Endorsement Playbook
Endorsements are one of the most powerful (and most misunderstood) tools available to Democratic and progressive candidates. Done well, they bring more than a name on your website: they bring money, volunteers, credibility, and a built-in network of people who want to see you win.
But there's no single formula. What an endorsement process looks like depends entirely on your race. A candidate running for city council in a mid-size suburb is going to have a completely different set of options than someone running for Congress. Your location, the political climate in your district, and the level of office you're seeking all shape which organizations matter, which are realistic to pursue, and how much weight any one endorsement will carry. This guide is simply built to get you thinking strategically — use what's relevant to your race and skip what isn't.
Many of the groups you'll see in the pages ahead have state chapters, regional affiliates, or local branches — and in many cases, you have to win over that local or state chapter before the national organization will even consider you. Start local, build up.
Finally, this advice applies primarily to organizational endorsements, and won't directly translate to endorsements from individuals or elected officials. The organizations featured throughout aren't a comprehensive list, and being included isn't a ranking or indication of importance on our part. They're simply meant to give you a sense of the major players to research further.
Read straight through, or jump to whatever section is most relevant to where you are in your campaign:
Questionnaire Strategy
Endorsement questionnaires are where campaigns either distinguish themselves or quietly disqualify themselves. Getting this right is part strategy, part craft, and part client management.
Finding the questionnaire and knowing what you're walking into
Not every organization publishes a clear process. Some will reach out directly once your candidate files and their information appears on official government sites — which means your campaign email needs to be monitored consistently from the moment you file.
Others require you to go looking: check the organization's website, call their Political Director, and ask directly about their endorsement timeline and process. Labor unions in particular often won't send materials until they've heard from you first, so proactive outreach matters.
When information isn't publicly available, talk to people who've run before. Candidates almost always know someone who's been through a cycle, and those people will have a sense of which organizations are active, what the processes look like, and who to contact. You can also check old campaign websites from candidates who ran in similar districts — the endorsements they earned tell you which organizations were active in that race and worth pursuing.
Prioritizing which endorsements to pursue
Not every endorsement has the same value, and part of the job is helping the candidate understand that. Before you start filling out questionnaires, do a prioritization pass. Ask: Will voters care about this one? Will it generate money? Will it bring people power — volunteers, canvassers, turnout infrastructure? Will it trigger other endorsements? Some endorsements are flashy but functionally empty. Others are modest in name recognition but unlock real resources. Know which is which before you spend time on them.
Also think about sequencing. Certain endorsers have influence over others — labor orgs, in particular, can trigger a cascade effect. Some individual endorsers are waiting to see who else jumps in before they commit. A mental — or written — map of who goes first, who they'll pull in, and whether a slate is possible is worth building early in the cycle.
How to answer — the core principles
The single most important rule for filling out a questionnaire: answer everything under the assumption that your responses will be leaked and that you may need to defend what you wrote publicly. Not because organizations are adversarial — most aren't — but because questionnaire answers have a way of surfacing, and candidates who write with that awareness tend to write better answers.
A few principles that follow from this:
Less is often more on policy questions. Length often depends on the structure of the question itself. If the organization is asking a clean yes/no or offering limited response options, match that format. If it's open-ended with no word count or character limit, you don't need to write a novel to prove you care. People's attention spans are shorter than ever, and one or two sentences is usually enough to make your position clear. Going deep with a long, nuanced, multi-part answer just gives more surface area to trip over.
More is sometimes better in a room. If your candidate has to appear before a committee or interview panel, the calculus flips. In a room where you're trying to win people over and stand out from similar candidates, personality and depth of engagement matter. Read the context.
Don't compare yourself to specific names. Referencing other politicians, whether favorably or unfavorably, gives people something to latch onto and creates associations you can't control. You never know how folks feel about someone else. Keep the focus on your candidate's own record and vision.
Don't take the candidate's first draft as gospel. Your job is to push back. If an answer is too long, too candid, too vague, or could be read two ways… say so. Have a scary story ready for the ones they're resistant to changing. Explain how it could come back to bite them. That's part of the job.
When your candidate doesn't fully align
This is where questionnaire strategy gets interesting. There will be organizations your candidate should consider pursuing where the values don't perfectly match. Here's how to think through it:
First, how significant is the values gap? A candidate who supports labor broadly but has complicated feelings about police unions may still be worth pursuing with a pro-labor organization — and can answer honestly while explaining their position. Being honest about where you stand and letting them decide is often the right move. You'd be surprised how often organizations will still endorse a candidate who's upfront about a genuine disagreement.
Second, how big a spender is the organization in elections? If they're going to put real money or infrastructure behind their endorsee, the calculation is different than if the endorsement is symbolic. And this cuts both ways… if you've said you won't take money from certain sources, like Big Pharma, don't risk contradicting that. If they end up supporting you financially, you may look like a hypocrite, even if you never asked for the money.
Third, watch for questionnaires that feel like traps. Some organizations — particularly oppositional ones or those backing a competitor — send questionnaires specifically to get answers they can use in ads or hand to an opponent. If you can sense that dynamic, you have options: give very brief, defensible answers, decline to submit, or — if your candidate is confident in their position — use it as an opportunity to draw a clear contrast. Answering strongly and standing firm can function as something of an op-ed if the answers get published. Done right, it's a form of "making the right enemies," clearly defining what your candidate stands for in a way that actually attracts the voters and supporters you're trying to reach.
One hard rule: don't lie. Be tactful, be strategic about how much you say, but never fabricate or misrepresent a position. The risk is never worth it.
Leveraging Endorsements
Winning an endorsement is step one. What you do with it is where campaigns either leave resources on the table or build real momentum.
The asks beyond the press release
Most campaigns announce an endorsement, post the logo on their website, and move on. The campaigns that get the most out of endorsements treat them as relationship transactions — and they ask for more.
When an organization endorses your candidate, here's just a sample of what you can ask for:
Fundraising
People power
Earned media
Mail and digital
Peer introductions
Sequencing your announcements
How and when you reveal endorsements matters. A few principles:
Release early endorsements strategically to trigger others. If you know that a specific reproductive justice group’s endorsement will move individual endorsers who are waiting on them, prioritize that one and announce it in a way that creates visibility.
Think about which endorsements to bundle and which to let breathe. A handful of major endorsements released together signals broad support. But a single high-profile name sometimes carries more weight if it gets its own moment.
Showcasing endorsements publicly — a note on tact
Not every endorsement belongs on every piece of campaign collateral, and how you display them publicly requires strategic thinking.
Consider your audience at every step. An endorsement from a progressive advocacy organization may be a powerful signal to base voters but could give pause to persuadable or cross-over voters you're still trying to win. That doesn't mean you hide it — but it may mean you lead with different endorsements on a mailer going to a swing precinct than you do on your campaign website or at a progressive club meeting.
Similarly, some endorsements are better activated internally than broadcast publicly. A faith community leader who endorses your candidate may be more valuable mobilizing their congregation than as a name on a website.
The goal is coalition-sensitive rollout: making sure that how you showcase support is building toward the broadest possible coalition rather than unintentionally signaling to some voters that this candidacy isn't for them.
Before you close this guide…
Everything you've seen so far highlights organizations with a national footprint, household names with infrastructure that extends across the country. Yet, some of the most important endorsements in your race won't come from any of them.
Three categories deserve their own research, separate from anything covered in this guide:
The Democratic Party itself isn't one endorsing body, it's several. Your state party has its own process, often distinct from your county party, which has its own process and priorities, separate again from the local Democratic clubs and caucuses active in your specific area. Depending on where you're running, one or more of these layers could matter enormously — or barely at all.
Labor unions are major endorsing forces in nearly every part of the country, but which unions matter and how active they are politically varies enormously by region. Always start local — going straight to a national or regional body without engaging the local chapter first is a quick way to damage a relationship before it starts.
Local newspapers still carry real weight in many races, especially down-ballot, but coverage and endorsement practices differ paper to paper, market to market.
Almost every race will have some combination of party infrastructure, labor, and local press playing a meaningful role — but don't get blinders on. The traditional endorsement infrastructure was built for a certain kind of candidate, and progressive, outsider, and minority candidates often have to be more resourceful. Endorsements can come from any entity that has a voice and a community behind it — a business association, a faith community, a neighborhood group, even a book club. Don't overlook the places where real people actually gather.
If you want help navigating that research or building out a full endorsement strategy tailored to your race, book a call with our team — this is exactly the kind of work we do alongside campaigns every cycle.