Winning On The First Try

-by Eva Putzova

It’s been a bit over a month since my bid for a congressional seat ended with winning 41.4 percent of the vote in one of the largest districts in the country in the midst of a global pandemic. I look back at our campaign as a truly winning campaign because to get 33,248 Arizonans to vote for an immigrant who didn’t shy away from supporting Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and a tuition-free college education in an environment where the Democratic Party with all its institutional power chose to back a lifelong-Republican-turned-Democrat with a strong pro-Trump record was an incredible success.

When I launched my campaign in January of 2019 I was as prepared as I could have been to challenge the incumbent: I had three successful campaigns under my belt and understood the layering and integration of campaign activities and strategies; I was disciplined and serious, willing to work day in and day out for a year and a half; I had a small team of competent and committed people I could rely on; as a former councilmember and a leader of a local minimum wage initiative, I already had a constituency to support me and was not starting from scratch to build my name recognition; and I gave ourselves a long 19 months to learn what we didn’t know with enough time to reach voters in this geographically vast district. I also knew our campaign needed a strong communications program and that we had to start knocking on voters’ doors early in the cycle to offset our fundraising capacity disadvantage.

Many in political circles would conclude that my candidacy had the typical arc of a progressive struggle and that this was just a warm-up for the next time. To be honest, running again in 2022 is not completely out of the question for me, but I am convinced that as progressives we can succeed on the first try. Here’s how and why and what we collectively should do to make it so.

• Give candidates the financial freedom to run

I’ve been preparing for this campaign since 2017 when I left my university job in strategic communications for a position that aligned with my political views while at the same time giving me the flexibility-- or so I thought-- to take time off to run a viable campaign. I am a regular working person who needs income but I structured my life in a way that allowed me to take the last 6 months of the campaign off from my day job. And here’s where I learned the most important lesson that I believe would have made a difference-- to build the campaign financially from nothing you need more than 6 months of undivided attention. As a campaign we ended up raising over $418,000 which is not a small achievement but more than half of it came after I was free from my day job and could focus my mental energy on call-time-- the bread and butter of every congressional campaign. With the tremendous proliferation of progressive organizations that want to change the composition of Congress to include more regular people, I would argue that candidates need less training in campaign 101 and more support in what boils down to essentially buying their time so they are free to run effectively. For newcomers, there’s no magic digital fundraising strategy that can replace good old-fashioned call time given the campaign finance laws we have to operate within and there’s no real way to dedicate those precious hours to it while also holding onto a full-time job. It’s true that candidates can draw a salary from their campaign funds but the law doesn’t allow for that until very late in the cycle and when they do just that, they are criticized from their well-funded opponents as well as from progressive circles that see virtue in financial sacrifice and struggle.

• Build out a post-partisan progressive issue-based institutional network

I underestimated how wide and deep the establishment institutional ecosystem reaches. I knew that the state Democratic Party as well as the DCCC would be both actively and passively working against my candidacy, but like most people, I didn’t realize how close organizations like Emily’s List, Planned Parenthood, or Sierra Club are to the Party and that their internal incumbent endorsement policies provide a convenient cover to support legislators who are far from championing issues their non-profit arms built their brand reputation on. As our grassroots support comes mostly from regular people who hold these institutions in high regard, the current landscape of issue-based organizations adds to the challenge when we compete for contributions, support, and ultimately votes. The network of trans- or post-partisan organizations operating in the area of reproductive health, labor, and to a lesser degree environmental and climate justice that enjoy significant brand equity is still underdeveloped. This is especially true in more rural districts where progressive alternatives have no local footprint. We need to support issue-based organizations willing to transcend party politics and build local, grassroots power through investing in lasting infrastructure. I realize that this is easier said than done but this is where numerous foundations interested in transformative policymaking can focus their energy.

• Focus on campaign staffing

After talking to many congressional candidates and based on my own campaign experiences, I concluded that one of the greatest challenges first-time grassroots candidates face is a lack of access to professional staff who share progressive values and have relevant campaign experience. By nature, campaigns do not have time and finances nor are set up with the necessary HR infrastructure to follow rigorous and lengthy hiring processes that would lead to successful filling of critical positions in campaign management, field, fundraising, and communications. There are many reasons why the bench of available campaign talent is so small, including competition from non-candidate PACs and c4/c3 organizations that can provide more stable employment to qualified talent and a growing number of campaigns vying for congressional and other elected seats. Progressive organizations working in the arena of electoral politics would significantly improve the chances of campaign successes by focusing on recruiting and developing campaign staff and providing them with steady employment while “loaning” them to the campaigns for months at a time to fill in their highly skilled and specialized but temporary staffing needs. Creating a match-making hub of campaigns and organizations with available staff for different functions could be transformational to grassroots campaigns. Such a hub would address concerns from the campaign and staff’s perspective, including vetting candidates and campaigns as well as professional staff, providing access to healthcare benefits, retaining knowledge in the progressive movement, and providing much needed employment stability in the political campaign “industry.”

• Test technology and tools, share actionable insights, and vet consultants

In the last four years we have seen an incredible growth in the number of organizations and PACs encouraging people to run for public offices, endorsing candidates, and providing basic campaign training. Shortly after a candidate files their candidacy papers they start making initial decisions on engaging a particular mix of tools and consultants that can set them on a path to success or be a source of frustration, missed opportunity, or costly mistakes. In these early stages, candidates need the most help-- they don’t know what they don’t know-- and they need specifics, like where to go for compliance advice or what is a reasonable rate for a reliable treasurer or what CMS to commit to for the length of the campaign and what voter outreach tools will be easily integrate-able down the road? What vendors sell what data and what quality can we expect? Who is a reliable consultant and who should we avoid because they are either overextended or simply are better in selling their services than actually providing them? In other words, because as grassroots candidates we operate on very lean budgets, we need help avoiding costly mistakes and losing time learning by doing. By the end of the first campaign, candidates gain incredible insights that they can capitalize on in their subsequent efforts but there’s no reason why that knowledge shouldn’t be transferred to them at the onset.

• Support candidates early and support them often

My best experience when being considered for an endorsement was with Blue America PAC, thanks to which you are reading this blog. Not only did Howie Klein, who heads the PAC, reach out to me soon after we launched our campaign but also, he didn’t send us a lengthy questionnaire that would take hours to complete. Instead, he spent 45 minutes on the phone with me asking direct questions to get to know me, my values, policy stances, and my campaign experience. He didn’t ask for a campaign budget but he asked how I intend to win. After Jamaal Bowman’s victory and Charles Booker’s near-victory, a number of articles were written calling for progressive organizations to get behind candidates early and to stop waiting on the sidelines for candidates who rise to the top despite the lack of support just to join in the last few weeks when what can be done to affect the outcome is limited. What people in progressive circles think will happen will happen because they will act to make it happen. The time and effort it takes to pursue endorsements is extraordinary. It’s not just lengthy questionnaires from organizations that never intend to endorse anybody but the incumbent or are not interested in the district at all, but also a lack of responsiveness and feedback that chips away unnecessarily from the campaign’s time. Blue America also did something that no other organization did: it used its platform to regularly and frequently raise dollars for our campaign and other endorsed candidates. In our weakest fundraising months, Blue America helped us stay operational because it had clarity, focus, and discipline in engaging its followers. It seems that some policy-focused organizations decide to endorse candidates but then don’t spend enough time to develop their candidate-facing programming. It is an opportunity for future cycles that I hope those in charge of c4 organizations and PACs will work on.

As I look back at the last 19 months, the work we did and the insights and knowledge we gained, I keep thinking about how to help first-time candidates to win on the first try. If you want to help me put the infrastructure we have built to good use, drop me a note at eva@evaforcongress.com and let’s talk. Campaigns come and go but the fight for progress continues.