What It's Like to Run in the COVID-19 Election Cycle

My gut is that they don’t even read the stuff. They might have aides read it and then get good stuff to them, but it mainly just seems like do the bare minimum if even that.

An example of this was that I wrote both senators in my state about issues with the PPP language/implementation. One of the senators wrote back an incredible form letter (gold standard) and did get back to me. The problem was the senator didn’t address any of my questions and spoke generically about it. The other senator wrote back quickly with nothing related to my questions and just endless patting themselves on the back. It didn’t inspire a lot of confidence from either, but it was still more than my rep has ever responded. I had an ex-senator write me a real letter once to the only other time I reached out to someone, which I did respect (was not a Dem). I think you basically have to have very low expectations for responses and try to get them at town halls.

Amplification is a big deal. When you hear about people in the media being freaked out about Bernie supporters being mean it’s because they had their message amplified to that person in the media. If you attack a famous person and they respond, boom, your message is amplified regardless of how representative that message is of the average Bernie supporter. It turns a 1 percent proposition into bringing a lot of ‘unearned’ heat. If people thought about how to properly use that amplification it could be used in pretty spectacular ways.

The thing you mentioned about the ballot statement was something I’d hoped to be able to do, but that wasn’t something they did this time.

For my campaign, I specifically avoided things like the forums you mentioned. I answered a few questionnaires and made sure I did the Candidate Connection on ballotpedia, a site a lot of people use to find out about candidates. I knew not doing that would have been a significant mistake in reach before the campaign started, which is the main reason I did it.

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What would you have done if you actually won?

Gone to Congress and become friends with all the most left members of Congress co-sponsoring their legislation. Oh, and going after the bad actors from this administration if they lost.

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would you have posted here?

No idea. Mainly just reading now anyway.

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Not sure if it’s interesting to anyone, but the precinct level results of the Congressional primary election I ran in became available recently and I’ve done a decent level of analysis of them.

If anyone has any interest in how a person who spent very little money (~$825 in voter facing costs) and took no donations did at a much more granular level, I’ll share some stats. If not, this thread can fall off the front page for good.

Did you get any endorsements?

What % of the vote went to candidates that you would consider in your political lane. For example of people “left” or “far left” of the centrist, what was their total vote share?

Collectively do you think you As a group help shift the centrist candidate at all with respect to current issues like current BLM, M4A, etc. in general could he/she get primaries from the left down the road?

Cliffs at bottom…

I got no endorsements, but was given the badge of Moms Demand Action Gun Sense Candidate. That was just filling out a questionnaire that had loads of plain common sense gun control questions. I didn’t put the badge on my website because I wasn’t trying to get any endorsements or bring anyone to picking my name on the ballot because a group thought I was acceptable. It needed to be that my words resonated with the people who were moved enough to select my name on the ballot without any additional external influence.

That’s a fairly interesting question about ‘lane’. Most of the candidates in the race were your basic M4A supporters who only mentioned a few of the hot button issues (health care, climate, and taxes). I ran on massive systemic change that gives power to the people and gave my stances on 25 issues so voters would really know what they were getting with me. To me, there’s no question I was the furthest left candidate in the primary, but the candidate who finished second called herself the ‘one true progressive in the race’ which was an eye roll for me. I was definitely in my own lane for a lot of what I ran on and not one of them mentioned Trump in any substantive way. The incumbent’s website had nothing on it other than a ‘donate’ button.

One guy was a term limits lefty type crank with love for the military (he finished last, but I barely faded him after I landed in 4th on election night). Another person was heavily connected with the county Democrats but was also a Bernie supporting former military person. Another guy was just your average nice white guy with not many views other than liking Bernie and was probably someone who would be comfortable in the DSA (he finished 4th of 6 after landing last on election night).

Of the Congressional races in the state, our primary was the closest against the incumbent but the incumbent still destroyed us. Combined, we got about 25% of the vote. When I looked at how the district voted for the 2020 presidential candidate, I was fairly sure it was quite a bit more moderate than one or two of the other districts. To get more out of it, I was hoping Bernie would have won in the district but he didn’t (Bernie won my precinct and Joe finished second to give an idea of the issues in the district). Second place got 9.4% of the vote, but none of 2-6 got over 5,000 votes or under 1,000 (83 votes separated 4th from 6th while over 2300 votes separated 3rd and 4th). Turnout was massively higher than I expected (way higher than the primary for a vacant seat in 2018) and as I described earlier in the thread I had a number of delays and issues that surely cost me votes (over half the people who selected my name did so with very early mail-in voting, meaning people who did actual research).

To answer the left, etc. question, if you did a bog standard questionnaire of regular issues, me and the person who finished 2nd likely would score exactly the same (we did on one website). I think the military people who liked Bernie are much more likely to not actually be as far left as they’d like to appear. The guy who finished 4th was so bland with his platform that it’s really hard to tell what he would say on a bigger questionnaire. Even the incumbent ‘appears’ more left than a lot of people but is very much an ambitious person trying to do the establishment will. The person is also completely unresponsive when reaching out to the office, which was part of what made me run.

On election night, one of the local stations had an election special (though no votes were returned until very late on election night) where they interviewed the incumbent and one of the GOP challengers. I think the channel thought the GOP person had a legit chance of winning, but she got smoked while spending a ton of money. The incumbent appeared to throw some shade at me by basically rattling off several key things on my platform, then saying something like, ‘and you need someone with experience to get that done’. Did we move the incumbent? I doubt it and really think any movement we could have pushed will be based on how well November goes.

I think the incumbent is especially vulnerable to a primary challenge from the left because this district is fairly liberal. I think if I trimmed out some of the more controversial items that scare people from my platform that I would have gotten a significantly higher amount of votes than I did. The main thing to remember about my particular run was that I was trying to set a baseline for what could be possible spending basically no money, taking no donations, doing no interviews, along with really basically no campaigning at all. It was about the message. COVID-19 kind of brought the campaign more to what I was doing and I lost out on a lot of the ‘viral’ things I was planning on trying to do to create name recognition before the pandemic happened.

If we win in November and in 2021 it looks like there would be a real chance of systemic change in 2022 I’d probably consider trying to primary the incumbent again. If I did, I would try to raise somewhere in the neighborhood $28-50k max through small donations in the primary of $20 max and stop raising money at either the bottom or top number. I think I could probably make it close under that condition, especially if I were willing to deal with the press on that cycle.

The district isn’t completely GOP safe, but it’s solid D and not anywhere near moderate enough to where there shouldn’t be at least a pretty good significantly left candidate from it that can win. The hardest part for all of us who ran against the incumbent is that none of us had really any money behind us at all from what I can tell and the press treated us as seriously as our money. In many articles, our names weren’t listed which is like, come on.

Cliffs:

  1. No.
  2. I’d guess maybe 15%, but it could have been as high as 22%. Everyone was further left than the incumbent, so 25%.
  3. I’d say no, but I think I might have at least been in the head of the incumbent based on something I saw on election night. I doubt anyone else was. The incumbent endorsed Biden before he had a legit shot at the nomination showing that the incumbent wasn’t a scary liberal (lol).
  4. Yes, I believe the incumbent is particularly vulnerable to primary challenges from the left because the incumbent thinks the district is further to the right than it actually is. That said, the incumbent won every precinct in the district so none of us gave even a cursory challenge to the seat. The incumbent was also extremely well funded and still looks to have spent over $800k to fend off 5 people who didn’t make it to the $5k threshold to become an FEC candidate (I know I didn’t but don’t know about the others). That means the incumbent probably doesn’t have the best judgment.
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