#the anointed of God | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

femmecelworld · 25 days ago

Text

intro to american political campaigns:

a romencken bestie asked me what campaigns were like/how they work, so I tried to do a brief overview… lol. I work in politics and I’m an overexplainer, so this is probably way more information than they intended. BUT if you were ever curious about the weird wild world of american political campaigns or wanted to write a political AU fic, this should help!

wow where to even begin 🫠

First I should clarify that while the Dems and Republicans have more in common in political gamesmanship / campaigning than either party would like to admit, Republicans don’t run electoral campaigns the way Dems do. They don’t do a lot of what we call “ground game”, or “organizing”—which means the person -> person part of campaigns; people who knock on doors and make calls or send texts, organize rallies and voter events, etc.

if anything, they run “paid canvasses”: when the campaign or PAC group will just pay people to knock on doors and read a script and hand out lit (those flyers/pamphlets). How is that different from Democratic organizers? A Dem organizer also knocks on doors, but they’re responsible for a lot more and they should (🙃) have more agency and flexibility to make decisions about their particular area. Also they actually care very deeply about the issues or the candidate(s), whereas a paid canvasser might not—organizers get paid absolute shit wages and have terrible working conditions, so it’s not about the money. If an organizer want to hold a rally or organize some kind of action, or even start up a weekly activist book club or something—that should be within their purview. (Whether or not their boss okays it is another thing)

Republicans don’t respect people at all, Dems at least pretend to (if anyone wants, I’m happy to do a longer expanded version of this rant with the way the DNC treats entry level workers, unions, hourly workers, and marginalized people). So the GOP doesn’t really care about “organizing”—despite the fact I think they might even be better at it—because they do it in the shadows. And if anyone wants me to get into *that* on an expanded scale, I will, it’ll just be too long for a campaign overview here. Officially, the RNC doesn’t do things… but subgroups and PACs and “local organizations” will. The truth is, the GOP is deeply involved with all of that, it’s just not “officially” and not on their financial disclosures.

For example, this year, the Trump campaign basically didn’t even hire campaign staff on the ground. Like at all. And coincidentally, El0n Musk ran a national PAC that did a paid canvass program in the swing states (that was a garbage program but I’ll sideline that)

guess I should try to highlight the different kinds of campaigns.

501(c)(4) vs 501(c)(3)

OKAY STAY WITH ME HERE lol!!

You’ll hear this tossed around a lot if you work in politics; it’s the IRS filing designations between political candidates, campaigns, PACs, lobbyists VS. nonprofits and “non-political” orgs. basically it means directly campaigning for a candidate/group/issue and non-profit organizing—which is tax exempt, and that’s why this is important. So for instance, in America, a church could run a “get out the vote!” campaign without risking their tax-exempt status, because they aren’t advocating for a candidate or position. If they did, that would be considered a political contribution and they’d have to pay taxes.

Example that is definitely fake and for sure not a mess I had to sort out last spring COUGH— I had to repeatedly tell someone that I couldn’t help them unless they register with [redacted] because I’m a political operative and my time counts as an in-kind campaign contribution unless they go through my bosses.

Like you can’t just do someone a favor, as much as it might not seem like a big deal. Even if I were to write a basic script or help someone get access to, idk, an event space, that’s all going to get me and them in huge trouble with the FEC if they’re not filing properly.

Now I say that, yet republicans pull this bullshit *all the time*. The problem is, the courts are stacked, Citizens United fucked this country so badly we might never recover, and it’s really hard to nail them on this because they always have money for lawyers. But I don’t, so I don’t play about the FEC.

Think of c3 vs c4 as a firewall—we don’t coordinate. (The GOP does but everyone in America decided to turn a blind eye to that I guess)

501(c)(4) political operations:

Cool so let’s talk about what that means, practically speaking:

The DNC (stands for Democratic National Committee or Democratic National Convention) runs most campaigns, followed by candidates’ individual campaigns, then sometimes we see issue-campaigns or movements. In a presidential general election year, everyone comes out to play and we call that “coordinated campaigns”. That means the DNC or Dem state party (they’re synonymous for this context) will coordinate with the candidates and county parties to run one big machine (that’s how it’s supposed to work in theory, almost never that smooth in actuality)

I think what a lot of folks don’t understand is there are DNC campaigns and candidate campaigns. So in Pennsylvania 2024, there was the Democratic statewide campaign, the Harris-Walz campaign, the Bob Casey campaign—etc etc. All running at the same time. Now if the coordinated campaign was working properly (lol it was not) they all would have flowed together into ONE campaign, like tributaries running into a delta. Because you don’t want 5 different groups doing the same thing.

Top of the ticket / all the way down the ticket:

When political people say this, they’re talking about a ballot and all the candidates listed there. In the context of campaigns, they are probably talking about working for all party candidates at once. Like I was explaining above ^ why would we have 5-8 democratic campaigns who are essentially doing the same thing when we could just have one campaign talking about all the Dem candidates?

1. money. Coordinated campaigns are taxed differently than an individual candidates campaign (more, basically)

2. ego. There are a lot of candidates, who shall remain nameless, who think they know more than everyone else so they want to be in charge of their own campaign instead of allowing someone in dc to call shots for the coordinated.

3. competence. Now to immediately play devils advocate to my own point, sometimes they’re right about this! sometimes (almost always) the dnc/d.c./hq is absolute trash or the people they hire suck. I’m going to just ref this quickly but if anyone wants an expanded note on this I’ll do it: the congressional district in Nebraska that ran to the left, in the middle of a very red state. That candidate ran as an independent not a Dem, but this isn’t why (or not the whole reason) he won. He ran his own campaign without working with the dnc and it was absolutely the right move for his district and his brand.

4. But. More often than not, I see a candidate (or their campaign manager) who lets their ego run the show and it doesn’t end well

Presidential vs Senate vs Congressional etc:

Now I think you asked about a Senate campaign—I’ll say really the only difference in campaigns, outside of “coordinated” or not is just scale. Like obviously it’s harder to run a Senate campaign than a city council campaign (unless that city council campaign is in NYC) BUT the overall picture is pretty similar. You still need a campaign manager, good field math, excellent data, comms strategy, a treasurer, and a plan for ground game.

Your budget and fundraising projections will determine how much staff you can hire and the various phases of your field plan (I’ll get into more detail on a campaign simulation later) but your campaign still runs with the same kind of philosophy and method, just on a different scale.

Like on a small scale campaign, the campaign manager might end up wearing 7 different hats, doing strategy and comms and arranging political relationships AND management, whereas on a better funded or bigger campaign, they’re able to delegate better because they can hire more people.

In my experience, a big difference in culture is that you get a lot more true believers on candidates’ campaigns. People apply because they’re there for that person, not the general cause or issue. A little more hero worship, and people who just want to get that specific person into office. There is way more money in coordinated campaigns but I would pick my first candidate campaign over that in a D.C. minute.

(Lowkey if I could quit my current job and go back to working for my first candidate, making about 1/3 of what I do now, I absolutely fucking would {that was probably the last time I had faith in a politician lol})

NY does spending caps and small dollar matching, it’s very cool and the whole country should be doing it:

Outside the DNC:

Now there are also a lot of groups who essentially fall into D-branding or the Dem umbrella but aren’t technically part of the party. PACs like SwingLeft, NextGen, Run For Something, Emily’s List, NARAL, MoveOn, Human Rights Campaign, etc etc I’m not going to list them all because I don’t got time like that. But they will run campaigns exactly like the DNC. Campaign finance laws have been changing a lot in the last 8 years and coordination is getting murkier and murkier and it often depends what state you’re in. So there are some states where these PACs actually can coordinate with the DNC (which, my 2017 brain still gets hung up on that).

Then there are even more groups that do campaigns, but they aren’t the DNC or PACs, strictly speaking. And that would be like, the AFL-CIO, greenpeace, sunrise movement, etc. those campaigns vary a LOT year to year and candidate to candidate.

{If anyone ever has questions about mutual aid / issue advocacy campaigns, lmk, happy to ramble! I won’t get into it here because it’s a bit of a side tangent. But an example that everyone in America should be paying attention to is the stop cop city campaign in Atlanta Georgia. Absolutely horrific consequences for the country and the future of protest movements.}

So. Yeah. Political campaigns are a multi-billion dollar industry in the United States; they’re complex and insane and unfortunately not going anywhere.

Okay now I’m finally going to talk about the inside of a campaign lol 🤪🫠

Different parts/departments of a political campaign:

Field/Organizing. Comms. Data. Digital. Political. Finance. Operations (Ops).

Any of these departments (except Political) you can essentially start entry-level, like fresh out of college or completely new to the industry. Politics runs pretty young, and campaigns ESPECIALLY so. Most campaign staff are under 35. another time I’ll rant about how the dnc loves to snatch up wide-eyed college kids who don’t know how to advocate for themselves and pay them shit wages to do horrible endless work. Part of the reason for the age gap is ^ that, but also campaigns are so fucking grueling that you need the elixir of youth to survive them. You can’t do campaigns endlessly, you just can’t. The burnout is insane. And the turnover rate is very very high.

I know people who started doing paid campaign work while they were still in college, and were managing statewide races about 3 years later.

Now, 12 years ago, campaigns were a rich kids/nepo baby’s game. You didn’t get hired onto a campaign unless your parents were Important People with Connections. Entry level campaign positions often weren’t paid (and if they were, it was minimum wage), so no one could afford to work them unless they had parents helping them or other money. reason for that was of course keeping power consolidated with the elite. and you can imagine how diverse campaign staff was (cough)

plus, if you want to make it as a campaigner, you have to be able to pick up and move a thousand miles with a few days’ notice. you’ll work one campaign for 3-6 months, longer if you’re lucky, then the election, then you have to find a new job and 9 times out of 10, that means moving to another state to start all over again. It means you have to own a car, you have to be able to fit your whole life in said car, and you have to have savings for new apartment deposits or moving costs. Most people can’t afford to live like that.

But things have changed—not fast enough but making progress. Now wages are increasing (slowly) and they have healthcare and caps on working hours.

The first union campaign was in 2018 but wages were secondary to the other massive issue on political campaigns: sexual harassment. You would think that progressive spaces would have less of a problem with that, right? Nope. Sexual harassment was rampant on campaigns (still a huge problem even now tbh). The reason for that is campaigns cross a lot of boundaries: you work insane hours, at weird times, and you have to push yourself to ignore or blur typical social norms, like, you know, working up the nerve to talk to complete strangers about their political views and personal ideology. So there are a lot of late hours in the office, talking about politics and deeply personal issues, and you’re running on empty because the work is exhausting—yeah, shit happens. And bad actors take advantage of these situations.

(Once, with a friend from 2020, I was talking about this and realized campaign working conditions almost perfectly match the conditions necessary for captor bonding and psychological conditioning 🙃)

Anyway! Like I said in that earlier section, each of these departments is determined by the scale of the campaign and how much money you have. On a city council campaign, I worked up a campaign plan that allocated for about 5 staffers—that was for Manhattan, so you’d think there was more money than a typical race but! NYC does have some very cool campaign finance regulation, YAY for that!!! You would not believe how much money gets spent on some of these other cc races. If you were running a cc race for… idk, St. Louis? I’d budget for maybe 3 staffers including your campaign manager, and they will probably mostly be doing organizing work while the CM does everything else (strategy data comms political finance)

The one position you never short is the campaign treasurer. Most states legally require you to have one. But, that isn’t really a full time job thing or even a paid position. A lot of campaigns will just designate someone to keep an eye on the books and make sure the money adds up, but not pay them.

Believe it or not, your candidate will do the bulk of the fundraising. Check out AOC’s page for more on this; she has some great explainers on how much time members of Congress have to spend fundraising. That’s called “call time” or “candidate call time” and sometimes you’ll even have a finance person sit on the candidate to do this because candidates fucking hate it. And I get it, cold calling people for money sucks, but people are way more likely to write a check if the candidate themself calls. And I don’t work with candidates who won’t. I don’t have a lot of black and white rules, but one is I do not work with candidates who won’t fundraise their own race and won’t knock doors. Hell no. Because if you won’t put in the real work, why the fuck should I?

For a Senate race, you’re going to have more money (or you fucking better lol) so you’re probably looking at… it really does depend how big the state/race is, but I’d say somewhere from 12-20. Maybe more! Covid changed campaigns a lot too, and hiring has been a nightmare since 2020. And for a Senate campaign, you *should* have at least one person staffing each of the departments I mentioned.

Just a very very vague simulation of what your staffing timeline could look like—obviously I would be more specific for a certain state or candidate, but as an example:

{timeline for hiring staff and campaign phases}

For a statewide (senate, gubernatorial) or a high-profile congressional, I would have:

campaign manager hired 9 months out min

senior staff hired 6 months out min, depending on budget and campaign needs

other staffers, entry level and otherwise, hired 3 months out

if the campaign just doesn’t have the money, you can adjust all these maybe 6 weeks, and possibly get away with cutting other staffers or hiring organizers only for the final four weeks

Field/organizing will always be your biggest department, because you need to hire enough organizers to cover whatever your district is, how many people can feasibly knock/call/text/etc all your constituents. Hopefully you’ll get volunteers, but your staff is going to do the biggest piece of it.

Now my advice is to *never hire fucking consultants because they are evil*. Snake oil salesmen. Sorry but true! And I can say that because while that isn’t technically my job title, it’s closer than I would like (🥲😩) Also consider that Shiv Roy is a political consultant. So.

But republicans always hire consultants for their campaigns, so if you’re writing a GOP campaign, you’ll need to write them in.

Also, if you can afford it, a lawyer can be a good move, sometimes. Like if the candidate doesn’t have a law background and they haven’t worked with consultants or advisors or any other group who might have a lawyer on retainer… they either need to double check some things with a lawyer to make sure they’re kosher, or get a campaign manager who will do a crash course in FEC regulation and campaign legal guidelines online (me early on working for candidates who had no money lol)

So if candidates run afoul of campaign finance law, it isn’t always the end of the world, because people make mistakes just by not knowing the law—but you never want to be in that position if you can avoid it.

Campaign structure:

Basically how campaigns start is top down: you need to sit down and figure out the big picture stuff and strategy, then you can start hiring people and doing things. A lot of first-time candidates will work with advising firms or consultants to figure themselves out. Sometimes other groups (Emily’s list and run for something dabble in this, but lots of others) work in communities to identify good potential candidates, then they’ll help them get off the ground. It might be the candidate and campaign manager rolling by themselves for a few months until they can afford more staffers. Your campaign manager is, obviously, your most important hiring decision. Not only do they need to be competent and skilled in a huge variety of work, but they need to be a cultural match with the candidate. If they’re not, it doesn’t work. They don’t have to line up on every single ideological or political issue, BUT they do have to speak the same language. That’s something I tried to get to come through in anointed, the difference between someone like Aiden and Paul in how they relate to Mencken. Paul doesn’t give a shit about Mencken’s policies but he knows this work and he wants a Rep, any Rep, in the White House. (And I also wrote it this way because a classic party leadership move is forcing one of their own people into a candidate’s campaign after they get through the primaries and win the nom, and at that point, for a POTUS campaign at least, the simpatico thing isn’t as important because the campaign manager becomes way more about bureaucracy and task management than shaping policy) So he and Mencken don’t mesh very well and Mencken doesn’t trust him, but it doesn’t sink the campaign because of Aiden. Aiden is a true believer type—he might not have stuck around in politics if he and Mencken hadn’t built this relationship. And he’s great at his job because he gets Mencken and he’s down with the fashy shit.

A candidate does need an Aiden-type, someone who really truly believes in them, that the candidate feels like they can trust. You see chaos when candidates don’t trust their own staff or they pull too many cooks into the kitchen. There’s a good book (“Shattered”) about what went wrong with the 2016 Clinton campaign (what didn’t go wrong, damn) and a huge problem she’s always had is she doesn’t trust a lot of people and those she does trust, she listens to blindly and those people set themselves up as gatekeepers with no accountability. A whole ass mess.

If you want more detail on day in the life type stuff for a campaign, I can get into it, but it varies so much based on state and office. Basically it’s like… you work all day with little or no breaks, you put out fires constantly, everyone’s stressed, and you find yourself locking yourself in a hall closet screaming “why didn’t they do this a month ago!” Oh also there’s this thing called “floor time”—which is so fun once you get brainwashed enough. Basically it’s like, when you get overstimulated, you shut down your laptop and lay down on the floor for a while until you feel better. (I had Mencken do it on the plane in ‘a precinct short’)

🤠

Sample daily schedule:

8am start time for CM and senior staff, morning checkin call

10am start time for daily checkin call (usually per department)

***there are usually 1-2 all-staff meetings per week, with everyone from the campaign manager down to field organizers and interns

CM and senior staff would have a variety of meetings and calls, depends on campaign’s specific affiliations and political network

Meanwhile, other staffers settle in to the days work, after their department level meetings where the dept head assigns work or updates—if there’s breaking news or a special event (a rally, a debate night), all previous work gets sidelined in favor of that. Sometimes those events happen really quickly with no notice, like you get a call from HQ and they say “hey Candidate is going to be there in 3 days, put a rally together”

Field organizers do call time (not fundraising, canvassing calls to voters/constituents) or door knocking after 3/4pm. The closer it gets the election, the more contact they’ll do. So if it’s 6 months out, they might do it every other day or twice a week, but once you’re in the final 90 or 60 days, that gets moved up to every day.

Per US law, campaigns are not allowed to contact people before 9am or after 9pm.

Then there’s a nightly checkout call per department, probably at 7 or 9pm, depending on how close it is to election day (hours increase)

In other departments outside of the field/organizing, hours are much closer to a typical 9-5. BUT they will work as needed, on weekends late at night whatever, and their workload also increases exponentially the closer it is to election day. Pro and cons to working in these departments: you’re supposed to get better hours and you do get better pay. But your schedule is abused a lot more because they don’t have as strict hours and cutoffs as the field organizers. Like digital staff will get pulled on a moments notice and be expected to just work until Item X is done if there’s breaking news. Political dept staffers work just all the time, because there’s an unspoken expectation that you constantly network and go to events to gladhand in your “free time”.

Okay… wow. Not me writing a thesis on this damn 🫠

I think that’s pretty good general overview of how campaigns work, but if you’ve got more questions, go for it, I can always add more sections.

Hope you enjoyed this Proust-length novel about campaign world!

#anointed with a coke #the romencken multiverse #oh my god how did this even happen WHAT my flight was delayed way too long

5 notes · View notes