Democrats Chase Shiny Objects. Here's How to Build Real Power.

There’s good reason to worry about the future of democracy, and little reason to believe Democrats have a viable plan for protecting it. They built their strategy around passing a major suite of voting reforms and protections through Congress, and a few weeks back, their whole agenda collapsed in the face of the filibuster. So what now? Is there a Plan B for protecting democracy? Yes. But it begins with realizing that there is no national solution in a country that administers elections at the state and local levels. Which means it begins with realizing that many Democrats have made a mistake: They’ve focused so much on national conflicts that they’ve ceded state and local power to the right, with dangerous results. Trumpists can’t pass some big national bill putting Trump back in office, so they are organizing to win the state and local offices that will hold power over the process next time. Democracy’s defenders need to do the same. And that means you. Amanda Litman is a co-founder of Run for Something, which recruits and supports young, progressive candidates who want to run for office. And so this is a conversation about the mechanics of American democracy, the confusions and myths that keep so many of us from participating in them and the practical question of what it means to step off the sidelines and, well, run for something. We talk about why Democrats tend to chase “shiny objects” over real political power, what right-leaning organizations have been up to that liberals should envy, how you probably have more control over issues like abortion and climate change than you think, what it actually takes to run a local campaign, the three questions prospective candidates should be able to answer, and more. This isn’t a conversation raging against the decaying of American democracy. This is a conversation about saving that democracy by participating at its most fundamental level: the local level. The one where you can have the most impact. And so it’s the rare conversation about democracy that left me feeling better, rather than worse, about what’s possible. I think it’ll do the same for you. This episode contains strong language. Mentioned: The Ezra Klein Show is hiring a managing producer. Learn more here. From ProPublica: “Heeding Steve Bannon’s Call, Election Deniers Organize to Seize Control of the GOP — and Reshape America’s Elections” by Isaac Arnsdorf, Doug Bock Clark, Alexandra Berzon and Anjeanette Damon What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer Find out what elected offices you can run for Book recommendations: The Heart Principle by Helen Hoang Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez Let’s Get Physical by Danielle Friedman Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.

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

• 0:06Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein and this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:19Ezra Klein?

  So before we begin today, we're looking for a managing producer for the EK show. This person will run our operations, bring some more logic to them, oversee our processes, manage our producers. Editorial and management experience here is a must and so particularly is a genius for process and schedule. But your experience doesn't specifically need to be in audio. We're looking for the right person, not just the right resume here. So we'll put a link to the listing in the show description and if you apply, do not forget the cover letter. We don't look at applications without them.

• 0:54Ezra Klein?

  Since Joe Biden won the presidency and Democrats took the Senate, their big plan on democracy has been national. They were going to pass these big democracy bills through the House, which they did, through the Senate, get them to Joe Biden, and then democracy would be saved, the franchise would be expanded, all these other good things would happen. And that strategy has failed. It failed a few weeks ago in the Senate and it failed for a very specific reason. It failed because Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema joined with Senate Republicans to say the filibuster does in fact apply to bills meant to protect the right to vote itself, bills that are about who gets to vote. And so that is that right now for the federal path to protecting and expanding democracy.

• 1:38Ezra Klein?

  And I could, I could rage to you about it for hours here. If you've followed me for a while, you, you know how I feel about the filibuster and you know that the filibuster has had a particularly noxious evil history, evil on voting rights in this country. If anything should be exempt from the tyranny of the minority, it is bills that ensure the votes of the majority can happen.

• 2:03Ezra Klein?

  I am mad, but I also know on this that raging does nothing, not right now. And I'm worried that too many people who care about democracy are stuck in the raging phase. And so I wanted this episode to be a bit more practical because the fight for democracy, it isn't over, it isn't lost, it isn't ending. And you are decidedly not powerless over it. A huge weakness in American liberalism right now is the obsession with national politics, which has led to seeding huge amounts of state and local power to the right. And that actually means seeding huge amounts of power over elections to the right, because it is state and local officials that decide how elections are administered.

• 2:48Ezra Klein?

  We do not manage elections federally in this country. They are devolved in the power to states and states devolve them down to municipalities. And that is where the right is focusing, as you'll hear in the show. Right now, the Trumpists don't hold the House, they don't hold the Senate, they don't hold the presidency, they can't pass some big national bill putting Trump back in office. So they're organizing to win the state and local offices, to hold even the local volunteer roles that will carry power over the election process next time. And it's not just elections. State and local officials drive everything from COVID policy to education to criminal justice to housing. The president is less powerful than you think. Your mayor, your board of supervisors, your legislature, your

• 3:33Ezra Klein?

  governor, they're all much more powerful than you think. Amanda Litman is co-founder of Run for Something, a group that recruits and supports young progressive candidates for office. And I wanted to have her on because I want to have a very practical, real conversation about something many of us can actually do but don't, which is run for office, actually run for office. Running for office can sound like this distant crazy thing that other people who are different than us in some unspecified way do. A lot of people don't realize it's an option for them. And even if they did think that, or they do think that, they have no idea how they would go about doing it, or what it would mean to try. And that's what this conversation is about. And you know what? It's the rare conversation about democracy right now that left me, and I think will

• 4:17Ezra Klein?

  leave you, feeling inspired rather than depressed, feeling like there's more you can do, not less. As always, my email for guest suggestions, recommendations of things I should read, listen to, play, whatever, is [email protected]. Amanda Litman, welcome to the show.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me, Ezra. I'm really excited to talk about Remember Something.

• 4:43Ezra Klein?

  So, we recently saw the defeat of the two major voting rights bills in the Senate, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act. Tell me how you thought about those votes and where they left us.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  It was infuriating. It was disappointing. It was not surprising to see those votes fail, to see filibuster reform fail. I'm trying to look at the silver lining here, which is that those votes provided some clarity. We cannot, will not, may not count on Congress and the Supreme Court to protect democracy. And knowing that for sure, knowing that Manchin and Sinema are not going to change their minds, that Schumer is not going to be able to find the votes, is in fact upsetting, is also kind of affirming that the path forward is quite clear.

• 5:27Ezra Klein?

  Would those bills have done the thing we mean when we say, quote unquote, "protect democracy"?

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Well, they would have made a dent. The voter suppression laws that I think something like 18 states have passed have certainly made it harder for especially young people, people of color, to vote. They have made a dent in the trust that we have in the system. I do think there is some conversation that is probably true, that a lot of those bills were meant to be messaging bills, and that the actual implementation of them would have been pretty complicated for local election administrators, which is something I think sort of got lost in the conversation there. But more broadly, they do not solve every problem. Regardless of what had happened with them, there would still need to be more done to reinforce democracy at the levels where we know the Republican Party and anti-democracy forces are taking it.

• 6:14Ezra Klein?

  When I looked at those bills, they always seemed to me, and again, I support those bills. I am furious at the people who stopped them from passing. But they were fighting a larger set of structural issues about our democracy. They were the things I was worried about in, let's call it, 2017, 2018. And then you have 2020. And what comes after 2020 is the prospect of local election boards being pressured or somebody being filled with people who are going to cause shenanigans with how votes are counted or whether they're certified. You have Donald Trump pressuring not just Secretaries of State, but just generalized Republicans

• 6:57Ezra Klein?

  to use tales of fraud to keep an election from going forward. And one of the things that struck me about those bills is they didn't really address that. In a way, they almost couldn't address that, that we have elections that are locally administered in this country. And that creates this constant prospect of local-level chicanery.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  And that's exactly right. There's no way that federal legislation could solve every problem. That's not to say we shouldn't have tried, but there's no way to keep, at least legislatively, to keep the monsters from taking over the elections from the ground up.

• 7:35Ezra Klein?

  Tell me a bit about the structure of elections in this country. What do you think people get wrong about it?

• 7:40Speaker 01

  So I think there's an understanding that we have one election. We have the midterms or the presidential election every other year. And that is fundamentally untrue. There are 50 state elections, and then there are 3,000-ish county elections. And then there are thousands more town and county municipality elections, all of which are occurring sometimes at the same times, sometimes at overlapping times, sometimes different times, and are run by different people. And I was thinking about this recently when I remembered voting as a New York City voter. When I went to vote last year, I had the city elections that were run through ranked choice and then the county elections that were not, and then the state elections, which occasionally happened on different days entirely, as a perfect example of the way

• 8:24Speaker 01

  in which these different overlapping bodies govern by very different rules and have very different timelines. All of that is to say is that it is a very complicated mess in which these same people might not be governing the things on the same ballot.

• 8:37Ezra Klein?

  And so is there any person, any body, any institution with power over our elections? Is there one site you could win and then know the game was safe?

• 8:51Speaker 01

  No, and I actually think that makes me feel better about the fact that it's really hard to rig elections because so many different hands touch them. Even in a county in Texas, you might have the county clerk that oversees elections or the county election administrator, but then you have the tax assessor who controls registration, at least in some counties. In Pennsylvania, you know, on most places it's county level and there's certain rules that oversee the county elections, but then in the cities, there's entirely different rules and entirely different campaign finance structures, which makes it really messy to engage with, both for better and in some ways for worse.

• 9:23Ezra Klein?

  What strikes me is that it's very hard to rig American elections, but it is very easy to throw them into total chaos. That to me is the one of the nightmare scenarios. It isn't so much you have an election rigged as that you would have a Republican election board in key places, simply say, we've decided, based on clips we've misinterpreted off of social media or on nothing, that there was too much fraud to certify what happened in the state, what happened in these key counties. And then you get this miasma of uncertainty that when I think of really scary outcomes for American democracy, the kinds of lead up to civil war or true political violence

• 10:06Ezra Klein?

  outcomes, it comes from something like that. It comes from a election where something has happened, such you have a 2000-like outcome, that in the current equilibrium, nobody can resolve. And it's when nobody can resolve something that important that things can get really... Heated is the calm word I'm going to choose here for a very scary thing.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the 2024 election subversion is not going to look like, you know, thousands of loud, angry people storming the United States Capitol because they're not going to need to. They're going to have a county board in Michigan, or a township in Wisconsin, or a election judge in Pennsylvania who just decides that it wasn't done right. And so they're not going to certify it, or they're not going to count it correctly. Or it could be an election supervisor in Florida who slims their budget down to nothing and then only has one polling place open for the entire area where they know Democratic voters are. You know, it can happen in a certainly a small way that can ripple out and undermine

• 11:17Speaker 01

  trust in the entire system and ultimately delay or prevent a result entirely.

• 11:22Ezra Klein?

  And this isn't just us speculating or doing election fanfiction. Tell me about Steve Bannon's precinct strategy. What is that? What are they doing? What effect is it having?

• 11:33Speaker 01

  So Steve Bannon is going on his podcast and his streaming shows and day after day, calling for people who share his fucked up values to run for local office, to run for precinct captain, to both take over the Republican Party from the inside, which is scary in and of itself, but also to take over the structures of the election apparatus, to run for things like county and city clerk, or probate judge, or the real elected positions that ultimately determine how our elections are run. And at least on the party level, ProPublica had a report, they saw surges in a number of these battleground states and county parties, where they saw more people showing up to engage in the Republican Party. And we have

• 12:13Speaker 01

  seen that folks are hearing his call. And it's not just him. This is like an overarching far-right extremist effort from QAnon, where if you go to the primary QAnon forum for a period of time, there was a call pinned right to the top that said, run for local office, run for city council, run for school board. Oath Keepers, the far-right militia group, have invested in local government. We have seen QAnon, again, engaging in this. And we've seen Proud Boys, the violent groups that would like storm school board meetings and city council meetings that also participated in the insurrection, have specifically said they are redirecting their efforts locally because they see that's where they can make change. And all of this is compounding on a Republican Party that has spent the last 20 or 30 years deeply engaging in local politics,

• 12:57Speaker 01

  specifically to build structural power. So all of that is combining at a moment where the right candidate, or the wrong candidate as it were, can take advantage of these structures and undermine the entire democratic system.

• 13:12Ezra Klein?

  And I want to distinguish two forms of this theory. There's something I always call the myth of the omnipotent opposition, where people always think the other side is organized and ruthless and falls in line and strategic in a way that their side is chaos and infighting and fracture and backbiting. And it's never really true. You just see things differently when it's your side versus the other. But what I do think is true here, and one reason I do worry about this, is that there isn't asymmetry in politics right now. Democrats are more advantaged at the national level, and so they focus on it more. They have the House, they have the Senate, they have the White House. They are disadvantaged at the state and local level.

• 13:57Ezra Klein?

  They have very little power there comparatively. They have a geographic disadvantage there. And so they focus on it less. There's actually a reason why Steve Bannon, who cannot get anything passed through Congress right now, he cannot get near passing his Voting Rights Act, has to focus on the local level, but that might actually be the correct focus.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  I mean, it's enough. You think about 12 years ago, 2009, 2010, Karl Rove writes an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal saying, Republicans, we're going to slip control of state legislatures ahead of the redistricting process after the 2010 census. They do so, they're then able to redraw their maps to control Congress. They lay the groundwork to begin doing that for the next decade. And while they're controlling state legislatures, they weaken unions, they make it harder for people of color and young people to vote, which are communities traditionally understood to be Democratic voters. You know, they of course pass pro-life and anti-abortion laws and anti-LGBTQ laws. They advance their agenda in every meaningful way. Now we are back. 2020 comes around. Yes, we win the White House. Yes, we win the Senate.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  But Democrats actually lose state legislative chambers in 2020. We lost in New Hampshire, and we did not flip a single chamber red to blue in 2020. Now, here we are. We are seeing the results of that with redistricting, and we are looking at a decade of, or more, of a weakened party structure.

• 15:21Ezra Klein?

  What makes you think that is party structure and disinvestment and disorganization, rather than polarization, geographic sorting, all the things that are concentrating Republicans in more states, even as there are more Democrats packed into the cities?

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's a little column A and a little column B. Part of this is certainly polarization. Part of this is population shift. But we know, for example, think about a state like Wisconsin. You know, there's a Democratic governor, a Democratic senator. There's a state that went for Biden in 2020, and yet Republicans, if they don't already, are quite in here to controlling a supermajority in the state assembly, and they have done so for the last decade. That is a legislature that is not drawn to reflect the people of the state. And we see this in Pennsylvania. Democratic governor went for Biden in 2020. The state assembly or the state house is controlled by Republicans. There is a way in which if you control the structure of these elections, like which candidates can get on the ballot and who voters get to choose from,

• 16:23Speaker 01

  you sort of get to predetermine the outcome.

• 16:26Ezra Klein?

  Something that you've said to me in our conversations is that you think Democratic donors, from the big to the small, chase shiny objects, not power. Tell me about that.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  So Democratic donors have been conditioned to engage around a candidate like President Barack Obama, a once-in-a-generation talent who makes your heart race, who inspires you, who seems to be building a movement. Or, on the grassroots donor side, Bernie Sanders, inspiring, hope, change, forward, revolution, you know, an idea that you're part of something bigger.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Republican donors, and I think the Koch brothers are a good example here, but a number of the others, Sheldon Adelson and the like, share this mentality. Investing in politics is a business decision. It is good for the bottom line. So it is OK if, over the course of two, or four, or six, or even 10 or 15 years, you lose a little, or you cannot necessarily measure the impact of it. Think tanks, foundations, university chairmanships, that kind of thing. Because ultimately, you will get your tax cuts, you will get your judges, and you will get the outcomes that are good for business. Democratic donors give because it feels good. And that leads you to make some really short-term decision-making. That leads you to operate entirely around a presidential battleground state mind. And even now, we are still getting folks thinking like,

• 17:47Speaker 01

  "Well, it really only matters if we elect local election administrators in Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin." Like, there are elections in other states, too. And there are Democrats in other states, too, where we want them to be running on fair and just democratic processes. And I think this is true for big donors, who are looking for the flashy thing that they can get invited to the cocktail party for, they can have the photo for their wall. And it's true for grassroots donors, who are looking for the thing that goes viral on Twitter, or the video that either makes them mad, or makes them hopeful, or a little bit of both. And I don't want to fault anyone for giving to the thing that inspires them. Donate where you feel like you can make the most good. But I do think there's a clear failure to match goals and actions.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  If your goal is to win and build sustainable power, throwing $90 million at Amy McGrath for Senate, just because she's taking on Mitch McConnell, is not the way to do that. It just isn't. And that is where things, I think, get a little lost in translation.

• 18:42Ezra Klein?

  What are the organizations and infrastructures on the Republican side that you envy here, that you think have been genuinely effective over the years, and don't really have an answer on the left?

• 18:53Speaker 01

  The closest analog to at least what Run for Something is doing, what my organization is doing, is an organization called the Leadership Institute, which has been around for 30 some odd years. They train and support conservative activists and operatives. They are, for example, currently running trainings for people to run for school board. They have a podcast out where you can listen to conservatives teaching you how to run for school board. Ted Cruz spoke at a training for school board candidates. They have been doing this for quite a long time. They claim many of the prominent Republicans as their alumni. They have a very deep and engaged and sustained investment in supporting conservative operatives and activists. I think Americans for Prosperity is another good example. They don't do everything right, but the fact that they are sustained year-round organizing in nearly every state,

• 19:38Speaker 01

  both Democratic and Republican states, is the kind of organizing that the Democratic Party would struggle to invest in, or would struggle to find the funding for, rather. There are absolutely amazing strategists and operatives who would be ready and willing to do the work, but there isn't the money for it.

• 19:55Ezra Klein?

  How much of this on the Democratic side reflects the weakening of the institutions that used to do this? So you mentioned Republican donors donating because it's good business. There for a long time has been and remains that analog on the Democratic side, which is labor. But labor has gotten a lot smaller, a lot weaker. They're still one of the biggest players, but they just don't have the heft they had at another time. So when you look at this, how much is the absence of that level of year-round organizing, which again, some of these players like labor are still doing, but its relative decline a reflection of the literal decline of some of these groups on the Democratic side?

• 20:36Speaker 01

  Well, and I think that's part of the intentional, it's like an intentional outcome of the Republican Party's strategy to weaken unions through quote unquote right to work laws, and you then lose power strength for the Democratic Party's organizing tools. Part of this is a weakening of the party structure itself, where the ways in which campaign finance law has changed have, over the years, have made it less meaningful to engage in the party's structures. You've also had Democratic Party candidates who run against the party itself. You have

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Bernie Sanders and even other candidates, like literally campaigning against the DNC. It's part of their attraction that undermines trust in these structures and denies them funds from broader sources, which then makes them a little more incompetent, which then proves the argument and becomes tautological. You know, when I think a lot about candidate recruitment, my particular focus, labor and county and state parties used to do candidate recruitment. They no longer have the capacity to do it. They don't have the money. They don't have the staff. They don't have the time. So they allocate their resources from a place of scarcity, which then gets you to a system where instead of trying to find the most exciting, engaging or compelling candidate for a position, you are, as one battleground state party told us in 2020 or 2018,

• 21:49Speaker 01

  flipping through the high school yearbook, trying to find the football coach and asking them to run.

• 22:08Ezra Klein?

  Run for Something launches on January 20th, 2017. I remember that day.

• 22:15Ezra Klein?

  What's the origin story there? How does this organization come into being?

• 22:19Speaker 01

  So I worked for Hillary for two years. I was her email director, managing online fundraising, volunteer recruitment, that kind of thing.

• 22:25Ezra Klein?

  Oh, you sent me all the emails.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  I did. And I like to clarify for my grandma, like not the emails Fox News talked about, the other emails. It was devastating. The election of 2016 was devastating personally, professionally. I was unemployed afterwards, for starters. And I got a Facebook message from somebody I went to college with about a week afterwards. "Hey, Amanda, I'm a public school teacher in Chicago. I'm thinking about running for office. They keep cutting our budgets here. If Trump can be president, it seems like anybody can do this. What do I do?" And I didn't have an answer for him. Because if you were young, he was in his mid twenties, and if you were newly excited about politics and you wanted to do more than vote and more than volunteer, there was nowhere you could go that would be guaranteed to take your call. Like, if you didn't have a ton of money and you didn't have a ton of experience,

• 23:10Speaker 01

  there was nowhere you could go. And that, to me, felt like a symptom of really big problems in the Democratic Party. A lack of focus on young people, not just as voters, but as leaders. What I thought was a pretty weak, undiverse bench of talent for the future. You know, when I thought as an operative who I'd want to work for down the road, I, maybe there was a few that I was excited about, but not a ton. And a lack of focus on local politics, a lack of focus on the structure of the electoral system that ultimately builds power. So I sent an email to a whole bunch of people. What if we started an organization to solve this problem? Kind of like Emily's List, but a little more focused on young people, a little bit more focused on local, and like, a different understanding of viability. And one of those folks connected me to her husband, my co-founder Ross Morales for Cut Out,

• 23:54Speaker 01

  who's been working campaigns for about 15 years, ranging from labor to super PACs to presidential and everything in between. He's the kind of guy who used to like, manage school board races for fun when he was in college. We wrote a plan and we built a website. And then we launched Run for Something on Trump's inauguration day, really believing this was going to be small. Like, he had a job managing a congressional race. I was applying for marketing jobs and still unemployed. We thought we'd get maybe 100 people who wanted to run in the first year, and what a cool hobby this would be to do on weekends to make us feel like we're making a difference. We made 1,000 people sign up in the first week. And as of today, we're up to just about 100,000 young people all across the country who've raised their hands to say they want to run. So, instead of a side project,

• 24:38Speaker 01

  it is my full-time, 200% time job that I'm really lucky to get to do.

• 24:43Ezra Klein?

  How many of those 100,000 people have run?

• 24:46Speaker 01

  So we did some data matching on this after 2020 and we found that about 10% of the people in our pipeline, and we measure our pipeline over the course of the lifetime of the organization, because people sign up in 2017 and then, you know, you can't run the next day. Sometimes you've got to get your life in order, you've got to figure out the mechanics, got to wait for the political opportunity. But about 10% of the people who initially sign up with us actually get on the ballot. So we guesstimated around 10,000.

• 25:11Ezra Klein?

  What separates the people who look at politics and are upset and think, you know what, I'm going to run for office and I think I can do it, from the people who look at politics and are upset? Like, what gets you over that hump?

• 25:23Speaker 01

  The on-ramp. One of the coolest things about doing this work over the last five years is the number of people who have told us, you know, I've always thought about what I would want to do, like, maybe one day, but I didn't know it was possible for someone like me. I didn't know that, you know, a 27-year-old, first-time parent could run. I didn't know that a woman of color with purple hair could serve on a city. Like, I just didn't know that that was an opportunity or even an option for me. The number of people who have told us, like, just you guys existing, just this organization existing, gives me permission to think about it. And more broadly, I think the people who are willing to go from mad or inspired to taking action are the ones that can clearly articulate an answer

• 26:08Speaker 01

  to three questions. Why do I want to run? What is the problem I care about solving? How is the office I want to run for going to give me space to solve it? And why should voters want me to win? Which is different than why do you want to win? You want to win because winning is great and losing is terrible. Why do voters want you to win? Is what are you going to do to make their life better? And when you can answer those three questions, everything else about campaigns, especially local ones, are just logistics.

• 26:33Ezra Klein?

  Is that true, though? Because I think about this from my own history. When I was in college, all I wanted to do someday was run for office. That was like my big, I had what it takes.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  It's not too late.

• 26:45Ezra Klein?

  The giant, right, the giant Richard Ben Cramer book about the 1988 presidential election, that was my bible. I was trying to get involved more in local politics. But just tactically, logistically, what it would take to run for office was really opaque to me. You know, did you have to go become a congressional staffer first? Did you, did I actually need a law degree? It seemed like everybody who was running for office had a law degree. Did I actually need a law degree fundraising? Just like, how do you call people up and ask them for money all day, every day? How much of that did you need to do? And I knew other people like this. I think that the ranks of young poli sci students are full of people who would like to one day run for office. And then it is that operational logistical side that makes you blanch a little bit.

• 27:30Ezra Klein?

  So tell me about that side of it. What makes people think, I can raise that money. I can go knock on all those doors. I can take that time.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's worth noting, the reason that it seemed hard to you or opaque to you is intentional. The gatekeepers of these processes, whether it was county parties or incumbents, are meant to keep, quote unquote, like, normal people out. They set up these structures. There is jargon. There is now technology. There is access to lists that is meant to keep the person that the party machine has not decided should run or can run from engaging. And one of the reasons we started Run For Something was to democratize access to the idea of being a candidate, to change that system, to, you know, get rid of the gatekeepers and to make sure that when you are thinking about running, the things that are hard, which running for office is really hard. I don't ever want to bullshit anyone. Like, it is a hard thing to do. It requires sacrifice. It requires time.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  It will hurt your self-esteem. It might hurt your relationships. Like, if you run for the first time, you're probably going to lose because most first time candidates do. It's hard. And there are things that are hard because they're hard and there are things that are hard because the system has made it hard. And we are trying to make the systematic side of it at least a little bit easier. So like, we've written guides on how to get on the ballot in all 50 states, including like, which person to call and email at your county clerk and how to Google the right keywords to find that person's contact information. And oh, by the way, it's probably going to be like a PDF that is undecipherable, that you will fail to download or might have to fax something in. The exact rules might change and they're going to tell you, you need 1,500 signatures. You actually need 3,000 because they're going to try and throw away half of them.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  All of that is the structure trying to keep you out. We have done things like how to write a campaign plan. Because ultimately, at the end of the day, a local campaign plan is just get the list of voters you need to talk to, talk to them as many times as you can, and do so in a timely fashion before Election Day. It is that easy. There's a lot of things that make it more complicated and that you sort of have to figure out because of time constraints, or money constraints, or people constraints. But at the end of the day, the core of it is that easy, especially for local races, where maybe the number of voters you have to talk to is 700, 1,000, 2,000. That's a lot, but if you start early enough, you can knock through that universe many times over. And it's one of the things Run For Something tries to do, is help you understand how to

• 29:50Speaker 01

  do that and how to do it efficiently and effectively.

• 29:53Ezra Klein?

  How many elected offices are there in this country?

• 29:56Speaker 01

  More than half a million.

• 29:57Ezra Klein?

  There are more than half a million?

• 29:59Speaker 01

  More than half a million. I mean, you think about it, yes, there's like Congress, and there's governors, and there's lieutenant governors, attorney generals, and all that. But then there's mosquito board, water abatement board, American River Flood Control District Trustees, community college boards, school boards, boards of education. In 1,300 counties, we still elect coroners, which is a fascination of mine. You can run for judge, you can run for DA, you can run for prosecutor. In Michigan, you can run for University of Michigan Board of Regents. We worked with a candidate for that. There are so many elected officials, each of which touch your day-to-day life in a meaningful way. And we have an expression, like, the further down the ballot, the closer to your front door. The person that makes the decisions about whether or not you get a stop sign at the

• 30:44Speaker 01

  end of your street, or a speed bump, or whether that restaurant over there gets a liquor license, or an outdoor cafe set up, is not Congress. It's your city council, or your township, or your mayor. It's small, but it's deeply meaningful.

• 30:57Ezra Klein?

  I think most people, and I would include myself, my college self in this, I think you could think of like eight or nine things to run for. You could run for president, but you're probably not going to win. You can run for senate, or house, governor. There's lieutenant governor, which is running for the opportunity to one day run for governor.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 31:16Ezra Klein?

  There's attorney general, which is chief lawyer or something. Then in your town, there's mayor, there's city council.

• 31:24Ezra Klein?

  And then it all gets hazy. There's supervisors who supervise or something. There are county executives and county judges and so on. What are the positions that are pretty common across localities in your experience? And that are more powerful and less known than they should be?

• 31:46Speaker 01

  Okay, so overarching caveat is all of this varies depending on where you are. And what time of year we're in and whether or not you run in a county or you're in a town or a municipality. So like full just overarching caveat, totally depends. And there are some really interesting positions that I think have a huge meaning for people and make a difference in people's lives that most folks don't think about as options. School board is obviously one of them, and we've seen this come to prominence over the last two years, especially as school boards have opened schools and closed schools and masks or no masks or equity or LGBTQ issues or science education or curriculum. So, school boards, important. City councils or town councils, they also are sometimes

• 32:27Speaker 01

  called boards of supervisors. In Texas, they're often considered like commissioners courts. These make decisions about everything from budgets to business licenses to even on issues like climate, you can make decisions about building codes and what kind of buildings you can have and how energy efficient they need to be. You can institute climate action plans through city councils. You can also institute paid leave policies through city councils. I am personally fascinated by library boards. Now, where I live in New York City, you cannot run for this. I've explored it. I'm really upset by it. But in a lot of places, you can run for and win a position on library board. We worked with a candidate in Altadena, California, Katie Clark, who ran for and won a seat on library board. And one of the things that she told me when I was meeting with her a couple of years ago was that the

• 33:12Speaker 01

  library is one of the biggest centers for people to interact with government. Because if you maybe are homeless and you need somewhere to use a computer to apply for a job, you go to the library. Libraries hold English language classes and citizenship test classes for people trying to become citizens. Libraries are often the centers where we preserve and restore the history of a community. I think it's so powerful to get to decide what kind of community place your library will be. And that doesn't even get into things like sheriff and DA and Florida mosquito abatement district. It matters what kind of mosquito containment policy a Florida county or city has. All of these are important and most of them are not as expensive, not as big,

• 33:56Speaker 01

  and not as scary as you might think. And they're where future governors and senators and members of Congress mostly come from.

• 34:03Ezra Klein?

  There's also a sense that people have, which is that there's a certain kind of person who runs for office. And that certain kind of person is, again, hazy. Maybe they probably love public speaking. They love marching in parades, possibly. They're good at raising money.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  Like to kiss babies.

• 34:21Ezra Klein?

  They kiss babies. How true is that in your experience? That there's one kind of person that does this?

• 34:28Speaker 01

  You know, I think the coolest thing about doing this work over the last couple of years is seeing just how false that is. We have worked with people whose primary experience is working at retail, fast food restaurants, musicians, artists, people with college degrees and people without, certainly some lawyers, but many more who have never seen or touched an LSAT prep book in their lives. We've worked with magicians. We've worked with people who are refugees and first or second generation Americans. And I think it's something that's wildly changed over the last, I guess, six or seven years in that one of the very few silver linings of Trump is he has blown open the idea of what kind of qualifications you need and what kind of person can run for office. And that if that motherfucker can do this, seems like anybody can. That's really powerful.

• 35:12Ezra Klein?

  But what skills do you actually need? Because even within all these different professions and backgrounds, it might be that it's selecting for the people who like to give speeches, but I'm not somebody who loves public speaking. Or it's selecting for the hardcore extroverts, but I'm not a hardcore extrovert. Or it's selecting for the people who know a lot of people with money, but I don't know a lot of people with money. What is the mix of skills you need versus skills you can learn and temperament you need versus adaptations you can make?

• 35:44Speaker 01

  I would say the best candidates are the ones that are willing to listen, the ones that can take feedback, the ones that are know how to separate the constructive criticism from the criticism like haters gonna hate. The best candidates are the ones who know what they know and know what they don't know. But you don't need to be an extrovert. You don't need to be a public speaker. You don't need to be a policy expert. What you need is a willingness to do the work. Like, you can't be a lazy candidate. Lazy candidates, like, sometimes win anyway. But you can't really coast on that for too long. It's just too hard. And I think you have to be willing to be vulnerable in a way that maybe wasn't necessarily true in the past. But I think the internet has sort of expanded. I think it's David Axelrod that has said,

• 36:26Speaker 01

  like, a particular presidential campaign is the MRI for the soul. That's true in many cases for a city council or school board or library board candidates. Like, it really shows you who you are and who your friends are in a way that can be both incredibly surprising and incredibly disappointing.

• 36:41Ezra Klein?

  I'm curious how much some of that has changed because I think this is another thing that is a hump for a lot of people. Let's call it the "I've had a life" concern. I've sent tweets some number of years ago that I'm not proud of, that I didn't mean to send. I have, I drank in college and there are a lot of pictures of me with red party cups. Like, I was a person. And like a person, I did all kinds of things. But I'm not Donald Trump, where my brand was being that sort of person.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  You know, I think voters will forgive a lot. That's one of the things we've learned now, is that voters will forgive a lot, but they do not like being lied to. They do not like bullshit. So one of the things at least we encourage candidates to do is if you have a story in your past that you think might reflect poorly on you, whether it was like a DUI or a divorce or bankruptcy or student loan debt or whatever it is, own it, incorporate it into your story, explain what you've learned from it and how it might inform your legislating or your governing. Do not lie. Do not lie. Don't betray the trust of your voters. Don't betray the trust of your volunteers or your donors. You know, there's certainly some, like, do not pass go, do not collect $200, do not get on the ballot, tape things. Like, I don't want to get specific.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Like, you know, when you see it, if you have something where you'd be afraid for it to be on the front page of a newspaper, which anything is possible when it comes to a campaign. Maybe take a second back to think about it. But generally, voters will forgive a lot if you are honest and authentic and open about who you are. And if especially if you can clearly point like how it will affect your governing. You know, you think about student loans, for example, or bankruptcy. That makes you a better representative for people who share your experiences.

• 38:25Ezra Klein?

  How much money do smaller races need? I think if a lot of people feel they know anything about running for office now, it's expensive. And the idea of calling everybody, you know, and asking them to give you money and then still not having enough and having wasted their money is pretty unappealing.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  So in years past, about 75% of school board races cost $1,000 or less. 85% cost $5,000 or less. Now, it's changed a little bit with the way that school board races have gotten nationalized. But generally speaking, it's still relatively true. These races, while they are not cheap, they're not free, although some of them can be. Some of them, you might only need to spend the filing fees and what you need to print the lit. They are not the billion dollar branding exercises that a presidential campaign is or the multimillion dollar ones that Senate or Congress or gubernatorial campaigns are. They are affordable. They are realistic. The number of voters you need to reach is not that big. And remember, like, you're not fronting the money yourself.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  You're not paying for it out of pocket. You are asking your friends, your family, and every person you've ever talked to, your dentist, your ex-boyfriend or girlfriend or partner, your ex-partner's parents. You're talking to every person you've ever met and asking them to invest, not necessarily in you, but in their community. And I think of fundraising for local campaigns as a bit of a public service. I mean, you think about what people did who had the means to do so over the last six years when they were stressed or anxious or upset or inspired. They threw money at things. You made a donation to ACLU. You made a donation to Planned Parenthood. You made a donation to a Senate campaign that was probably kind of a waste. But you made a donation. So when you ask someone or give someone a vehicle to invest in to make their schools

• 40:05Speaker 01

  better, their streets safer, you're giving them a chance to do something good. I think it's a gift to ask someone for money.

• 40:13Ezra Klein?

  See, that's an amazing point to get to. I actually felt my stomach clench when you said, you gotta call your exes and your ex's parents and you're not my dentist, because given the amount of money I've given every dentist I've ever known, and it's honestly the least they could do for me. But everybody else on your list was a bit terrifying. And I'm sure a lot of people feel that, asking people in your life who you don't know that well, for money to support an endeavor of yours, which I recognize is not how you're framing it, but how it can feel. I'm sure that's a big, a big block for a lot of people. How do people get over that particular hump?

• 40:48Speaker 01

  You just do it over and over and over again. You do it afraid. You do it uncomfortable. And the first time you get a yes is just such a powerful feeling because it is someone who believes in you. And that is a little bit intoxicating. You know, a big part of my job is raising money for Run for Something, and I will be the first to tell you fundraising is terrible. You just put your dignity in a box and you put it over there and you revisit it later. It sucks. And when someone says yes, I think what you are doing, whether it's the organization or a candidacy or whatever it is, I think what you are doing is worth investing in, even if it's just $5. Especially for someone who thinks $5 is a lot, but even

• 41:28Speaker 01

  if it's just $5, that is so powerful. You will be surprised at who says yes. And I think the flip to that is you will be deeply disappointed in who says no. It's one of the things that my co-founder Ross and I often have to say with candidates who are, you know, struggling with fundraising of like, well, my sorority network or my coworkers weren't into it. It's like, it's not personal. It's not about you. It's not about who you are or what you believe. People's relationship with their money is so complicated and their relationship to politics is equally as complicated. Do not take it personally. The people who step up for you believe in you and are willing to put a buck on the table, as proverbially,

• 42:10Speaker 01

  and say they're in and take the yeses as seriously as you take the no's.

• 42:15Ezra Klein?

  The other piece of this is that if you run for something, you may lose. And you mentioned a couple of minutes ago, losing is terrible. It's horrible. It is not as redeeming as the cultural narrative of people who have won. Talking about their past losses sometimes makes it seem. In 2022, you all endorsed, I think it's 525 candidates on ballots, 44% won. That means 56% lost. Those losses are public. I think that's the scary thing about them. You're losing in public after having asked a bunch of people you know for money. What is it like for candidates who lose?

• 42:52Speaker 01

  It's heartbreaking, but it's also an incredible lesson in resiliency. And the coolest thing about the number of folks we've worked with who have lost is that about 65% to 70% of them tell us they want to run again. They rarely regret it. It is so meaningful to experience this, especially if you're running in a place where maybe someone of your party has never run before, which is more common than you'd think. There's a large number of districts where Democrats just haven't competed. Especially if you're running in a place where the numbers are just against you. Maybe it's a Republican district, 70, 30, or maybe it's somewhere where the previous Democratic candidate got 5% or 10% of the vote.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  That doesn't mean that your campaign was a waste of time. You know, yes, only winning is winning. Only winners get to determine things, but losers and the process of campaigning can be so galvanizing for a community. It can really push the issues forward. It can push the debate forward. It can hold incumbents or opposition accountable. It can make them make promises they wouldn't otherwise do and make them, you know, even talk to voters that they might not otherwise engage with. One of the coolest things I got to do over the last year was host the Run for Something podcast, which is now over. Very sad, but it was really incredible to get to talk to so many alumni who we've endorsed before and candidates. And one of the ones that stuck with me most prominently was a conversation I had with three trans people who had ran and won for state representatives or state senators.

• 44:19Speaker 01

  Brianna Taton in Colorado, Danica Rome in Virginia, and Sarah McBride in Delaware. And each of them were talking about their experiences knocking doors and not sure what kind of response they would get from their neighbors, knowing that like they might be the first trans person some of these folks had ever met. And Sarah McBride, who is the state senator from Delaware, who's the first trans state senator in the country, and perhaps I think one of the highest ranking trans people elected. She said, if you want to fall in love with your community, run for office. I'm like, what a beautiful way to think about it. That to meet your neighbors, to talk about the things they care about, to give them a space to be heard, is to fall in love with them in the place that you've made home. I can't think of anything nicer.

• 45:02Ezra Klein?

  Tell me about that experience, not just for the people running for office, but also just the people engaging in local politics. Something I always try to emphasize is if you're listening to the show and you've come to it through politics, you're probably pretty focused on national politics. And we all know national politics sucks. It feels bad to focus on. It's very frustrating. A lot of it feels like it's going wrong and there's not much you can do about it. And it's always been my experience that being part of local politics feels differently. It works in the body differently, a little bit win or lose, which is to say it's always pleasant, but that it just operates on a different dimension.

• 45:45Ezra Klein?

  Can you talk a bit about just the experience of being involved locally and how it differs from the experience of being a following closely nationally?

• 45:53Speaker 01

  Well, for one, you win more locally. And that in and of itself is a morale booster. And the wins and the losses are more personal. Like you get to drive the street that four months ago you were arguing to be repaved. You get to go to the restaurant that you maybe sat in the community board meeting where they approved the license for. You get to build the home that you helped get the zoning for. That in and of itself, being able to really live the results of that process, of engaging in that process, make it feel more meaningful. It is also an incredible way to really get to know folks. I often tell people when they're like, well, I'm not thinking about running yet, but I want to think about for the future, maybe three or five years from now. Great. First thing you should do is volunteer for a local campaign because for one, you're going to get to meet the candidate.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  How often do people get to say they've met their governor or their senator or the president? Except for like folks in Iowa and New Hampshire, most people have never met Joe Biden. Many people have the opportunity to meet their state legislatures or their city council members. And maybe you go to the gym with them. Maybe they're in church or synagogue with you. Maybe they're in the school pickup line with you. These are people you know, you can trust, you can build a relationship with. And when you knock doors for them or make calls for them or show up at the city council meeting and yell at them, any of that is totally fine. You get a chance to like, really make a difference because the pool is so small. You get to be a big fish in a small pond. One of the things I got to do when I wrote a book a couple of years ago, I wrote Run for Something. But I got to talk to a bunch of people

• 47:22Speaker 01

  who had come up through local politics. And one of the people I talked to is now Secretary Pete Buttigieg. And he told me about going out on dates with his partner and getting yelled at at the restaurant about trash pickup. You know, it's personal for people. They will see you around town or you will see your leaders around town. That makes it both very scary, but also way more meaningful. And you get to win and winning feels good. And then you get to live the experiences of that win, which feels even better. And it's more sustainable than paying attention to national politics. I spend 98% of my energy engaging on local races across the country and 2% mad at Joe Manchin. And I think that ratio is very helpful for my mental health.

• 48:21Ezra Klein?

  I want to circle back to something you said earlier now, which is that the key questions, both in running and in crafting that campaign, aren't why you want to win, but what you can do with that win, why the voters should want you to win. Tell me a bit about how one asks that question honestly. Because nothing is easier if you're an ambitious person or if you're a highly political person, than merging in your own head your self-interest with the public interest. And Donald Trump is obviously the maximal version of this. But how do you actually ask that question in a real way and come to a real answer?

• 49:04Speaker 01

  Oh, that's such a good question. Well, for one, every person think we're running for office and every person in our large should be in therapy. It's good if you can afford it or you can swing it is good. And I think helps sort of navigate the ambitious complications there. But as you are thinking about running for office and trying to understand what you can deliver for people, think about the issue that gets you out of bed in the morning. You know, let's say that it is climate change. Maybe the thing that keeps you up at night that gives you, you know, heart palpitations is the idea of the incoming apocalypse, the end of the world due to fire and plague and drought and all of that. And then you look at your city council or your state legislature and you realize maybe there is space here for something I can do.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  Yes, it won't solve every problem, but maybe it's time for New York City to change the building codes to ensure that the new buildings we are creating are more carbon efficient, have solar panels, you know, more green. Okay, that is something specific that I can deliver that is attached to a big issue that I care about. It is a quintessential like think globally, act locally axiom that while you may not be able to solve every problem, you can at the very least point to a specific action you can take that will make things better or impactful where you are. And it's not always going to be something glamorous.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  It's not always going to be something attached to you that like clearly delineates itself to the issue that you care about. Maybe it's reproductive health and abortion access to abortion. Maybe your city can set up an abortion fund for people seeking reproductive health care. Maybe you can change the protest zones around a women's healthcare center or a healthcare center that provides reproductive care. Maybe you can be the vocal minority in a state legislature proudly demanding at the very least, if they're going to pass anti-abortion bills, that there is a hearing and that people's voices are heard. It is, I think, understanding the limitations of power, but also being able to find the contours around it, where what is the lever you can pull? It is hard. It is absolutely hard.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  But once you are able to articulate that, once you're able to articulate what you are going to deliver for voters, the rest of your campaign becomes much easier because it's just trying to find a way to tell that story to as many people as possible.

• 51:23Ezra Klein?

  I want to tread on this question carefully because all of the issues you just mentioned are really important. But there's also this trend in politics of not just the nationalization of all politics, but the nationalization of local politics. And you could see a podcast like this one, a group like Run for Something, as part of that. A lot of people, in theory, get jazzed up to run for local office because they want to fight about climate change. And climate change, again, is important, but nevertheless, isn't there a danger that we are already seeing playing out, certainly on the Republican side, with harnessing the

• 52:05Ezra Klein?

  energy of national politics and the issues of national politics for local elections? Doesn't that lead to a lot of school boards trying to play out their national resentments locally? A lot of state legislators, not legislating for their state, but legislating as if it's a mock House of Representatives at the national level?

• 52:24Speaker 01

  I think that's absolutely a danger. It's one of the reasons why we're working with candidates. We really encourage them to be reflective and representative of the communities that they're trying to represent, not just like, what is the issue, but how is that relevant to the people where you live? It's not just about a big fight about equity. It's about what is on the third graders in your school district's list that you do or do not like. It is a really hard line to walk. And the experts have found that the most meaningful way to engage a voter, the most meaningful thing to get them to show up at the polls, is the relationship between the candidate and the voter. It's a personal touch by the candidate. Touch in the sense means a door knock or a phone call.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  That relationship can help supersede some of the other bullshit. I think a lot, we worked with a candidate in DuPage County, Illinois. It's like a Chicago suburb, a young woman named Padia Afzal, who was running for county board, I believe at this time. And she is a young woman, she's Muslim, she was maybe 19 or 20, she was still in college at the time of this race. She was knocking doors and she needed to win both Republican and independent voters in her district. She was knocking doors and she told me about a conversation she had where she was knock, knock, knock, knocked on this older white man's door. "Hi, my name is Padia Afzal, I'm running for county clerk, I want to talk to you about your property taxes." And he looks at her, this young woman wearing hijab, so confused. And they start talking about property taxes and they talk about schools and they talk

• 53:52Speaker 01

  about the roads, they talk about the city government, it's like a long conversation. And he tells her at one point, "You are the first person, Democrat or Republican, in the decades I have lived here, that has ever asked for my vote. The Republicans assume they have it in the bag, so they don't even try. And the Democrats assume they don't have a chance, so they don't even try. I don't agree with you on most things, but I appreciate that you came out and asked and that you were willing to have a conversation with me." That conversation can break through some of the nationalization. Like, it is hard, hard, hard, hard to demonize someone who you know, who you put a face to, who you have a relationship with, which allows, I think, some of that nationalization

• 54:34Speaker 01

  of the conversation to get diluted when it hits the local level. Now, it's certainly not 100% true every time. And every time I talk about these things, I get folks, you know, in my mentions or in my DMs, being like, "What about this? What about that?" Yeah, definitely doesn't work every time, but it's better than the alternative of not trying at all, right?

• 54:53Ezra Klein?

  What if you're listening to this and it all sounds great, except for the fact that you're not a Democrat? You don't like the Democratic Party. Maybe you're a Republican who doesn't love the Republican Party, but believes in elections or just believes in local government. Maybe you're just an independent, you just don't like either party. You're to their left or right, or just somewhere completely orthogonal on the spectrum. How do you run?

• 55:16Speaker 01

  You should do it. I want to say like Run for Something specifically works with young progressives, meaning people under 40, and we specifically work with people who share values. But that doesn't mean we don't think folks older than 40 shouldn't run, and it kind of means we don't think Republicans should engage. But I think personally, I want more people who care about democracy to run for office at every level. We know that there is deep anti-democracy forces at play here, that they are trying to take over the election structures from the bottom up. So we need people, whether or not you share necessarily all of my or my organization's opinions on every issue. If you think it's important that we have free and fair elections, you should consider running for these offices. And there are organizations out there that will support you. You can get on the ballot,

• 55:58Speaker 01

  you can run, you can win. Run for Something resources are all publicly available, so you can find stuff on our website, even if we don't deeply engage in your race as an endorsement. That's there for you if you decide to do it.

• 56:09Ezra Klein?

  Why restrict yourself to progressive candidates, particularly right now? I mean, there are so many places where Democrats are not going to win local races, probably. I'm not saying you can't win the occasional upset, but there are important races that Democrats are going to be naturally disadvantaged in. In some ways, having Republicans who believe that elections should be free and fair seems of overriding importance to me. Shouldn't that be a priority?

• 56:37Speaker 01

  Totally. And I think for Run for Something PAC, which is our primary driver of our work, we set out to build sustainable democratic power. A lot of the races we work with are technically nonpartisan, but we work with candidates at the PAC level who share our values, whether that means pro-choice, pro-equality, pro-climate change being real, and we have a responsibility to do something about it, pro-tackling gun violence, and the like. That being said, Run for Something Civics, which is our broader nonpartisan partner, does work with folks who might not share all of those values but are still pro-democracy and, more importantly, pro-truth and pro-accessibility. We have a bunch of partners from across the ecosystem, both on the left and the right, through Run for Something Civics, that are willing to engage with folks across the pro-democracy side.

• 57:20Ezra Klein?

  And why do you focus on candidates under 40?

• 57:23Speaker 01

  Oh, this one gets me yelled at all the time. We do this in part practically because we wanted to limit our scope of mission. We wanted to approach young people as a generation, you know, millennials, Gen Z and below, who have a very specific set of challenges. We are also wildly underrepresented in government. The American government is a gerontocracy. Thirty of 50 US governors are over the age of 60. The average age in the House is 58. The average age of the Senate is 63. The median age of a school board member is 59. The median American is 38. If millennials were accurately and proportionally represented in Congress, there would be more than 100 of us. There are about 30 something to that last count. That is not reflective democracy.

• 58:06Speaker 01

  And age is just a shortcut to account for race and class and gender identity and sexual orientation and life experience. Like, it wildly changes the tenor of conversation around things like affordable housing, or parental leave, or education policy, or student loans, when you have young people in the room. And the number of folks we've worked with who, you know, on the most specific example of housing, are the first or only renter to serve on the city council or the state assembly. That really changes the stakeholders in the conversations around housing, especially for young people, many of whom cannot afford to buy a home right now. So we wanted to make sure that we were a space for young people who were previously not seen as viable candidates, who maybe couldn't have the wealth, and were at a very

• 58:50Speaker 01

  different stage in life than the retiree who's thinking about running. That's not to say folks over 40 shouldn't run. You absolutely should. I want to be very clear, you should. Run for something just might not be the right organization for you.

• 59:00Ezra Klein?

  I think there's something so interesting in the contrast you bring up there between representation and maybe we could call it experience. Because if you want to be generous to our gerontocracy, that set of...

• 59:16Ezra Klein?

  Numbers, you just read of how old school board members are and members of Congress and senators and so on. Well, age begets experience, having a lot of life experience, having success, having learned how to do different things, having built a network, having in Congress, learned how to work with your fellow members of Congress. So of course, our elected offices should be full of older people because they have that lifetime of capability and experience. But what you're saying there strikes me as important as a rejoinder to that, that there is a trade off with representation, that the experience of being 32 or 22 makes you

• 59:58Ezra Klein?

  aware of different things that are happening, gives you a different kind of literacy, gives you access to problems that, you know, maybe somebody who had a long time to participate in the building of asset wealth in this country during the boom years, or the housing boom years, wouldn't feel. So could you just spend a minute more on that trade off? Because I think it's not just an abstract point. I think a lot of young people think it would be a little bit presumptuous to run for office because I'm 19, I'm 24. Who needs to know what I think? I should go out and achieve some things and then maybe it'll be appropriate for me to run. And you're saying there's a real value to running just as you are?

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  You know, we've seen congressional hearings on technology that prove this point better than I ever could, where you'll have United States senators, a member of Congress, ask about, why do my campaign emails go to spam? What are you doing, Google, to make that happen? I was like, you don't understand how these work. You are not fluent in the internet. And I think that's true overall across levels of government, where you have people who just like, don't understand what it is like to be a normal person, to be a 20 something or 30 something, to have experienced housing insecurity, to have been on food stamps, to have had, you know, growing up in an age of school shootings even. There is a very different lived experience today. This is true both of the way in which you grew up, but also the way that you understand politics.

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  I think this is something that gets lost a little bit, but if you are particularly a Democrat in your 20s or 30s, you have never known the Republican Party to be a good faith operator or a good faith negotiator in governing. That means you approach it in a very different way. Run for Something has now elected 637 young people across 48 states, mostly women, mostly people of color, about a fifth LGBTQIA+. And they have done amazing things because they're in the room. Berkeley, California, ended single-family zoning. And it took a culmination of years of activist work on the outside, and then electing, in small part, two young people, Rachel Robinson and Terry Taplin, both Run for Something alum, to the city council to get it across the finish line.

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  In Pennsylvania, Jennifer O'Mara, a state representative, who was carrying a bunch of student loan debt, like many young people do, helped create the state legislature's first-ever Student Loan Debt Caucus to tackle the issue for Pennsylvanians. I mean, we had in Connecticut, Will Haskell, who ran when he was still in college. He started his campaign out of his Georgetown dorm room, ran against an incumbent who'd been in office as long as Will had been alive. Will ran, he won, he helped things like getting people in Connecticut to help pay off some of their student loans, passing gun safety laws, tackling the issue of vaccine hesitancy and outreach among college students in the district where he is. No, their voices matter.

• 1:02:43Ezra Klein?

  And so before we get to books, you have a tool that I want you to plug, because anybody can use it, whatever party you are, whatever you might want to do, which is simply to see what it is possible to run for, where you are. So if you just wanted to take that very first step of just knowing what are the elected offices that happen to be where you live? How do you do that?

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  So you go to runforwhat.net. You enter your address, the interest of your information. You can look up the offices available to you in 2022.

• 1:03:12Ezra Klein?

  And then finally, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  This was very stressful for me because I'm a prolific reader and I could not name her down to a couple. But I will say, in interest of being fully authentic and vulnerable, as I tell our candidates to be, I am a obsessive romance reader. So I would highly recommend people read The Heart Principle by Helen Wong. If you read her first novel, it's really good. It is sadder and intimate. It's about grief and burnout and also really hot. It's great and it's very relaxing for this moment of time we're in. I loved Olga Dies Dreaming by Soty Gonzalez, which was a perfect combination of romance and politics and New York stuff. And answers the question of like, what happens when someone, in this case, the main character's mother, sacrifices everything for a bigger cause? Like, what happens to the people who get left behind?

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  And then nonfiction, I loved Let's Get Physical by Danielle Friedman. It's a history of women in fitness and women in America and the sort of overlapping cultural ways in which society polices women bodies and women try to take ownership of their bodies. And it's so fun and some really interesting anecdotes. So read them.

• 1:04:19Ezra Klein?

  Amanda Litman, thank you very much.

• 1:04:20Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:04:29Ezra Klein?

  That's the show. If you enjoyed it, there are a few ways you can help us out or shape the next episode. You can rate the podcast on whatever play you're listening on now, or send this episode to a friend, family member. If you didn't like it, an enemy. He deserves it. Or you can tell us who you think we should have on the show next by emailing me at eserclineshow@nytimes. We really do get suggestions for guests we have on from the email. And though we can't respond to every message, we really do read every single one.

• 1:04:59Ezra Klein?

  The Ezra Klein Show is a production of The New York Times. It is produced by Roja Karma, Annie Galvin, and Jeff Geld. It is fact checked by Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Jeff Geld. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Shannon Busta and Kristin Lynn.