Amanda Litman on Next Gen Leadership

Amanda Litman is an author, digital strategist, and the co-founder and president of “Run For Something” - an organization which recruits and supports young, diverse progressive candidates. Since launching in 2017, Run For Something has helped to elect more than 1,500 leaders across 49 states- primarily women and people of color. Outspoken against “bad boomer leadership” and a “boomer mentality” in politics, Litman is also president of RFS Civics - a 501c3 that works to end the gerontocracy. Shortly after launching Run for Something, Amanda wrote the book Run for Something: A Real-Talk Guide to Fixing the System Yourself and has recently published her latest book, When We’re in Charge: The Next Generation’s Guide to Leadership in May 2025. Litman cites Barack Obama as her inspiration to work in politics and started her career as an email writer for his 2012 re-election campaign. From there, Litman worked as a digital strategist for Hilary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, Charlie Crist's 2014 Florida gubernatorial campaign, and served as the deputy email director for Organizing for Action. Litman is a strong advocate for a new style of “next gen” leadership and setting a new standard for this upcoming generation of leaders. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:36Alec Baldwin?

  This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio. My guest today is an author, digital strategist, and the co-founder and president of Run for Something, an organization that recruits and supports young, diverse, progressive candidates. Amanda Litman launched Run for Something in 2017. Since then, she has helped elect more than 1,500 leaders across 49 states. Amanda Litman is also the president of RFS Civics, a 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to ending the charantocracy in American politics.

• 2:18Alec Baldwin?

  Prior to launching Run for Something, Litman built a career as a digital strategist. She served as the email director for Hilary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, not those emails. She also served as the digital director for Charlie Crist's 2014 Florida gubernatorial campaign and previously worked on Barack Obama's 2012 reelection campaign. Amanda Litman is also the author of two books, Run for Something, A Real Talk Guide to Fixing the System Yourself, and her most recent book, When We're in Charge: The Next Generation's Guide to Leadership.

• 3:01Alec Baldwin?

  Litman has become an outspoken critic of what she calls "bad boomer leadership" and is an advocate for a new style of next-gen leadership. I was curious to hear her perspective on the boomer mentality and what she believes sets the next generation of leaders apart.

• 3:20Speaker 07

  I find boomer leadership to be a very good foil for what the next generation needs to be working against, yeah.

• 3:26Alec Baldwin?

  In what way?

• 3:27Speaker 07

  Well, I think that there is a mentality behind boomer leadership, and I say this with all due respect, to boomers, to Gen Xers, who always get mad when I leave them out, it's a classic Gen X response, that there is a certain mentality among a boomer style of leadership that is very beholden to institutions. It feels like institutions are good, will be there for them, are worth engaging with, that you can climb a career ladder, that mental health is like, you know, for weaklings and that you should never take a day off. And if you do take a day off, it's none of our business what you do with it. And, you know, you don't bring your full self to work. You are a beep-bop robot when you show up and you do your job and then you leave. Or alternatively, you bring all of yourself to work with you and you tell me all of your problems and all of your illnesses and I actually don't want to know any of that.

• 4:09Speaker 07

  Compared to what I am proposing in When We're in Charge, which is what I call sort of next-gen leadership, which millennials, Gen Z, but really anyone can adapt, which is authentic but with boundaries, transparent but understanding there are limits to transparency. Effective, but also not treating people like shit. And I think that especially in this particular moment, understanding that you do not have to be an asshole to be a good boss and a good leader and a good politician is something that we actually need to be incredibly clear about and reiterate over and over and over again. Because if you look around the world right now, you might come away with the misconception that you have to be terrible to people in order to rise to the tops of the ladders.

• 4:51Alec Baldwin?

  Do you believe, as I do, that we have the patriarchy in charge of the country for so long now, and it hasn't been bested by some other group? What appealed to me about your book, Run for Something, was this idea that more and more people don't want anything to do with politics.

• 5:07Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 5:08Alec Baldwin?

  The people that would make the best senators, justices, statewide offices, nationwide offices, they don't want anything to do with these recent generations. Do you agree?

• 5:17Speaker 07

  No. So Run for Something, which is the organization I run, recruits and supports millennials and Gen Z running for local office. In the last nearly 10 years, we've had more than a quarter million young people raise their hands to say they want to run. And my favorite thing is, these are people who never thought about running for president. They haven't planned to become United States senators since they were kindergartners. They didn't go to college majoring in political science. They're not lawyers. They're not rich. They are totally ordinary people who see what's happening around us and say, oh, I actually have a responsibility and an opportunity to fix it, and this organization has said, maybe I could run for office and they'll help me do it. I'm going to consider this. I'm going to jump in. I think we're at a tipping point here, where, to your point, there is a lot of young people who see the political system and say, screw it, this is not for me.

• 5:59Speaker 07

  But there is a group among them who are saying, this is for me and I'm not going to wait my turn. And I love that.

• 6:06Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah. But I look at, for example, although New York's fortunes have ebbed in terms of its relevance and its place, not as a spawning ground for political leadership nationwide, but I mean, just in terms of, the population has gone down, the House delegation has gone down. New York, Florida, California is forever eclipsing us, and New York is like the fourth most populous state now. And I say to myself, what passes for leadership in a certain state? I look at people who go to the Senate and the House from certain states and I You've got to be kidding me. That's the person you sent to the United States Senate?

• 6:39Speaker 07

  Mm hmm.

• 6:39Alec Baldwin?

  You couldn't find somebody else, man, woman, black, white, doesn't matter, whatever age, who's more dynamic than that? The same, I think, is true in New York. He's been there too long.

• 6:48Speaker 07

  If Democrats take back the majority in the House, the Speaker of the House will be from New York City, and if we take back the majority in the Senate, the majority leader will be from New York City. What happens here has national ramifications. And, you know, Hakeem Jeffries, eh, but is Chuck Schumer our best? Is really, is Chuck Schumer the best we can do?

• 7:07Alec Baldwin?

  I think he's had his time.

• 7:08Speaker 07

  Yes, I would agree with that.

• 7:09Alec Baldwin?

  And I think that she's had her time as well, Gillibrand. I mean, nothing wrong with them as people. I'm not judging them as people. I'm just saying, they've been there a long time, and I'm not quite sure when Chuck Schumer didn't stand up to the banks during the financial crisis, it was over for me.

• 7:21Speaker 07

  For me, I think part of this is that Chuck Schumer still imagines the Republican Party as good faith operators. He still sees this as the Republican Party of when he came up in politics, where, you know, he and others will say this too, like, we're just waiting for the fever to break. No, it is Trump's party all the way down. These people do not want the government to function. You cannot negotiate with them.

• 7:39Alec Baldwin?

  They're happy with the way things are.

• 7:40Speaker 07

  They want to break it, and they don't want to put it back together. You know, Schumer has this, like, shtick where he, you know, he doesn't have an iPhone. He's got a flip phone. That's like his bit.

• 7:50Alec Baldwin?

  Right.

• 7:51Speaker 07

  I don't find that charming. If you don't understand how people communicate in 2026, how they're getting information, how they consume media, how they're engaging with the world, you are not well suited to lead in this moment.

• 8:01Alec Baldwin?

  Well, people told me back then, when the 2008, when the financial crisis was, they said to me, well, you know, Schumer's the head of the DSCC, and he's got to raise money, and he raised money, a lot of money from these banking people, and he can't go too hard on them, because then he's going to bite the hand that feeds him for the DSC. He needs this money. He has to handle them very tenderly. I want to go, no, no, you don't. I wanted to see something in which you were taking a leadership role in opposing how we got into this horrible place, which we could likely be in again.

• 8:29Speaker 07

  Mm hmm.

• 8:30Alec Baldwin?

  We could likely be in again. But before you started Run for Something and before you did other work, you were involved in working for political figures. It was Obama. But I would say the one I'm more interested in for the purposes of this podcast is Hillary, in which you had to raise a lot of money, $330 million.

• 8:46Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 8:47Alec Baldwin?

  Did you like raising money?

• 8:49Speaker 07

  Did I like raising money? I like doing email marketing because it's a mix of art and science. Because it's writing, it's creative. And also, it's very data-driven. You get a chance to test things. You get a chance to learn what people respond to. And the way in which people, in many ways, are animals when it comes to marketing of like, oh, if you center the text and make the button bigger, more people give money. Man, we are just so primal. But it was fun. And it was also, I hope, the hardest thing I'll ever do.

• 9:13Alec Baldwin?

  In what way?

• 9:14Speaker 07

  I worked for two years, basically, 100-hour weeks in the office from 7:00 a.m. to 2:00 a.m. every night, every weekend, for a mission that I genuinely believed in and a candidate I really believed in. Like, I thought every day we were going to elect the first woman president.

• 9:28Alec Baldwin?

  So did I.

• 9:29Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm. We used to get these pep talks in the office when days were really hard about how, you know, if we didn't win, it would be like Nazis would storm the streets. There would be, women would lose their rights. The right to vote would be taken back. Like, all the progress we made had been rescinded. And it felt hyperbolic at the time. Like, it was just supposed to motivate us. And, you know, almost 10 years later, we weren't scary enough.

• 9:55Alec Baldwin?

  Author and co-founder of Run for Something, Amanda Litman. If you enjoy conversations with political leaders who started their career, thanks to Run for Something. Check out my conversation with Michigan State Senator and U.S. Senate candidate Mallory McMorrow. I'm used to people underestimating me. I ran in 2018 against my Republican incumbent state senator, who had won previously by 16 points. And even local Democrats said, you're going to get destroyed. There was something really freeing about not having the backing of the party and just said, let's just go for it. And try to run a campaign to really connect with people in a way that feels different. And I beat them by four points. And now I'm in leadership. You know, I'm responsible for an $80 billion state budget.

• 10:40Alec Baldwin?

  I've proven that I'm a workhorse. I do really well when people underestimate me.

• 10:46Alec Baldwin?

  To hear more of my conversation with Mallory McMorrow, go to here'sthething.org. After the break, Amanda Litman shares her thoughts on the 2028 Democratic primary and why she predicts the nominee could be someone no one is talking about today.

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• 13:06Speaker 03

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by Miguel. My small experience with the discrepancy in the business of music made me angry in the best way. And I wanted to, I wanted to finish. So I started really... Like leaning into my therapy, trying to get down to like what matters now. Somewhere, Miguelito felt like he didn't have a place to say how he felt. And music was the place that I went to to say how I felt.

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• 13:59Alec Baldwin?

  I'm Alec Baldwin, and this is Here's the Thing. Amanda Litman grew up in Fairfax, Virginia, but it was a young Illinois senator that would ultimately draw her to attend college in the Midwest. Litman enrolled at Northwestern University in the hopes of being close to Barack Obama's Chicago base of operations. She recalled a day as a high school junior in 2008 when she decided to skip a day of school to attend a Students for Obama rally.

• 14:30Speaker 07

  I was hooked. I wanted to be part of whatever he was building, which is why I went to Northwestern for college, because I wanted to be in Chicago when he was gonna.

• 14:37Alec Baldwin?

  Interesting.

• 14:37Speaker 07

  I assumed, I was like, he's gonna win. That's an insane thing to think.

• 14:40Alec Baldwin?

  Interesting.

• 14:40Speaker 07

  And I want to work for his campaign and it'll be in Chicago.

• 14:43Alec Baldwin?

  You went to Northwestern because you wanted to be proximate to his work.

• 14:44Speaker 07

  I was not a small part of it. You know, I also, I liked the diploma program. I liked the campus, but I wanted to be near Chicago. Great school. When I was a senior, I got an internship on the Obama campaign, doing online fundraising, which is what I ended up doing for Hillary in 2016. And it was magical, like being part of that movement and being on the inside of that felt like being part of the best sorority or fraternity I could ever imagine. I mean, it's how I spent my senior year of college. I'm shocked they gave me a degree because all I did was write my thesis and work on the Obama campaign.

• 15:14Alec Baldwin?

  I was there in Washington in 76 when Carter beat Ford and went on to have his term the entire period of time I was there. This is back in the old Washington when they were burning the Shah of Iran in effigy in Lafayette Park, right outside the White House gates. Who's gonna come forth two years from now? You say six, over 60. Gavin Newsom isn't over 60. Does he cut it for you or no?

• 15:36Speaker 07

  I think that there is going to be a very crowded, chaotic, interesting primary. It's gonna make us want to throw our phones into the river. It's gonna be in. Furiating as primaries are because ultimately, most of us have the same values. Like, we generally agree on 98% of things. The 2% we don't is where it gets personal. And it gets like mean and personal and nasty. It's why primaries, it's like a fight with your family. It sucks. I don't know who it's gonna be. And I find that to be actually very freeing. It could feel very scary. But I think this is the first open primary, really, since I've ever gotten a chance to vote. I mean, even 2020, like Biden sort of came in as the polling leader and ended with the nomination. This is the first time where there is no clear frontrunner. It could be anyone.

• 16:19Speaker 07

  And I would say, you know, 50/50 chance it's someone nobody's talking about right now.

• 16:23Alec Baldwin?

  Whitmer I was keen on. I really, I thought she was effective and smart and all these other things. And not just a woman for a woman's sake. I mean, I thought, I'd like to see a woman become the president because a woman was, voted the president, I believe. And I think where we would be now is very different from where we are now if she had won.

• 16:39Speaker 07

  Uh huh.

• 16:40Alec Baldwin?

  When she lost, what did you attribute it to?

• 16:43Speaker 07

  I thought it was one part, many parts, obviously sexism, obviously a 20-year campaign to drag down her reputation. I think there was obviously foreign interference. I think Trump tapped into something that had been building since the Tea Party. I think, you know, the final 10 days of the Comey letter and then, you know, Anthony Weiner and the emails, all of that.

• 17:05Alec Baldwin?

  Talk about the emails.

• 17:06Speaker 07

  I can't talk about it. It makes me wanna, you know, I was Hilary Clinton's email director. And I, so we have a sweatshirt, we had team sweatshirts during the campaign. It says Hilary Clinton's other emails. Because I always had to clarify, not the ones they're talking about on Fox News. Like, that's not the ones I'm in charge of. It was, I mean, I think it was so many things. And yes, of course, the campaign made some poor decisions in the process, too. Every losing campaign does in the same way that every winning campaign also makes some bad decisions in retrospect. But we came so close. Close is not, close is not winning, but we came so close.

• 17:39Alec Baldwin?

  It was tough. It was so tough because what a great president she would have been.

• 17:42Speaker 07

  She would have been phenomenal. Although, I would say, my husband often reminds me, had she won, the Republican Party, had they controlled the House, would have tried to impeach her by like noon the day after inauguration. So what would, you know, President Tim Kaine have been like is an interesting question to marinate on.

• 17:56Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah, that's a good point.

• 17:57Speaker 07

  And I find that version of the alternate history to be like a little soothing. It was never gonna be easy for the first.

• 18:03Alec Baldwin?

  It's interesting you say that about no clear frontrunner for 2028. And I agree with you, even though Newsom's name is thrown around a lot, and I've met him a few times, and I'm not quite sure how I feel about him as president, because I, again, I look at the job now and think it's almost undoable. There's marketing involved.

• 18:18Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 18:18Alec Baldwin?

  There's image making that's involved.

• 18:20Speaker 07

  Well, it's basically a nationwide branding campaign. That's what a presidential campaign is at this point, the branding campaign. And policies are a part of that, but it's policies and the way that they contribute to the brand of the person, and how you can make people understand and see themselves in those policies. It's not, most people don't actually have a strong, you know, position on most issues. They take their cues from the leaders and how the leaders make them feel. And yes, partisan affiliation, and how the person communicates, and the story that they tell, and of course, their identity, like, all of that sort of plays a role here. So, just to say, there's like a broader internal Democratic Party debate about, oh, we need a progressive, or a moderate, or, that's not, that's not the axis upon which people are operating anymore. They want someone who is willing to fight, and who is authentic, and knows who they are and what they believe.

• 19:02Alec Baldwin?

  Someone who's willing to go down in flames in their first term.

• 19:05Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 19:05Alec Baldwin?

  Risk a second term, nothing more important. To me, if I were president, I'd sit there, I'd go, I'm gonna do this first term like it's the second term.

• 19:11Speaker 07

  You got it.

• 19:11Alec Baldwin?

  And I'm gonna throw everything to the wind, and I want to win, I want us to accomplish these things environmentally, and blah, blah, blah. Now, the idea of coaxing people, of summoning people to want to run for office themselves, and get into the whole civics thing about that, is something that's not new. I mean, when I was in college, and I was in the Young Democrats of GW, and blah, blah, blah, everything was about when you leave here. When you leave here with your degree, or your professional degree, are you gonna go home and run for office? What are you gonna do? And you have formed your variant of that. How did you get involved with that, and why?

• 19:42Speaker 07

  So, about a week after Election Day in 2016, I'd started hearing from people I'd gone to high school and college with, hey, Amanda, I'm a public school teacher in Chicago. If Trump can be president, it seems like fucking anybody can do this. What do I do if I want to run for office? They keep cutting our budgets, and I want to fight back. And at the time, this is November 2016, I didn't have anywhere you could send them. Like, the state party would probably not answer your emails if you're a 26-year-old public school teacher. That wasn't what the DNC did. There's like, there wasn't an on-ramp. And the more that I thought about that, and the more that I kept getting these emails and seeing it online, the more I realized, like, That's actually a problem we need to solve if we're going to fix a whole bunch of other problems in the Democratic Party and our democracy. So I reached out to a whole bunch of people with an idea. What if we start an organization to solve this?

• 20:24Speaker 07

  I am unemployed and very sad and would like a coping mechanism in the form of an interesting project. One of those folks became my co-founder, Ross Morales Racheado. We wrote a plan, we built a website.

• 20:33Alec Baldwin?

  Where'd you meet him?

• 20:35Speaker 07

  Um, his, no, Hayes' wife and I worked together on the campaign.

• 20:38Alec Baldwin?

  Right.

• 20:38Speaker 07

  So she connected me with him and he'd been like chewing on a very similar idea for a little while. He was managing a congressional campaign in California at the time and I was sad at home. So we wrote a plan, we built the website and we launched Run for Something on Trump's first inauguration day. We thought this is going to be small. We're going to get 100 people in the first year. This is going to be my hobby. We had 1,000 people sign up in the first week.

• 21:01Alec Baldwin?

  What do you attribute that to?

• 21:02Speaker 07

  Partially it was the right idea for the right time. Partially, we, you know, I'm a digital strategist by trade. We built a very easy way for people to engage. The branding was good, the story was good, the, you know, the vibe was good. But mostly, I think people were hungry to do something and they wanted to do something they felt like could matter. You know, we had 80,000 people raise their hands in 2025. We had more people sign up in the last 12 months than we did in the entirety of Trump's first term. They're looking around and saying, there aren't leaders here that are doing the work I see that needs to be done. There aren't people who excite me. My community is struggling. If I don't run for office, if I don't get involved in this way, nothing is going to get better. I find it to be so inspiring.

• 21:44Speaker 07

  It's how I've been able to do this work for almost the last decade in that every week, and we have elections basically every week, and every week we win. And then every day I get in my inbox, the stories of the people we've helped elect who are cutting the cost of insulin, getting free lunch for kids in schools, building more housing, you know, passing gun safety laws in unusual places. It's just, it's a reminder that actually democracy is good and government can work when you get really good people in it.

• 22:08Alec Baldwin?

  So Daniel Squadron and Melissa Walker from States Project came to do this show recently. And I'd gone to some salons of theirs at somebody's home in my building once, and I just went to another one that they had. And I'm very admiring of the two of them. Do you see some kind of overlap with the work you do with them?

• 22:22Speaker 07

  We do. We work closely with them and with every other organization that works on these state and local offices. Because we only work with people running for a state house, state senate, city council, school board, library board, American River Flood Control District trustee, like the kinds of local positions that make up the building blocks of democracy.

• 22:38Alec Baldwin?

  Is it safe to say that when Mam Donnie won, you were glad because you were glad somebody else didn't win?

• 22:43Speaker 07

  I was delighted.

• 22:45Alec Baldwin?

  Okay.

• 22:46Speaker 07

  Yeah, I was delighted. I did not like Cuomo. I wanted a mayor who, one, spoke to the problems that I, as a millennial mom of two in Brooklyn, were really experiencing. The housing crisis as a renter is personal. Free childcare, huge, huge part of my expenses. In fact, you know, him getting us 2K might make me have another kid. The idea that you can make a difference in your city with a leader that is inspiring, who I don't agree with on every issue, but who I believe what he's, he believes what he's saying. And I believe he's going to try. And I believe that when he fails, because he will certainly fail on some of his promises, he'll be able to communicate that in a way that brings the people along with him. Like, that is so powerful. And I will say, after he won, especially in that primary in June, we saw 10,000 people raise their hands to run for

• 23:30Speaker 07

  office the two weeks after. It was our biggest organic candidate recruitment moment in the history of the organization.

• 23:35Alec Baldwin?

  Describe the point of contact, the point of engagement between you and these people. They contact you and seek resources to help them in guidance of how to run for office, depending on what kind of an office it is?

• 23:46Speaker 07

  So it sort of depends. We find people. We ask them to sign up to run for office. We do text messages.

• 23:51Alec Baldwin?

  You recruit them.

• 23:52Speaker 07

  We recruit them. So we do, we work with partners. We do cold calling. We do cold texting. We do ads. We do events. We do social media. I wrote Run for Something, the book. We had a Run for Something podcast. We have all kinds of ways in which we reach people and say, have you ever thought about running for office? When they say yes or maybe, we then have a whole bunch of programming for them to get them onto the ballot. So we have the Run for Something community, which is an online space. You can talk to other people thinking about running. You can do one of two training tracks. I'm running this year, or I'm thinking about running someday down the road. It's a slightly different focus. You can join one of our monthly intro calls, where we talk through the same basic questions every first time candidate has. You can talk to one of our volunteers. And once you have filed to get on the ballot, which we have guides to help you figure out how to do, you can apply for our endorsement.

• 24:36Speaker 07

  Our PAC does endorsements, specifically of folks 40 and under, running for those local offices for the first time.

• 24:42Alec Baldwin?

  I'm not eligible for your PAC.

• 24:43Speaker 07

  Sorry. It doesn't mean I don't think you shouldn't run if you want to, which is we might not be the right org to help you. But I think for us, we really try to help people with everything that isn't the stuff that you, like, they have innately.

• 24:55Alec Baldwin?

  But if you recruit them, what I want to go through a path here, a very simple path, which is that if you recruit them and they decide they want to participate with you and engage with you, then what happens, meaning you help them run for office.

• 25:07Speaker 07

  Absolutely.

• 25:07Alec Baldwin?

  How many people have you, I'm not saying you've kept track of this, but I assume you have, how many people have you engaged with this way who've run for office and won?

• 25:15Speaker 07

  So we track winners and losers of our endorsed pools. We've endorsed more than 4,000 campaigns. We've helped elect 1,653 across 49 states plus DC, mostly women and people of color, all millennials and Gen Z to state and local offices, many of whom are now running for higher office. So we have really built the bench of the Democratic Party. You know, people like Mallory McMorro in Michigan.

• 25:37Alec Baldwin?

  We had her on the show.

• 25:38Speaker 07

  She's phenomenal. We were her first endorser when she ran for state senate back in 2018. James Tellerico down in Texas, one of our alums. Zach Walls in Iowa, Alexis Hill in Nevada, Ethan Corson in Kansas, Ruwa Roman in Georgia, Francesca Hong in Wisconsin, and then currently serving in Congress, Christian Menefee, who's in Houston, Yasmeen Ansari in Arizona, Sarah McBride in Delaware.

• 26:00Alec Baldwin?

  Is there a part of the country where this plays more than other parts, a region or a state for that matter?

• 26:05Speaker 07

  No, it's pretty commensurate with population. We have people signing up with us in all 50 states. The only state we haven't won an election yet is Idaho, although this is the year. I feel very good about it. And we have built a model that is tight on values but flexible in policy, which means we can, in the same night in 2025, as an example, elect, you know, a DSA-affiliated candidate to the Atlanta City Council, Kelsey Bond, young renter activist who was really pushing for more green space and transit justice and all those things. At the same night, we helped elect a former Republican who had left the party after January 6th and won in a county that Trump won 70-30 in rural Pennsylvania, Andrew Harbaugh. We built a machine that can do both.

• 26:44Alec Baldwin?

  Now, let's just confine ourselves to the run for something period of your career.

• 26:49Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 26:49Alec Baldwin?

  When you began, which is like, what year was it?

• 26:51Speaker 07

  2017.

• 26:52Alec Baldwin?

  2017. So it's seven, it's nine years ago. So nine years ago, which is a considerable amount of time as far as I'm concerned. Do you look back in retrospect and there were things you assumed? There were things you had hoped for or even took for granted? And it's different than you thought it was? How's the work you're doing different from what you conceived it would be when you started?

• 27:13Speaker 07

  I didn't think it would be this big. Like, it is, I thought it would be harder to get people to run. Like, we genuinely, you know, I part of my spiel is like, yeah, we thought we'd get 100. I really thought we'd get 100 people and we would struggle to get 100 people in that first year. The fact that people are so eager to do this meant we've had to build systems very differently. We've had to scale the organization very differently. I also have been equal parts surprised and disappointed at how fundraising for the work has gone. Surprised that like nine years in, we're still here. That is honestly shocking to me. And disappointed because the work is working. The impact is so clear. You can like literally measure the outcomes that we have done, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

• 27:55Speaker 07

  You know, nine years ago, it would have been unimaginable for a state party to put out ads recruiting people to run for office. Nine years later, the Florida Democratic Party had billboards up across the state. Do you want to run for office? Sign up here. We've changed what it means to ask people to run. We've put running for office as much a part of the civic vocabulary as vote or volunteer. And yet, man, do Democratic donors not like to fund what we're doing?

• 28:18Alec Baldwin?

  Really?

• 28:19Speaker 07

  It's been harder than I expected. It's been harder than I expected.

• 28:22Alec Baldwin?

  Because they want the money just to go straight to a party.

• 28:25Speaker 07

  They want it to go to a party or they want to go to a federal candidate or they want to become an ambassador. Or, you know, love what you're doing, think it's so important, but this year we have to flip the house. This is not the year for infrastructure. Or this is the year we have to win the White House. This is not the year for local. If it's never the year for infrastructure, if it is never the year for local, if it is never the year for pipeline building, we will keep being in this mess, year after year after year.

• 28:49Alec Baldwin?

  Author and co-founder of Run for Something, Amanda Litman. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing on the iHeart Radio app, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Amanda Litman talks about the future of the Republican Party without Donald Trump and the opportunity that creates for Democrats in 2028.

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• 30:09Speaker 02

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• 30:20Speaker 04

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• 31:01Speaker 04

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• 31:44Speaker 03

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by breakout singer-songwriter Alex Warren.

• 32:04Speaker 05

  To this day, Ordinary would not have done anything and I would have not been able to put it out if Book Talk didn't back it up and if my wife and her friend didn't back it up.

• 32:12Speaker 03

  Amazing.

• 32:13Speaker 05

  Pretty crazy how like, just one thing.

• 32:16Speaker 03

  Right.

• 32:16Speaker 05

  I mean, you, I bet you, we could point to nine different things in our careers where it's just one thing, all of a sudden, if that one thing didn't happen, then I wouldn't be here.

• 32:23Speaker 03

  What you're talking about right now is what I've been talking about since the beginning of my career. There's these things outside of you that make everything happen. These other forces somehow came into contact with each other and helped propel you to this place.

• 32:41Speaker 05

  It's just insane.

• 32:42Speaker 03

  Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 32:54Alec Baldwin?

  I'm Alec Baldwin, and this is Here's the Thing. With the 2028 presidential election on the horizon and the next president facing a long list of daunting tasks, I was curious to hear Amanda Litman's opinion on the much needed remedy for American governance in a post-Trump world.

• 33:14Speaker 07

  If we have a Democratic Congress and a Democratic Senate and we can break the filibuster and we have people really ready to govern.

• 33:20Alec Baldwin?

  That's in 2026.

• 33:21Speaker 07

  2028. I was saying 2028. So let's say like we have full control, tri-effective government and we can do things. I would do massive campaign finance reform. We've got to change the way money interacts with politics. And that's not just like how much you can give. That's, you know, thinking about how outside groups can engage. We're seeing this this year with, you know, AI companies and outside special interests just flooding races with very confusing messaging in a way that really takes away people's power. So that's one. I would wildly change, this is going to be kind of a hot take, I would change the pay of elected officials. That doesn't feel like the top priority for a lot of folks, but I would do it as much as possible for as many offices possible. State legislatures wildly underpaid. Members of Congress also actually really underpaid.

• 34:01Alec Baldwin?

  I agree.

• 34:01Speaker 07

  I think you will get better people, you will get more working class people.

• 34:04Alec Baldwin?

  The president is underpaid.

• 34:04Speaker 07

  Yeah, you will get more and better people.

• 34:06Alec Baldwin?

  $400,000 a year.

• 34:08Speaker 07

  To be president?

• 34:08Alec Baldwin?

  Right. When there's guys that are, that people would think that they would want to buy that office who are making $400,000 a day.

• 34:14Speaker 07

  Yeah. Like, we should pay these positions to be competitive so they're not incentivized to do insider trading.

• 34:19Alec Baldwin?

  Right.

• 34:20Speaker 07

  And, you know, I think, so you change campaign structures, you change the way people engage with the system, then I would do as much as you can around tech regulation while you can. Because I think that we are looking forward to an environment where you've got AI doing massive like labor force implications, you've got tech in schools, you've got social media companies that are literally rotting people's brains, and there's really smart people thinking about how you can engage in these social media tools in a way that better fortifies the information ecosystem, that will also serve to make our democracy a little bit stronger.

• 34:50Alec Baldwin?

  I mean, I've been immersed in campaign finance reform and always adhere to that old line, that tired old line, which is that if the Supreme Court says cash is money, then he with the most cash speaks the loudest. And I really believe this is the linchpin of all the problems in this country. You've got to be able to have people who aren't rich or not the friends of the rich run for office and then beholden for the rich. Well, I agree with you that that's really the most critical thing in the world, among the most critical in this country, rather.

• 35:18Speaker 07

  I would also add gerrymandering. I think like there's some structural, I would say broader structural changes to elections, to like voting. Voting rights, but I think those connected, like you want to fix the structure of these institutions. You can change how people engage with them. Then you'll be able to get really meaningful policies around housing, around reproductive health, around equality, around climate. Like, you got to change the institutions first because right now they are broken. We're not going to get effective governance in the next two, well, 2026, 27, we're not going to get good governance.

• 35:45Alec Baldwin?

  I can't see where we're going to gain much ground in the court. Because I think that Clarence Thomas will resign right before the buzzer with Trump leaving, so they'll leave that open to this Republican, unless they lose the majority. That's a different ballgame. I mean, the number one thing for me is that you wonder would Thomas even resign now, this summer? Because there's the fear that the Democrats will take over both houses in the fall, which will hurt him. But I'm very worried about that. I'm very worried about how, if possible, to repopulate the courts.

• 36:16Speaker 07

  There's really compelling arguments about court expansion. There's really compelling arguments about term limits and other ways you could do reformation here. I think we need a president who is not beholden to the way we did things yesterday dictating the way we do them tomorrow. Because the way we did them yesterday has meant today sucks.

• 36:32Alec Baldwin?

  Well, I also would love to have somebody articulate for me some examination. It just might take a lot of hours and a lot of effort. And that is to understand how things got the way they are right now. I mean, I don't mean the way they are right now in terms of policies, but the hatred and the bile and the partisanship on this level. And I'd love to find out how can this be changed where, and you even have people running for office who are kind of taking oath. And they go, I'm not going to go in and buy into that. You know what I mean? Where everything is all just screw them on the other side of the aisle reflexively.

• 37:07Speaker 07

  You know, I think there's an opportunity in 2028 for a really compelling communicator to make a case for America being a place where you can know and trust your neighbors again. And you could tell a story about that. We've seen that over the last year, like in Minneapolis, neighborism is what has gotten people through this crises in Los Angeles, in Chicago, in Portland, and through these climate crises, through the fires in LA, you're seeing people step up for their neighbors in a way that is so. Meaningful and moving. And I've been joking, it's like the Mr. Roger's Resistance, where people really do want to feel like they can trust and love and care for the people who are near them. They're neighbors, they're fellow citizens, they're fellow community members, you don't have to be a citizen, but fellow community members.

• 37:51Speaker 07

  And there are so many things getting in the way of that, from social media, to housing, to cars, to, you know, public safety, to schools. There's a lot of ways in which you could pull policies into that. But I do think there's an opening. And I think Mom Don actually got at this a little bit, where you can create a country where you can feel like free to be in community with others.

• 38:15Alec Baldwin?

  I wonder what you think about the notion, which is, you know, everybody seems to, whether it's through some fatigue from reality, or just in general, they don't ascribe to Trump that what he's really capable of. But what do you think about him co-opting the midterm election this year?

• 38:30Speaker 07

  I think it's certainly scary. There's things that he can't do. And I think it's worth always being really clear. You can't cancel elections. The federal government does not run elections. He sends ICE to polling stations. There like isn't enough ICE agents, there's not competent enough. And also, I think that there is a real danger in what they are doing, because Democrats would crawl over broken glass to vote in this midterm election. Their voters are low propensity voters, people who are unlikely to vote unless they're given a really good reason. If you make it even a little bit harder for them, they're going to stay home, because they're already not liking what Trump is selling and what the Republican Party is doing. I do think that there's real concerns to have on the state and local level, especially in some of these Republican states. But I prefer to operate in this moment. There's really smart people across the party who are doing, you know, contingency planning, preparing lawsuits,

• 39:15Speaker 07

  preparing safety plans. I want to focus on my particular sphere of influence. Let's prepare to win. Let's prepare to win and then prepare to govern as much as we can.

• 39:24Alec Baldwin?

  I think that as much as I'm horrified to even consider this, let alone say it, I think that Iran's going to be the final denouement for him. I think that Iran, even though it's horrible, and I'm sickened that he did that. I have a lot of people attack me online and sit there and go, "Well, you know, what about a free Iran?" And I want to go, "Well, let's hope there was another way to have a free Iran. We don't have to, we don't have to turn all of the Middle East into an ashtray in order to achieve our policy goals." But I do think that Iran is not going to be over quickly in a way beyond them just stating it is and claiming it is. We're going to be over there for a while to control Lebanon. I mean, it's just, it's insane what they've, this beehive they've kicked. But I think it's also going to lend to his demise. I think he's going to lose the midterm because of Iran. That will be the straw that breaks.

• 40:08Alec Baldwin?

  Because of Iran, he'll lose the midterm and he'll lose the long-term election, the general, the Republicans, because of Iran. I think Iran is something that's got some silver lining. I hate to say that, but for us politically.

• 40:18Speaker 07

  Well, and I think once Trump loses the midterm, he is really a lame duck. And the Republican Party without Trump has no uniting, like, vision. This is, I think, something we're not talking about enough, at least on the Democratic side, where their primary is going to be as much of a shitshow as ours is. And it's going to be way nastier because they're going to be trying to, like, out racist, out bigot, out, you know, MAGA the one or the other. But none of them can sell MAGA the way that Trump does because they don't have his, you know, 45 years in the public eye. They don't have his brand as a businessman, whether justified or not. They don't have the charisma that he has, even though not my cup of tea. But without him, the Republican Party is going to fight among themselves. I don't think it's going to be fun to watch necessarily, but I do think it creates an opportunity because...

• 41:02Alec Baldwin?

  Well, the finger pointing, I mean, I look at them, I mean, this is a weak analogy maybe, but it's like the cockplate of a plane. And once the pilot is removed, meaning Trump, there isn't another pilot onboard the plane.

• 41:12Speaker 07

  Nope.

• 41:13Alec Baldwin?

  Where have you seen a legislature dominated by women or people of color or one that is closer to what you advocate for? What did they achieve and what did they get right?

• 41:21Speaker 07

  So there's a couple of state legislatures that are now majority women, New Mexico and Nevada in particular. And New Mexico just passed universal childcare.

• 41:29Alec Baldwin?

  Mm-hmm.

• 41:30Speaker 07

  Huge. The St. Paul City Council is actually entirely women, majority women of color, almost all women under the age of 45. And we have seen them really rise to the occasion over the last year, you know, as ICE has taken, taken over the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. The St. Paul City Council has been out there doing, like, protection efforts in a way that is really meaningful and really supporting local organizers and grassroots movements. I think we just saw Virginia passed Paid Family Leave, thanks to, in part, a woman governor and an incredible bunch of women in the House of Delegates. You know, when women take office, good things happen. I'm not saying every woman is good. Kristi Noem, bad, but women who generally-

• 42:08Alec Baldwin?

  A surprising number of bad women have shown up on the podium right now.

• 42:11Speaker 07

  Yeah, well, you know, patriarchy needs its show horse, I guess is whatever the expression is. But we have seen really good women take over and do things a little bit differently and pass laws that while they shouldn't just be women's responsibilities, directly make a difference for women, for families, for kids in a way that's really powerful.

• 42:29Alec Baldwin?

  What's a state that breaks your heart in terms of this? What's a state that really do you think gets it wrong?

• 42:34Speaker 07

  What's your guess?

• 42:35Alec Baldwin?

  Louisiana.

• 42:36Speaker 07

  Yeah, I was thinking Louisiana, Mississippi, even Texas a little bit. Like, Texas had, you know, Ann Richards. Texas has incredibly ballsy women, for lack of a better expression. Like, women who can really kick ass and take names. I suspect at one point we will have another woman governor or women state legislators in Texas where there's an opportunity.

• 42:54Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah. What was among the ones that was most gratifying to you, a campaign that you were involved with? Someone you helped and guided?

• 43:00Speaker 07

  It's one of my, I have many, many favorites, but I would say one of the ones that I come back to a lot is in 2023, we were running a campaign, and we still are, to get people to, pro-democracy people, to run for local election administrator roles. So positions that actually oversee elections, like county clerk, county commission, county recorder, those kinds of roles. And we were specifically doing it in a bunch of targeted counties, one of which was Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. It's around Harrisburg. We did a bunch of texting and cold calling, and we found this guy, Justin Douglas, who was a former pastor who'd been fired from his church for being too welcoming to LGBTQ congregants. He was a CrossFit athlete, like, had been working with the homeless community in the area. And he was like, no, not me, not me, but maybe I know someone, not me. And we're like, ooh, no, you, dude, it's you.

• 43:41Speaker 07

  We got him to run for office, and he was running against a Republican who'd been in office for a very long time. He was outspent, I think, 10 to 1, 12 to 1, something insane like that. He was knocking doors, making calls, doing billboards. His actual campaign premise was on the fact that, I believe, a dozen or more folks under the county jail system had died under the care of the county, and he wanted to combat that neglect that they had done in the county commission. He ultimately flipped that seat by 144 votes in November 2023, won that election, flipped control of the county commission for the first time since World War I, and was able to make huge changes, both on the way that they oversee the county jail system, but also the election administration. And he's now running for Congress in that district, where he can flip a seat red to blue.

• 44:26Speaker 07

  So I think that's an amazing example of like, he's not, he's got like big gauged ears, tattoos all over. He's like, not the kind of guy you typically see in politics, but he's so deeply caring about community and speaks from a place of faith. And can I give you one other?

• 44:38Alec Baldwin?

  Sure.

• 44:39Speaker 07

  So earlier this year in 2026, you may have read about Taylor Remet, who flipped a seat in the Texas State Senate that Trump had won by, I believe, 17 points. Run for something got Taylor to sign up back in 2019. He came through our pipeline, he joined our calls from time to time, he was part of our community. When he ultimately ran in 2025, we were one of his first national endorsers. When he came in first in that primary, or that general election, but not quite far enough to win outright, it was beyond my wildest dreams. And to see him win that general election at the end of January, to flip a seat that was so far off the radar that most other organizations didn't even consider it. And to see it happen because we invested for six years in thinking about long-term

• 45:21Speaker 07

  talent cultivation, like, that's what it's all about. That's the point. That's why we do this. We get people to sign up to think about it, we stay in their ear, we stay in relationship with them, and then maybe a year, maybe three years, maybe five years later, they can win in a long shot race.

• 45:35Alec Baldwin?

  How do you find candidates specific to a, like, for example, do you look at people and go, we need more candidates in Alabama? You do?

• 45:43Speaker 07

  We do.

• 45:44Alec Baldwin?

  You factor that in.

• 45:45Speaker 07

  We do. We think about this in a couple lenses. One is we want people who are interested in running for office. Like, you gotta have some self-motivation here, because it's really hard. You gotta know why you want to do it, why voters should want you to win, which is different than why you want to win. Why should someone else want you to win? What are you gonna do for them? You need to be able to understand.

• 46:01Alec Baldwin?

  Good point.

• 46:01Speaker 07

  Like, it's not glamorous, it's not fun, it's gonna be really hard, you're gonna put your, your life through a mic, under a microscope. So you gotta want to do it. And we should be asking in more places. We should be really intentional about asking people who are traditionally left out of the system. So we've actually identified a dozen states where we think in five or six years, they could become battlegrounds. Or if we don't do the work, they will be off the map entirely. Some of those, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Iowa, Nebraska, Idaho, Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, places where.

• 46:33Speaker 07

  Not yet, but I would love to think about it because I think there's opportunities in these places where, you know, if we don't do the work, especially what Run For Something does of recruiting and supporting local candidates, like in six years, especially post-re-districting, it's not even that we won't have like multiple options, we won't have a path to victory. We gotta keep everything on the table.

• 46:52Alec Baldwin?

  Now, when people want to help you,

• 46:55Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 46:55Alec Baldwin?

  when people want to embrace the work you're doing and assist you in any way, is it just only funding?

• 47:00Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 47:00Alec Baldwin?

  Or can they offer you something else?

• 47:02Speaker 07

  So-

• 47:02Alec Baldwin?

  Could I come and give acting lessons to political candidates?

• 47:05Speaker 07

  Uh, you absolutely could. We have a whole mentorship program where people can sign up. They can, you know, give their services, their skills to candidates for free. We ask you not to like charge people anything because most of our candidates are not full-time candidates. They're working people with jobs and this is what they do outside of their job. We don't charge candidates anything for our help as much as we can. So yeah, we have ways you can volunteer, ways you can help make calls, ways you can work directly with the campaigns. Um, if you want to knock doors, make calls, whatever it is you want to do, we have ways that you can help.

• 47:31Alec Baldwin?

  I think to myself, back then, it seemed like there was something to root for. I mean, did I like Kamala Harris? I didn't worry about like or whatever, but I worried about her. I had a friend of mine, this is not me, but I had a friend of mine lean over to me at a fundraiser for her one night. This is years ago. He leaned over to me and she goes, "She's a little 2'4", 1'5" for my liking." You know, kind of Northern California, like unabashed, unshielded liberalism. Is that gonna sell right now? Maybe not, you know, when we found that it didn't. But I really, really look now and it comes to this thought, and that was, do Americans really just have the government that they deserve right now?

• 48:07Speaker 07

  I hope not. I think we're at a tipping point. Like, you know, you gotta get to rock bottom before you can get better. I do think Trump 2.0 is hopefully rock bottom. And it's gonna be uncomfortable to get out. You know, like you go to the gym, you work out, your muscles are sore after. Growth is painful. I look at the next generation of leaders that are coming up, both ones that Run For Something has helped, but also, you know, countless others across the country. These mayors, these state legislators, even these governors, who make me think democracy can work. And there is possibility. You know, I, I often joke, I am an optimist in spite of this all, but also I do this because

• 48:49Speaker 07

  I'm an optimist, because I believe that better things are possible and change is possible. And when I've seen what our leaders have done, even in spite of all of the bullshit over the last decade, I have to think that it's going to get better. And I'm going to do everything I can to make that so.

• 49:03Alec Baldwin?

  I have no doubt about that.

• 49:04Speaker 07

  For better or for worse, or die trying, I suppose. But I really, I do believe because the people who are stepping up to lead now are not settling for the status quo.

• 49:13Alec Baldwin?

  I just went to a meeting with Hokel about something involving my mother's charity, a breast cancer charity in New York. And we went to go meet with Hokel, and I was blown away.

• 49:22Speaker 07

  Pleasantly surprised.

• 49:22Alec Baldwin?

  You meet her, and she's dynamic and smart and on it. And I thought, seeing her in the press, as you perceive her through that prism or through that lens, it's so diminishing. And I met her, and we sat with her for like an hour, 45 minutes, and she was just so engaging and smart. I walked out of there going, I'm her fan now.

• 49:38Speaker 07

  Well, and the really good candidates, the ones who are going to be able to thrive in the next couple of years, are they're going to be the ones who are so good at using the internet that they can make you feel the way that you feel when you're in the room with them? That they can create that parasocial connection, that they can connect. I mean, like, Mom Donnie is really good at this, but he's not the only one. Talarico is good at this. McMorro, Mallory is really good at this. There's a number of others for whom you feel the same way, whether you're watching their Instagram story or sitting around a table with them. And those are the people who can really use the tools of 2026 to lead in 2026.

• 50:10Alec Baldwin?

  My thanks to Amanda Littman. This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City. We're produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach McNeese, and Victoria DeMartin. Our engineer is Isaac Kaplan-Wulner. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing, as brought to you by iHeart Radio.

• 51:21Speaker 04

  Meds has a simple, virtual process. Connect with licensed medical professionals who can determine whether a GLP-1 treatment may be appropriate for you wherever you are. Get started from the comfort of home online. Change your habits and consider a new approach to feeling your best. Visit orderlymeds.com to learn more. That's orderlymeds.com. Orderlymeds.com. Gain confidence and choose better habits this fall. Compounded medications are not FDA approved. Eligibility required and determined by a licensed provider. Individual results may vary. See website for details.

• 51:55Speaker 05

  With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. Whether you're leading a big project, planning an elaborate trip, or trying to balance work and life, ChatGPT can help. Give it a goal, plus things like files, notes, or project plans. Develop a trip itinerary with daily updates, or create a prioritized schedule. So you can spend less energy sorting out the details and more on bringing your biggest ideas to life. Get started at ChatGPT.com.

• 52:22Speaker 04

  Hey, what's up? This is Kelvin Washington from The Odd Couple with Rob Parker and Kelvin Washington. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability, and it starts with a great deal on off-road-ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra. Two of Toyota's longest-lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between. Built on a reputation for quality and reliability, Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shoptoyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.

• 52:59Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.