What winning candidates have in common right now

Democrats keep asking what kind of candidate can still break through in a political environment defined by Trump, massive outside spending, online outrage, and collapsing trust in institutions. Amanda Litman thinks the answer is less mysterious than party strategists want to admit: the candidates winning voters right now are the ones who are locally rooted, focused on affordability, and willing to do the unglamorous work of actually campaigning. Her organization, Run for Something, has seen that pattern in red-to-blue flips, special elections, and the first wave of 2026 primaries. 

That makes this year’s National Run for Office Day (today!) feel especially fitting. Litman started Run for Something in 2017 to get more young progressives to run for down-ballot office, and nearly a decade later, she says the barriers are still real — but so is the opportunity for normal people to step forward. As her organization enters its 10th election cycle, we chatted this week about the state of the Democratic Party and what it takes to run and win. 

Kyle Tharp: Let’s start with last Tuesday. First-time candidate Emily Gregory won a special election in Florida’s 87th State House district, flipping a seat that had voted for a Republican in 2024 by 19 points. It’s a good illustration of the many special elections that are off a lot of people’s radar in D.C. and New York, but your organization, Run For Something, has been laser-focused on for years. What have you noticed about elections like these that people are missing? What issues are they focused on — or not focused on?

Amanda Litman: Emily Gregory, Taylor Rehmet (who won a special election in Texas in January), and the 43 other folks we helped elect in red-to-blue flips last November are part of a pretty clear pattern. We did a lot of analysis of those races and found a few things they have in common.

First: affordability. That’s the watchword, but in these races, affordability usually means a focus on housing. These are local races — state house, special elections, city council — where candidates can actually do something about housing. And they’re usually talking about it from the perspective of a renter or a first-time buyer. If you’re in your 20s or 30s, that’s your reality.

Second: community ties. These candidates are rooted where they live. Emily was a small business owner. Taylor had been a union leader in the area. They know their communities, and they fit the place. In 2025, 90 percent of our red-to-blue flips talked specifically about community engagement — bringing trust back into the process, whether that meant rescheduling city council meetings so more people could attend or modernizing government so it reached people better.

And the final thing is simple: they actually campaign. They knock doors. They talk to voters. That sounds obvious, but a lot of people don’t do it. It’s boring sometimes, but it’s powerful. It’s also one of the few things we know actually influences whether someone votes. Personal relationships matter most.

Local candidates can build that kind of relationship in a way top-of-the-ticket candidates usually can’t. They can literally talk to tens of thousands of voters if they start early enough and put in the time. A lot of national candidates try to recreate that intimacy online, but they don’t have the juice to make it feel real.

Kyle Tharp: Are you seeing any trends in the motivations of the people stepping up to run now, compared with when you started Run for Something nine years ago?

Amanda Litman: The issues haven’t changed much: housing, healthcare, childcare, opioids. What’s different in 2025 and 2026 is that people are saying much more explicitly, “I’m done waiting my turn.” They’re sick of the Democratic Party, sick of leaders who don’t fight for them, and are deciding they have to do it themselves.

Trump is the water people are swimming in, but he’s not the bait that’s hooking them. The bigger force is frustration with our own leaders.

Kyle Tharp: That’s something I wanted to discuss with you: There does seem to be a thumb-on-the-scales factor in Democratic primaries this year—from the party establishment quietly supporting its own candidates, to crypto PACs, AI groups, and pro-Israel spending. How much of that is that a barrier to first-time candidates, versus a motivating factor?

Amanda Litman: Some of these candidates may worry, “What if the Democratic Party supports my opponent?” While others think, “Great, the Democratic Party is going to support my opponent.” It cuts both ways.

But we remind people there’s no easy button. There’s no secret donor list in most places. The national party doesn’t have the same juice it used to, and it’s often disconnected from where voters are. Right now, being against the status quo can actually help your campaign. It signals that you’re ready to try something new.

A lot of our candidates understand, instinctively or intentionally, that the way we did things yesterday cannot be the way we do things tomorrow, because today sucks. We cannot keep repeating the same mistakes. At the very least, we need to make new ones.

In terms of big money, you need enough to run a campaign, but you can out-hustle being outspent. You can knock more doors, talk to more voters, and build personal relationships. And right now, voters really dislike the idea that elections can be bought.

If you communicate that well — if you make clear that big money is the thing attacking you — it can become an advantage.

Kyle Tharp: Have the barriers or opportunities for first-time candidates changed over the last five or six years? Has the internet made it easier or harder to run for office?

Amanda Litman: There are more examples of people who have run and won, which makes it less scary. And yes, it has gotten easier in some ways. Many of our candidates are fluent in the internet. That doesn’t mean they’re great video editors—but they understand the language well enough that, with a little tactical support, they can really leverage it.

That’s why “trusted messengers” matter. Who is more trusted than the small-business owner running for city council, or the mom who’s shown up at PTA meetings for years and is finally fed up with how underfunded the school is? 

Our endorsed candidates so far this cycle have a collective social reach of at least a million people. That’s not nothing. They’re like micro-influencers with skin in the game, and they’re hugely underutilized by the Democratic Party and the broader ecosystem.

We’ve democratized access to some of the stuff that campaigns need that used to be gatekept. Running for office will always be hard. You have to put yourself out there, and it can put you and your family at risk. It takes time and sacrifice. But some of the old barriers existed because we didn’t want normal people to do it.

What I’m proud of is that we’ve changed the conversation. We want normal people to run. That means giving them the basic logistics: how to file, how to get on the ballot, how to write a campaign plan, how to get the voter file, and what to do with it. Some of this is just logistics. It doesn’t have to be hard. Our job is to solve for the things that shouldn’t be hard, so people can focus on the things that still are.

Kyle Tharp: You’ve written and spoken a lot recently about this unique political moment for the Democratic Party—the mismatch between fighting 2026’s battles with 1996’s leaders, tools, and visions. Where is that mismatch most damaging right now — messaging, strategy, messengers, or candidates?

Amanda Litman: All of the above. On vision, Democrats have been running a moderate, centrist vision since 1992, if not longer. People act like the progressive left has taken over the party, but Joe Biden was president. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are the leaders in Congress. A lot of the frustration with progressives is really just that people get yelled at online.

The deeper issue is that the normal way of doing things didn’t work for people, and we can’t go back to it. The old argument was basically: nibble around the edges and make things a little better. It’s not hard to see why that’s not compelling to someone who feels like they’ll never be able to buy a home.

Then there’s messaging. How many members of Congress can actually do a normal-sounding interview? Not many. Too many of them don’t understand the language of the internet, which makes it hard for them to speak it.

And then there are tactics. The old idea was that you could just raise a bunch of money, buy TV and online ads, and win. We’ve seen that’s not true. You can’t sell a product with money alone. People aren’t consuming information that way anymore, and they don’t trust advertising the same way.

Organic social matters more, and paid media should be part of a broader strategy. Candidates are brands who are also people, and that brand’s story has to be consistent. That requires a good person at the center of it. 

Candidate quality—the idea that who the person is, the story they have to tell, and how they communicate—really matters. If you’re not thinking about the person, you’re not solving the actual problem of a campaign. Too much political discourse treats the candidate as a fixed variable, and then focuses on ads or tactics as the only things you can change.

Our argument from the beginning has been that if you work downstream long enough, you can change who runs in the first place. You get someone like Mallory McMorrow running for Michigan state senate in 2018, and by 2026 she’s a national U.S. Senate candidate. You get someone like James Talarico starting in the Texas state house, helping flip a seat, and becoming a serious statewide candidate.

The idea that who the person is matters is now part of the vocabulary. We still don’t invest nearly enough in it. People get mad at the groups or consultants, but the person accountable is the candidate. I’m telling you: you can change the candidates. We have changed the candidates.

Kyle Tharp: One last question: on National Run for Office Day, why did your organization create the holiday and why does it matter?

Amanda Litman: We’ve been doing National Run for Office Day since 2018. We wanted to make running for office part of the civic vocabulary, the same way we think about registering to vote, volunteering, or showing up at the polls.

We want to bring as many people as possible into the funnel and get them considering elected office as part of their path. There are other ways to lead, and we help people find the best fit for them. But we’re excited to have more partners than ever — over 50 organizations this year — plus celebs and elected officials.

And we just want people to know: you can run, you can win, you can lead. There are still filing deadlines for 2026 that haven’t passed, but it’s absolutely not too early to start preparing for 2027 or 2028. Local offices matter because they’re both the front line of offense and the front line of defense.

You can win them with a couple thousand votes and a couple thousand bucks. Then you get to ride down the bike lane, build the house, or go to the restaurant you helped make possible. That’s the cool part.

When Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed announced he’d campaign with popular leftist streamer Hasan Piker, he probably didn’t expect it to ignite a minor civil war on Democratic Twitter. “Disgusting… you are a disgrace,” Matt Bennett, co-founder of the centrist think tank Third Way, fumed on X. That post and others like it set off a multi-day cycle of outrage, dunking, and posturing among Democratic operatives, political reporters, and social-media partisans eager to revive cancel culture and use Piker as a wedge.

By Saturday, POLITICO’s Adam Wren had dubbed the flap “Democrats’ Piker pickle,” quizzing potential 2028 contenders on whether they’d appear with Piker, who commands a vast online following among young men disenchanted with mainstream politics. CNN’s Jake Tapper ran a whole segment on it. And Bennett kept pushing the line that Democrats “take on all of [Piker’s] baggage if they don’t overtly reject him,” as if merely associating with a Twitch streamer were tantamount to endorsing jihadism or worse.

It’s hard to read that as anything but performative politics. Bennett and others in the centrist establishment aren’t really afraid of Piker’s content; they’re trying to reinforce ideological boundaries and police who counts as a respectable ally within the Democratic tent.

Meanwhile, Democrats seem to have developed selective tolerance for controversy. When centrist Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro appeared on a show with far-right racist musician Ted Nugent, it failed to elicit any response or condemnation from Bennett and Third Way. No one suggested at the time that Shapiro has “taken on all of Nugent’s baggage,” (which includes calling Barack Obama a “subhuman mongrel”) as Bennett’s Piker logic would imply.

Besides, the same class of Party figures who once panicked over candidates appearing alongside podcaster Joe Rogan now treat courting audiences like his as a pragmatic necessity. Rogan and fellow podcaster Theo Von regularly sling just as much offensive rhetoric as Piker, yet their audiences are viewed as key campaign hunting grounds, not liabilities.

The episode underscores a broader political problem for Democrats: their ongoing discomfort with online further-Left influencers, even as they lament losing young male voters to the right. The scolding reflex against figures like Piker doesn’t do anything for the Party’s image; it just deepens the divide between its electoral ambitions and the culture of the voters it urgently needs to win back.

The below video, created by comedian Druski, has received over 300 million views across social media since being published last Wednesday. It’s one of the most-viewed political videos of the year thus far.