are ways to get around this, e.g. putting money into public investment funds and let those borrow money.
I know it is kind of “cheating” the balanced budget rules, but infrastructure investments and especially renewable energy investments are really important. On the other hand there is a shortage of constructions workers as is, so more money would not necessarily have solved the problem.

As a teacher I obviously have some problems with things concerning the school system. We also have a shortage of teachers in Germany, but that is why I think we should give money to schools to hire administrators, social workers etc. If you can`t hire more teachers, because there are not more teachers, hire people who can do part of the work teachers do, so teachers can teach more.

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So you would have represented about 100,000 people? I think in the U.S. a congressional district is about 700,000.

How did you have zero expenses? Did the state pay for all of your campaigning? Is there any advertising at all? In the US we are flooded with radio ads, yard signs, emails, etc. Could you do any of that even if you wanted to? If there is no advertising allowed at all. are there ways for billionaires to get around those rules?

Are you extroverted or introverted? I assume extroverts are way overrepresented in politics, but I haven’t looked for data on that.

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Was there any mud slinging? Did your opponents send out glossy mailers with blurry pictures of you saying GERMANGUY WANTS TO TAKE AWAY YOUR FREEDOM?

Assuming not, because you are in the civilized world.

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That is right, but keep in mind that I was running for my state legislature. Compared to US states the population is closest to Virginia and Washington state. We have 87 districts sending 137 members of our parliament, which only has one chamber. Considering both chambers the Washington state legistlature has 147 members and Virigina has 140, so the sizes seem rather comparable. As we have a mixture of first-past-the post and proportional representation, the district sizes are a little different.

As only 1.5% of Germans are members of parties and only those can vote, we do not really have “primaries” compared to the US. Most of my campaign activities were taking part in debates - and since my party has a delegate system, direct phone calls with delegates or local party leaders.

I would not call myself super-extroverted, but you have to be somewhat extroverted to take part in politics - even local volunteer politics. But in my experience this is also something that comes with practice. Speaking in city council meetings, party meetings/conventions has made me more comfortable in situations like that. Directly speaking to members of my community was always somthing I enjoyed doing.

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No mud-slinging, but some attacks on other candidates were done. Mostly those stayed on policy issues.

The winning candidate is wheel-chair bound and the candidate who dropped out stressed how physically demanding the public campaign was going to be in the debates. I tried to stay out of that, but I did stress that I had a lot of experience with door-to-door campaigns and was looking forward to doing that some more. In the end the message is similar, but just less direct.

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