10 Lessons from 10 Years
1. Campaigns are massive life undertakings.
Running for office is often seen as a hobby or a side gig, but it’s more like buying a house or getting a dog than like taking up cross stitching or baking sourdough. As soon as you run, you become a public figure, which comes with literal Constitutional changes for how society can interact with you. If you win, your life may never really belong to you again, depending how successful you are in re-elections. If you lose, you still have to contend with a lack of anonymity, all the financial and familial stress, and the fact that your reputation has either taken a hit or grown to the point where professional and personal consequences are very real.
Even for staff and volunteers, campaigns can become an entire lifestyle that costs them opportunities in other parts of life.
Campaigns cost money, relationships, and time that you are never going to get back. And it’s incredibly rare that anyone warns you about it, because we need good people to run and if you knew the truth, you may choose not to do it. But at Evinco, we believe that properly preparing good people increases their chance of victory and reduces harm to their mental, physical, financial, and relational health -- increasing the chances they’ll stay involved.
So here’s your warning: campaigns can REALLY suck. But they can suck a lot less if you’re mindful about protecting the human element.
2. Strategy is mostly deciding what NOT to do.
Running for office or running a campaign is like drinking from a fire hydrant. There is a TON of pressure, and directing it in a productive way is difficult.
Everyone wants you to do it their way. Everyone wants you in their room. Everyone thinks their thing is the most important thing and without that thing you will surely lose. Most of them are wrong.
There are endless factors to contend with. Data sets. Demographics. Feelings. Issue areas. Other elections. Personal life. Strengths and weaknesses of yourself and your team. Weather. Election laws. Manpower. Money. People.
Time is the top factor though. You are always running out of time. And you will never have enough time to do all the things and respond to all the noise. So you have to focus. You have to sort through everything flying at you and decide what is worth your very precious and always shrinking time. Which means ignoring EVERYTHING ELSE and being okay with it.
If everything is important, nothing is. End of story.
3. People are smarter than consultants give them credit for.
There’s a lot of talk in political circles asserting that “voters are stupid.” When I hear a consultant say that, what I am really hearing is “I don't understand why they did that.”
Which is fine. And normal. Humans are fucking weird.
But when you dismiss the decisions voters make as “stupid”, you’re actually just being a lazy strategist and letting yourself off the hook. If millions of people keep making a decision you think is irrational, at some point you have to consider the possibility that you don't understand the problem.
And there are a myriad of problems. Public education in this country has been gutted for 50+ years. Media literacy and civics have been purposely destroyed. The information infrastructure either feeds people propaganda on one side or a personalized algorithmic bubble on the other. There’s also the simple fact that people are exhausted from their 3 jobs and mountains of medical debt and simply do not have the mental space to “get informed.”
We as political insiders need to understand that curiosity will make us much more effective than contempt ever will. No one wants to vote for someone who looks down on them. And they can tell.
4. Political labels rarely mean much.
We are all progressive in the face of fascism. We are all moderate compared to authoritarians. Shut up and focus. Factions are for winners. We have not earned those yet.
5. Everyone has an agenda, and that's okay.
I had a mentor/friend a long time ago teach me this lesson in a metaphor at the beginning of my career when talking me through a political friend break up.
An election cycle is like a horse race. You have your horse. The union has their horse. The party has theirs. The Chamber has theirs. And so on. Everyone is gathered at the track for one purpose: to watch their horse win.
Sometimes you bet on the same horse as other folks, and you’re best friends. Sometimes you bet on a different horse and you act like enemies. But to expect anyone at the track not to have a favorite horse makes no sense. Why would they be there in the first place?
Politics is the same way. If you’re not trying to get something done and angling your work to achieve those goals…why are you here? And if you’re doing it, why punish someone else for doing the same?
There’s nothing wrong with having an agenda. Where things go bad is when people hide them.
6. The Political Industrial Complex is real.
I could write a whole book on this, but money in politics is SO MUCH worse than most people know. And I’m part of the problem.
The lady who cuts my hair has a certificate on her wall that shows she did at least 1,100 hours of training to be able to legally touch my head and charge me money. I, on the other hand, woke up at 25 and randomly decided to pull the levers of power. No certification or training or oversight. No one can stop me and I am not limited the same way lobbyists, donors, or elected officials are.
Ordinary people think they're interacting with candidates and movements. Often, however, they're actually interacting with an enormous invisible commercial infrastructure: consultants like me, platforms, list brokers, pollsters, mail houses, media buyers, fundraising firms, software companies, vendors, etc.
All the people inside this infrastructure should be in the business of democracy, but there is a financial incentive to keep politics expensive, adversarial, and perpetual.
If you think your consultant is super cheap, take a closer look at how they're getting paid. A lot of political consulting revenue is buried in voter outreach through commissions, markups, or other compensation tied to media spending. That creates obvious motivation to build campaign plans heavy on direct mail, television, and other forms of mass communication. Field and organizing don't offer the same profit structure. Direct voter relationship-building simply isn't as lucrative as mass media.
Hot take: the presidential election isn’t the big sexy election because it impacts our lives the most, it’s the big sexy election because it’s where the Political Industrial Complex makes the most money.
7. Winning matters.
In 2020, we were running a campaign for a city wide police reform ballot measure in San Diego. We ran the campaign for the full 2-year cycle and had all the messaging about why voting yes was the right thing to do. We’d been working our asses off and we were very very very sure we were right.. But we ran a poll, and we were losing. Our message didn’t resonate at all. It was so disappointing.
Hidden in the polling cross tabs was one small piece of opportunity. The California Nurses Association had endorsed the campaign and was polling highest among our endorsers. And it wasn’t particularly close.
So we scrapped all our messaging. All of it. No more accountability and transparency. No more justice. No more anti-racism. Just “Nurses say Yes on B.”
We won by the largest vote share in San Diego that year. Higher than President Biden. Because we stopped pushing our values on the voters and went with the messaging that worked.
Did it feel good to not share all the high level values in our hearts? No. Did it feel good to win? Fuck yes. And civilian investigations of police misconduct in San Diego get subpoena power now.
8. Campaigns are not revolution.
Elections in our current system are not the revolution, but they are harm mitigation.
Opting out of politics does not weaken authoritarianism, it clears the field for it. It removes one of the few imperfect tools available to slow the damage, limit the reach, and buy time for organizing, resistance, and care.
Elections determine who holds power when the machinery of the state is turned on its people. They determine who commands law enforcement, and whether that enforcement is used to protect or to punish. They determine who controls the purse strings, and whether that money will be used to nourish or to starve. They determine whether abuses are investigated or ignored. Whether we are taught to think for ourselves or to believe them when they tell us our eyes are lying. Whether rights are defended, diluted, or erased.
Elections have consequences, and we are watching some of the most dire ones unfold in real time.
9. Movement building is more important than cycle-based work.
Sometimes you can lose an election and still leave the movement stronger. Sometimes you can win an election and leave it weaker.
I’ve done both.
Campaign culture measures dollars, voters, and seats and aims every factor squarely at the second Tuesday in November. Movement building includes people, relationships, skill building, infrastructure, leadership development, and increases to power over time.
Campaigns ask only where the next vote is cheapest. Movement builders ask where investment creates durable political capacity.
It breaks my heart every First Wednesday in November to watch all the campaign infrastructure and development that gets thrown away. The brand new donors and voters who bought in this time -- and will be expected to repeat that behavior without anyone keeping the relationship warm. The volunteers, neighborhood leaders, candidate pipelines, community trust, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in up to date data and institutional knowledge across the country. All thrown to the side.
We spend millions building temporary organizations and then dismantle them. That's objectively insane. If we rebuild our political infrastructure from scratch every two years, we're not building power. We're renting it.
Movement building is harder to measure. Not as sexy to fund. And has to be taken in stride with losing while making progress. But we are losing to a decades-long plan by Christian Nationalists right now, and we need one of our own. Power building requires thinking beyond November…every single November.
10. Cynicism is lazy.
I am not naive. I know that everything is fucked. But I have no patience for folks who just throw up their hands and claim there’s nothing to be done.
You think you’re sophisticated because you have identified the problems of the world. But identifying problems is easy. Building solutions -- even partial ones -- under imperfect conditions is hard.
It’s easier to dismiss everything as fucked than it is to create progress. It’s easier to throw your hands up and claim there's nothing to be done than it is to come up with a strategy to do something despite everything.
Yes, politics is industrialized.
Yes, people have agendas.
Yes, campaigns churn and burn.
Yes, people vote against their own interest.
Yes, sometimes the message that wins isn't the one that makes you feel morally impressive.
No, elections are not revolution.
But…some of us are working in those constraints and fighting fascism. You’re doom scrolling.
Hope is discipline, cynicism is lazy, and giving up makes me think you’re incompetent.