This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio. My guest today is an author, digital strategist, and the co founder and president of Run for Something, an organization that recruits and supports young, diverse, progressive candidates. Amanda Littman launched Run for Something in twenty seventeen. Since then, she has helped elect more than one five
hundred leaders across forty nine states. Amanda Littman is also the president of r FS Civics, a five oh one c three organization dedicated to ending the char intocracy in American politics. Prior to launching Run for Something, Littman built a career as a digital strategist. She served as the email director for Hillarby Clinton's twenty sixteen presidential campaign, Not
those emails. She also served as the digital director for Charlie Crist's twenty fourteen Florida gubernatorial campaign, and previously worked on Barack Obama's twenty twelve reelection campaign. Amanda Littman is also the author of two books, Run for Something, a Real Talk guide to Fixing the System Yourself, and her most recent book, When We're in Charge, The Next Generation's guide to leadership. Litman has become an outspoken critic of what she calls bad Boomer leadership and is an advocate
for a new style of next gen leadership. I was curious to hear her perspective on the boomer mentality and what she believes sets the next generation of leaders aparts.
I find boomer leadership to do a very good foil for what the next generation needs to be working against.
Yeah, in what way?
Well?
I think that there is a mentality behind Boomer leadership. And I say this with all due respect too boomers two gen xers always getting mad when I leave them out. It's classic gen ICs response. That there's a certain mentality among a Boomer style of leadership that is very beholden to institutions. It feels like institutions are good, will be there for them, are worth engaging with, that you can
climb a career ladder. That mental health is like you know, for weaklings, and that you should never take a day off, and if you do take a day off, it's none of our business what you do with it. And you
know you don't bring your full self to work. You are a beatbop robot when you show up and you do your job and then you leave, or alternatively, you bring all of yourself to work with you and you tell me all of your problems and all of your illnesses, And I actually don't want to know any of that compared to what I am proposing in when we're in charge, which is what I call sort of next gen leadership, which millennials gen Z but really anyone can adapt, which
is authentic but with boundaries, transparent, but understanding there are limits to transparency, effective, but also not treating people like shit.
And I think that, especially in this particular moment, understanding that you do not have to be an asshole to be a good boss and a good leader and a good politician is something that we actually need to be incredibly clear about and reiterate over and over and over again, because if you look around the world right now, you might come away with the misconception that you have to be terrible to people in order to rise to the tops of the latters.
Do you believe as I do, that we have the patriarchy in charge of the country for so long now and it hasn't been bested by some other group. What appealed to me about your book run for something. Was this idea that more and more people don't want anything to do with politics. Yeah, the people that would make the best senators, justices, state wide offices, nationwide offices. They don't want anything to do with these recent generations. Do you agree?
No, So run for something, which is the organization I Run recruits and supports millennials and gen z running for local office. In the last nearly ten years, we've had more than a quarter million young people raise their hands to say they want to run. And my favorite thing is these are people who never thought about running for president. They haven't planned to become United States senators and say, we're kindergarteners. They didn't go to college majoring in political science.
They're not lawyers, they're not rich. They are totally ordinary people who see what's happening around us and say, oh, I actually have a responsibility and an opportunity to fix it. And this organization has said maybe I could run for office and they'll help me do it. I'm going to consider this. I'm going to jump in. I think we're at a tipping point here where to your point, there is a lot of young people who see the political system and say screw it. This is not for me.
But there is a group among them who are saying this is for me, and I'm not going to wait my turn. And I love that.
Yeah, But I look at, for example, although New York's fortunes have ebbed in terms of its relevance and its place, not it as a spawning ground for political leadership nationwide. But I mean just in terms of the population has gone down, The House delegation has gone down New York, Florida, California is forever eclipsing us, and New York is like the fourth most populous state now. And I say to myself,
what passes for leadership in a certain states? I look at people who go to the Senate and the House from certain states and I go, You've got to be kidding me. That's the person you sent to the United States Senate. You couldn't find somebody else, man, woman, black, white, doesn't matter, whatever age, who's more dynamic than that. The same I think is true in New York. He's been there too long.
If Democrats take back the majority in the House, the Speaker of the House will be from New York City. And if we take back the majority in the Senate, the majority leader will be from New York City. What happens here has national ramifications and you know, Keem Jeffries. But is Chuck Schumer our best is really? Is Chuck shot He says, yes, I would agree with that.
I think that she's had her time as well well, jilib Bren. I mean nothing wrong with them as people. I'm not judging them as people. I'm just saying they've been there a long time, and I'm not quite sure. When Chuck Schumber didn't stand up to the banks during the financial crisis, it was over for me.
For me. I think part of this is that Chuck Schumer still imagines the Republican Party as good faith operators. He still sees this as a Republican Party of when he came up in politics, where you know he and others will say this too, like we're just waiting for the fever to break. No, it is Trump Party all the way down. These people do not want the government to function. You cannot negotiate with them.
You're happy with the way things are.
They want to break it and they don't want to put it back together. You know, Schumer has this like shtick where he you know, he doesn't have an iPhone. He's got a flip phone that's like his bit. I don't find that charming. If you don't understand how people communicate in twenty twenty six, how they're getting information, how they consume media, how they're engaging with the world, you are not well suited to lead in this moment.
Well, people told me back then, when the two thousand and eight, when the financial crisis was They said to me, well, you know, Schumer's the head of the DSCC, and he's got to raise money, and he raises money, a lot of money from these banking people, and he can't go too hard on them because then he's going to bite the hand that feeds him. For the DSc. He needs this money. He gets to handle them very tenderly. I
want to go no, no, you don't. I wanted to see something in which you were taking a leadership role in posing how we got into this horrible place which we could likely be in again. We could likely be in again. But before you started run for something, and before you did other work, you were involved in working for political figures. It was Obama. But I would say the one I'm more interested in for the purposes of this podcast is Hillary, in which you had to raise
a lot of money three hundred and thirty million dollars. Yeah, did you like raising money?
Did I like raising I liked doing email marketing because it's a mix of art and science. Because it's writing, it's creative, and also it's very data driven. You get a chance to test things, You get a chance to learn what people respond to and the way in which people in many ways are animals when it comes to marketing of like, oh, if you center of a text to make the button bigger, more people give money. Man,
we are just so primal. But it was fun and it was also, I hope, the hardest thing I'll ever do.
What way?
I worked for two years basically one hundred dollars weeks in the office from seven am to two am every night, every weekend for a mission that I genuinely believed in and a candidate I really believed in. Like I thought every day we were going to lock the first woman president. So we used to get these pep talks in the office when days are really hard about how you know, if we didn't win, feel it would be like Nazis
wood storm the streets. There would be women would lose their rights, the right to vote would be taken back, like all the progress we made it be rescinded. And it felt hyperbolic at the time, like it was just supposed to motivate us. And you know, almost ten years later, we weren't scary enough.
Author and co founder of Run for Something, Amanda Littman. If you enjoy conversations with political leaders who started their career thanks to Run for Something, check out my conversation with Michigan State Senator and US Senate candidate Malory mcmurrow.
I'm used to people underestimated me. I ran in twenty eighteen against my Republican incumbent state senator who had won previously by sixteen points, and even local Democrats said you're going to get destroyed. There was something really freeing about not having the backing of the party and just say let's just go for it and try to run a campaign to really connect with people in a way that feels different. And I beat him by four points, and now I'm in leadership. You know, I'm responsible for an
eighty billion dollar state budget. I've proven that I'm a workhorse. I do really well when people underestimate me.
To hear more of my conversation with Mallory mcmurrow, go to Here's Thething dot org. After the break, Amanda Littman shares her thoughts on the twenty twenty eight Democratic primary and why she predicts the nominee could be someone no one is talking about today. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is Here's the Thing. Amanda Littman grew up in Fairfax, Virginia, but it was a young Illinois senator that would ultimately
draw her to attend college in the Midwest. Littman enrolled at Northwestern University in the hopes of being close to Barack Obama's Chicago base of operations. She'd be called a day as a high school junior in two thousand and eight when she decided to skip a day of school to attend a student's for Obama rally.
I was hooked. I wanted to be part of whatever he was building, which is why I went to Northwestern for college, because I wanted to be in Chicago when he was gonna interesting. I assumed was like he's going to win. That's an insane thing to think interesting, And I want to work for his campaign, and it'll be interesting.
West because you wanted to be proximate to his work.
I was not a small part of it, you know. I also I liked the diploma program, I liked the campus, but I wanted to be near to Schogo Grade school. When I was a senior, I got an internship on the Obama campaign doing online fundraising, which is what I ended up doing for Hillary in twenty sixteen. And it was magical, like being part of that movement, and on the inside of that felt like being part of the best sorority or fraternity I could ever imagine. I mean,
it's how I spent my senior year of college. I'm shocked they gave me a degree because all I did was write my thesis and work on the Obama campaign.
I was there in Washington in seventy six when the Carter Pete Ford and when to have his term. The entire period of time I was there, this is back in the old Washington when they were burning the Shah of Iran and effigy and Lafayette Park right outside the White House gates. Who's going to come forth two years from now? You say, over sixty, Gavin Newsom is in over sixty. Is he cut it for you or no.
I think that there is going to be a very crowded, chaotic, interesting primary. It's going to make us want to throw our phones into the river. It's going to be infuriating, as primaries are because ultimately most of us have the same values, Like we generally agree on ninety eight percent of things. The two percent we don't is where it and it gets like mean and personal and nasty. It's why primary is. It's like a fight with your family.
It sucks.
I don't know it's going to be, and I find that to be actually very freeing. It could feel very scary. But I think this is the first open primary really since I've ever gotten a chance to vote, I mean even twenty twenty, like Biden sort of came in as the polling leader and ended with the nomination. This is the first time where there's no clear frontrunner. It could be anyone, and I would say, you know, fifty to fifty chance it's someone nobody's talking about right now.
Yeah, whit Mari was keen on I really I thought she was effective and smart and all these other things and not just a woman for a woman's sake. I mean, I thought I'd like to see a woman become the president because a woman was voted the president, I believe, and I think where we would be now is very different from where we are now if she had won. When she lost, what did you attribute it to?
I thought it was one part, many parts, obviously sexism, obviously a twenty year campaign to drag down her reputation. I think there was obviously foreign interference. I think Trump tapped into something that had been building since the Tea Party. I think you know, the final ten days of the call Me letter, and then you know Anthony Wiener and the emails, all of that. Talk about the emails, I can't talk for it makes me want to. You know, I was Hillary Clinton's email director and I so we
have a sweatsheh. We had team sweatshirts for in the campaign, says Hillary Clinton's other emails because I always had to clarify not the ones they're talking out on Fox News, like that's not the ones I'm in charge of.
It was.
I mean, I think it was so many things, and yes, of course the campaign made some poor decisions and the process too. Every losing campaign does the same way that every winning campaign also makes some bad decisions in retrospect. But we came so close close. It is not close, it's not winning, but we came so close.
It was tough. It was so tough because what a great president she would have been.
She would have been phenomenal. Although I say, my husband often reminds me, had she won, the Republican Party, had they controlled the House, would have tried to impeachure by like noon the day after inauguration. So what would you know President Tim Kane have been like? Is an interesting question to marinate on. Yeah, that's a good pob and I find that version of the alternate history to be like a little soothing. It was never going to be easy for.
The first It's interesting you say that about no clear front runner for twenty twenty eight, and I agree with you, even though Newsom's name is thrown around a lot, and I've met him a few times and I'm not quite sure how I feel about him as president because I mean, again, I look at the job now, one think it's almost undoable. This marketing involved, there's image making that's involved.
Well, it's basically a nationwide branding campaign. That's what a presidential campaign is at this point, it's a branding campaign and policies are a part of that. But it's policies and the way that they contribute to the brand of the person and how you can make people understand and see themselves in those policies. It's not most people don't actually have a strong position on most issues. They take their cues from the leaders and how the leaders make
them feel. And yes, part is an affiliation and how the person communicates and the story that they tell, and of course their identity like all of that sort of play is a role here. So just to say there's like a broader internal Democratic party debate about oh we need a progressive or a moderate or that's not the access upon which people are operating anymore. They want someone who is willing to fight, and who is authentic and knows who they are and what they believe.
Someone who's willing to go down in flames in their first term risk a second term. Nothing more important to me. If I were a president, sit there and I go, I'm going to do this first term like it's the second term, got it. I'm not going to throw everything to the wind and see, I want to win. I want us to accomplish these things environmentally and blah blah blah. Now, the idea of coaxing people, of summoning people to want to run for office themselves and get into the whole
civics thing about that is something that's not new. I mean, when I was in college and I was in the Young Democrats of g W and blah blah blah. Everything was about when you leave here, when you leave here with your degree or your professional degree, are you going to go home and run for office? What are you going to do? And you have formed your variant of that, how did you get involved with that and why?
So About a week after election Day in twenty sixteen, I'd started hearing from people I'd gone to high school in college with, Hey, Amanda, I'm a public school teacher in Chicago. If Trump can be president, it seems like fucking anybody can do this. What do I do if I want to run for office? They keep cutting our budgets and I want to fight back. And at the time, this is November twenty sixteen, I didn't have anywhere you could send them, like the state Party would probably not
answer your emails. If you're a twenty six year old public school teacher. That wasn't what the DNZ did. They're just like there wasn't an on ramp. And the more that I thought about that, and the more that I kept getting these emails and seeing it online, the more I realized, like, that's actually a problem we need to solve if we're going to fix a whole bunch of
other problems in the Democratic Party and our democracy. So I reached out to a whole bunch of people with an idea, what if we start an organization to solve this. I am unemployed and very sad, and with like a coping mechanism in the form of an interesting project. One of those folks became my co founder, Ross Morales Rocqutto. We wrote a plan, we built a website. Hayes no Hayes wife and I worked together on the campaign, so she connected me with him, and he'd been like chewing
on a very similar idea for a little while. He was managing a congressional campaign in California at the time, and I was sad at home. So we wrote a plan, we built the website, and we launched Run for Something on Trump's first inauguration day. We thought this is going to be small. We're going to get a hundred people in the first year. This is going to be my hobby. We had a thousand people signed up in the first week.
What do you attribute that to?
Partially it was the right idea for the right time. Partially, we you know, I'm a digital strategist by trade. We built a very easy way for people to engage. The branding was good, the story was good, that the you know, the vibe was good. But mostly I think people were hungry to do something and they wanted to do something they felt like could matter. You know, we had eighty
thousand people raise their hands in twenty twenty five. We had more people sign up in the last twelve months than we did in the entirety of Trump's first term. They're looking around and saying, there aren't leaders here that are doing the work I see that needs to be done. There aren't people who excite me. My community is struggling. If I don't run for office, if I don't get involved in this way, nothing is going to get better.
I find it to be so inspiring. It's I've been able to do this work for almost last decade, and that every week, and we have elections basically every week, and every week we win, and then every day I get in my inbox the stories of the people we've helped elect who are cutting the cost of insulin, getting free lunch for kids in schools, building more housing, you know,
passing gun safety laws in unusual places. It's just it's a reminder that actually democracy is good and government can work when you get really good people in it.
So Daniel Squadron and Melissa Walker from State's Project came to take the show recently, and I'd gone to some salons of there it's at somebody's home in my building once and then i just went to another one that they had, and I'm very admiring of the two of them. And do you see some kind of overlap with the work we do.
We work closely with them and with every other organization that works on these state and local offices, because we only work with people running for a state house, state senate, city council, school board, library board, American River Flood Control District trustee, like the kinds of local positions that make up the building blocks of democracy.
Is it safe to say that when Mom Donnie won, you were glad because you were glad somebody else didn't win.
I was delighted. Okay, yeah, I was delighted. I did not like Cuomo. I wanted a mayor who won spoke to the problems that I, as a millennial mom of two in Brooklyn, really experiencing the housing crisis as a renter is personal. Free childcare huge, huge part of my expenses. In fact, you know, him getting us two K might
make me have another kid. The idea that you can make a difference in your city with a leader that is inspiring, who I don't agree with on every issue, but who I believe what he's He believes what he's saying, and I believe he's going to try, and I believe that when he fails, because he will certainly fail on some of his promises, he'll be able to communicate that in a way that brings the people along with him.
Like that is so powerful. And I will say after he won, especially in that primary in June, we saw ten thousand people raise their hands to run for office. The two weeks after. It was our biggest organic candidate recruitment moment in the history of the organization.
Describe the point of contact, the point of engagement, between you and these people. They contact you and seek resources to help them in guidance of how to run for office, depending on what kind of an office it is.
So it sort of depends. We find people, we ask them to sign up to run for office, We do text message recruit them. We recruit them. So we do. We work with partners. We do cold calling, we do cold texting, We do ads, we do events, we do social media. I wrote Run for Something, the book we Had to Run for Something podcast. We have all kinds of ways in which we reach people and say have you ever thought about running for office? When they say yes or maybe, we then have a whole bunch of
programming for them to get them onto the ballot. So we have the Run for Something Community, which is an online space you can talk to other people thinking about running. You can do one of two training tracks, I'm running this year or I'm thinking about running someday down the road because it's a slightly different focus. You can join one of our monthly intro calls, or we talk through
the same basic questions every first time candidate has. You can talk to one of our volunteers and once you have filed to get on the ballot, which we have guides to help you figure out how to do. You can apply for our endorsement. Our PACK does endorsements specifically of folks forty and under running for those local offices for the first time you PACK, I'm sorry. It doesn't mean I don't think you shouldn't run if you want to. It just we might not be the right org to
help you. But I think for us, we really try to help people with everything that isn't the stuff that you like. They have innately, but.
If you recruit them what I want to go through a path here, a very simple path, which is that if you recruit them and they decide they want to participate with you and engage with you, then what happens to man you help them run for office?
Absolutely?
How many people have you I'm not saying you've kept track of this, but I assume you have. How many people have you engaged with this way who've run for office?
In one so we track winners and losers of our endorsed pools. I've endorse more and four thousand campaigns. We've helped elect sixteen hundred and fifty three across forty nine states plus DC, mostly women and people of color, all millennials and gen z to state and local offices, many of whom are now running for higher office. So we have really built the bench of the Democratic Party. You know, people like Mallory McMorrow in Michigan.
You had her on the show.
She's phenomenal. We were her first endorser when she ran for state Senate back in twenty eighteen. James tell Rico down in Texas, one of our alum Zach Walls in Iowa, Alexis Hill in Nevada, Ethan Corson in Kansas, Rure Roman in Georgia, Francesca Hang and Wisconsin, and then currently serving in Congress, Christian Menafie who's in Houston, Yasamine and Sorry in Arizona, Sarah McBride and Delaware. These as you're a.
Part of the country where this plays more than other parts in a region or a state for that matter.
No, it's pretty commensurate with population. We have people signing up with us in all fifty states. The only state we haven't won an election is Idaho. Although this is the year, I feel very good about it. And we have built a model that is tight on values but flex in policy, which means we can in the same night in twenty twenty five, as an example, elect you know, a DSA affiliated candidate to the Atlanta City Council, Kelsey Bond, young renter activist who was really pushing from more green
space and transit justice and all those things. At the same night, we helped elect a former Republican who had left the party after January sixth and one in a county that Trump won seventy thirty in rural Pennsylvania, Andrew Harbough. We built a machine that can do both.
Now, let's just confine ourselves to the run for something period of your career when you began.
Which is like, what year was a twenty seventeen.
Twenty seventeen, so it's seven, it's nine years ago, so nine years ago, which is a considerable amount of time as far as I'm concerned. Do you look back in retrospect and there were things you assumed, there were things you had hoped for or even took for granted, And it's different than you thought it was. How's the work you're doing different from what you've conceived it would be when you started.
I didn't think it would be this big like it is. I thought it would be harder to get people to run genuinely, you know, part of my shields like, yeah, we thought we'd get a hundred. I really thought we'd get a hundred people, and we would struggle to get one hundred people in that first year. The fact that people are so eager to do this meant we've had to build systems very differently. We've had to scale the
organization very differently. I also have been equal parts surprised and disappointed at how fundraising for the work has gone. Surprised that, like nine years in, we're still here. That is honestly shocking to me. And disappointed because the work is working. The impact is so clear. You can like literally measure the outcomes that we have done, both quantitatively and qualitatively. You know, nine years ago it would have been unimaginable for a state party to put out ads
recruiting people to run for office. Nine years later, the Florida Democratic Party had billboards up across the state, do you want to run for office? Sign up here. We've changed what it means to ask people to run. We've put running for office as much a part of the civic vocabulary as vote or volunteer and yet man to Democratic donors not like to fund what we're doing. Really, it's been harder than I expected. It's been harder than I expected.
Because they want the money used to go straight to a party.
They wanted to go to a party, or they want to go to a federal candidate, or they want to become an ambassador, or you know. Love what you're doing. I think it's so important, But this year we have to flip the House. This is not the year for infrastructure, or this is the year we have to win the
White House. This is not the year for local. If it's never the year for infrastructure, if is never the year for local, if it is never the year for pipeline building, we will keep being in this mess, year after year after year.
Author and co founder of Run for Something, Amanda Littman. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be sure to follow Here's the thing on the iHeartRadio app, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Amanda Littman talks about the future of the Republican Party without Donald Trump and the opportunity that creates for Democrats. In twenty twenty eight, I'm Alec Baldwin, And this is
here's the thing. With the twenty twenty eight presidential election on the horizon and the next president facing a long list of daunting tasks, I was curious to hear Amanda Liptman's opinion on the much needed remedy for American governance in a post Trump world.
If we have a democratic Congress and a democratic Senate and we can break the filbuster and we have people really ready to govern this say twenty eight, So let's say like we have full control trifecta government and we can do things. I would do massive campaign finance reform. We got to change the way money interacts with politics. And that's not just like how much you can give.
That's you know, thinking about how outside groups can engage receiving this this year with you know, AI companies and outside special interests just flooding races with very confusing messaging in a way that really takes away people's power. So that's one I would wildly changed. There's can be kind of a hot take. Have we changed the pay of elected officials? I am that doesn't feel like the top priority for a lot of folks, but I would do it as much as possible for as many offices possible,
state legislatures wildly underpaid members of Congress also actually really underpaid. Agree, I think you will get better people, You'll get.
More working class under paid.
Yeah, you will get more.
More and better. One hundred thousand dollars a year to be president right when there's guys that are people would think that they would want to buy that office who are making four hundred thousand dollars a day.
Yeah, Like we should pay these positions to be competitive
so they're not incentivized to do insider training. And you know, I think so you change campaign structures, you change the way people engage with the system, then I would do as much as you can around tech regulation while you can, because I think that we are looking forward to an environment where you've got AI doing massive like labor force implications, You've got tech in schools, you've got social media companies that are literally rotting people's brains, and there's really smart
people thinking about how you can engage in these social media tools in a way that better fortifies the information ecosystem that will also serve to make our democracy a little bit stronger.
I mean, I've been immersed in campaign finance reform and always adhere to that old line, that tired old line, which is that if the Sumime court says cash is money, then he would the most cash speaks the loudest. And I really believe this is the lynchpin of all the problems in this cuntrure. You've got to be able to have people who aren't rich or not the friends of the rich run for office and beholding for the rich. So I agree with you that that's really the most
critical thing in the world. We're among the most critical in this country. REP.
I would also add jerrymandering. I think there's some structural I would say broader structural changes to elections, to like voting rights, but I think those connected, Like you want to fix the structure of these institutions, you can change how people engage with them. Then you'll be able to get really meaningful policies around housing, around reproductive health, around equality, around climate. Like you got to change the institutions first,
because right now they are broken. We're not going to get effective governance in the next two twenty twenty six, twenty seven. We're not going to get good governings.
I can't see we're we're going to gain much ground in the court because I think that I think that Clarence Thomas will resign right before the buzzer with the Trump leaving, so they'll leave that open to this Republican unless they lose the majority. That's a different ballgame. I mean, the number one thing for me is that you wonder would Thomas even resign now this summer because there's the fear that the Democrats will take over both houses in
the fall, which will hurt him. But I'm very worried about that, and I'm very worried about how, if possible to repopulate the court.
There's really compelling arguments about court expansion. There's really compelling arguments about term limits and other ways you could do reformation here. I think we need a president who is not beholden to the way we did things yesterday dictating the way we do them tomorrow, because the way we did them yesterday has meant today sucks well.
I also would love to have somebody articulate for me some examination. It just might take a lot of hours and a lot of effort, and that is to understand how things got the way they are right now, the way they are right now in terms of policies, but the hatred and the bio and the partisanship on this level, and I'd love to find that how can this be changed where And you even have people running for office
who kind of take an oath. Yeah, I'm not going to go in and buy into that, you know, any meaning where everything is will just screw them on the other side of the aisle reflexibly.
You know.
I think there's an opportunity in twenty twenty eight for a really compelling communicator to make a case for America being a place where you can know and trust your neighbors again. And you could tell a story about that. We've seen that over the last year, like in Minneapolis.
Neighborism is what has gotten people through these crisses in Los Angeles and Chicago, in Portland, through these climate crisses, through the fires in LA You're seeing people step up for their neighbors in a way that is so meaningful and moving. And I've been joking it's like mister Roger's Resistance, where people really do want to feel like they can trust and love and care for the people who are near them. There they're neighbors, they're fellow citizens. They're villow
community members. You don't have to be a citizen, but fellow community members. And there are so many things getting in the way of that, from social media to housing, to cars, to public safety to schools. There's a lot of ways in which you could pull policies into that. But I do think there's an opening. I think Mom Donnie actually got at this a little bit, where you can create a country where you can feel free to be in community with others.
I wonder what you think about the notion, which is, you know, everybody seems to whether it's through some fatigue from reality or just in general, they don't ascribe to Trump what he's really capable of. What do you think about him co opting the midterm election this year.
I think it's certainly scary. There's things that he can't do, and I think it's worth always being really clear. You can't cancel elections. The federal government does not run elections. He sends ice to polling stations. Isn't enough ice agents, There's not competent enough. And also I think that there is a real danger in what they are doing because Democrats would crawl over broken glass to vote in this
midterm election. Their voters are low propensity voters, people who are unlikely to vote, and unless they are given a really good reason, if you make it even a little bit harder for them, they're going to stay home because they're already not liking what Trump is selling and what the Republican Party is doing. I do think that there's real concerns to have on the state and local level, especially in some of these Republican states, but I prefer
to operate in this moment. There's really smart people across the party who are doing contingency planning, preparing lawsuits, preparing safety plans. I want to focus on my particular spear of influence. Let's prepare to win. Let's prepare to win, and then prepare to govern as much as we can.
I think, as much as I'm horrified to even consider this, let alone say it, I think that Iran is going to be the final denu mall for him. I think the Iran, even though it's horrible and I'm I'm sick and that he did that. I have a lot of people attack me online and sit they go, well, you know what about a free Iran? And I want to go, well, let's hope there was another way to have a free Iran. We don't have to, don't We don't have to turn all of the Middle East into an ash in order
to achieve our policy goals. But I do think that Iran is not going to be over quickly in a way beyond them just stating it is and claiming it is, We're going to be over there for a while to control Lebanon. I mean, it's just it's insane what they've this beive they've kicked. But I think it's also going to lend to his demise. I think he's going to lose the mid term because of Iran. Well, that'll be
the straw that breaks because of Iran. He'll lose the mid term, and he'll lose the long term election the general the Republicans because of Iran. I think Iran is something that's got some silver lining. I hate to say that, but for us politically.
Well, and I think once Trump loses the midterm, he is really a lamb duck and the Republican Party without Trump has no uniting like vision. This is I think something we're not talking about enough, at least on the Democratic side, where their primary is going to be as much of a shit show as ours is, and it's going to be way nastier because they're going to be trying to like out racist, outbigo out you know, maga,
the one or the other. But none of them can sell maga the way that Trump does because they don't have his you know, forty five years in the public eye. They don't have his brand as a businessman, whether justified or or not. They don't have the charisma that he has, even though not my cup of tea. But without him, the Republican Party is going to fight among themselves. I don't think it's going to be fun to watch necessarily, but I do think it creates an opportunity because.
It a finger pointing. I mean, I look at them. I mean this is a weak analogy maybe, but it's like the cockplit of a plane, and once the pilot is removed, meaning Trump, there isn't another pilot on board the planet. Where have you seen a legislature dominated by women or people of color or one that is closer to what you advocate for? What did they achieve and what did they get right?
There's a couple of state legislatures that are our majority women in New Mexico and Nevada in particular, and New Mexico just passed universal childcare huge. The Saint Paul City Council is actually entirely women, majority women of color, almost all women under the age of forty five, and we have seen them really rise to the occasion over the
last year. You know, as ICE has taken taken over the cities in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, the Saint Paul City Council has been out there are doing like protection efforts in a way that is really meaningful and really supporting local organizers and grassroots movements. I think we just saw Virginia pass paid family leave thanks to impart a woman governor and an incredible bunch of women in the House of Delegates. You know, when women take off as good
things happen. I'm not saying every woman is good christ you know, bad, but women who's surprising surprising number of bad women. Yeah, well, you know, the patriarchy needs its showhorse, I guess is the expression is. But we've seen really good women take over and do things a little bit differently and pass laws that while they shouldn't just be women's responsibilities directly make a difference for women, for families, for kids in a way that's really powerful.
What's the state that breaks your heart in terms of this, what's the state that really do you think gets it wrong? What's your guests Louisiana?
Yeah, I was thinking Louisiana, Mississippi, even Texas a little bit like Texas had you know, Anne Richard's Texas has incredibly ballsy women for lack of a better expression, women who can really kick ass and take names. I suspect at one point we will have another woman governor, women's stay legislators in Texas where there's opportunity.
Yeah, what was among the ones that was most gratifying to you? A campaign that you were involved with, someone you helped and guide it.
It's one of my I have many many favorites, but I would say one of the ones that I come back to a lot is in twenty twenty three, we were running a campaign and we still are to get people to pro democracy, people to run for local election administrator roles, so positions that actually oversee elections like county clerk, county commission, county recorder, those kinds of roles, And we were specifically doing it in a bunch of targeted counties,
one of which was Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. It's around Harrisburg. We did a bunch of texting and cold calling, and we found this guy justin Douglas, who was a former pastor who'd been fired from his church for being too welcoming to LGBTQ congregants. He's a CrossFit athlete. I have been working with the homeless community in the area. And he was like, no, not me, not me, but I mean I know someone not me, And we're like, ooh, no,
you dude, it's you. We got him to run for office, and he was running against a Republican who'd been in office for a very long time. He was outspent I think ten to one, twelve to one, something insane like that. He was knocking doors, making calls, doing billboards. His actual campaign premise was on the fact that I leave a dozen or more folks under the county jail system had died under the care of the county, and he wanted to combat that neglect that they had done in the
county commission. He ultimately flipped that seat by one hundred and forty four votes in November twenty twenty three, won that election, flipped control of the County Commission for the first time since World War One, and was able to make huge changes both on the way that they oversee the county jail system, but also the election administration. And he's now running for Congress in that district where he can flip a seat red to blue. So I think
that's an amazing example. Like he's not he's got like big gauged years tattoos all over. He's like not the kind of guy you typically see in politics, but he's so deeply caring about community and speaks from a place of faith. And can I give you one other So earlier this year, in twenty twenty six, you may have read about Taylor Ramett, who flipped a seat in the Texas State Senate that Trump had won by I believe seventeen points. Run for Something got Taylor to sign up
back in twenty nineteen. He came through our pipeline, He joined our calls from time to time. He was part of our community when he ultimately ran in twenty twenty five. We were one of his first national endorsers. When he came in first in that primary or that general election, but not quite far enough to win outright. It was
beyond my wildest dreams. And to see him win that general election at the end of January, to flip a seat that was so far off the radar that most other organizations didn't even consider it, and to see it happen because we invested for six years in thinking about long term talent cultivation, Like that's what it's all about.
That's the point. That's why we do this. We get people to sign up to think about it, We stay in their ear, we stay in relationship with them, and then maybe a year, maybe three years, maybe five years later, they can win in a long shot race.
How do you find candidates specific to a play like, for example, do you look at people and go, we need more candidates in Alabama? You do? We do you factored that it?
We do. We think about this in a couple lens as. One is, we want people who are interested in running for office, like you got to have some self motivation here, because it's really hard. You got to know why you want to do it, why voters should want you to win, which is different than why you want to win, why should someone else want you to win? What are you going to do for them. You need to be able to understand good point, like, it's not glamorous, it's not fun,
it's gonna be really hard. You're gonna put your life through a under a microscope, So you got to want to do it. And we should be asking in more places. We should be really intentional about asking people who are traditionally left out of the system. So we've actually identified a dozen states where we think in five or six years they could become battlegrounds or if we don't do the work, they want to be off the map entirely.
Some of those Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Iowa, Nebraska, Idaho, Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, places where not yet, but I would love to think about it because I think there's opportunities in these places where, you know, if we don't do the work, especially what Run for Something does of recruiting and supporting local candidates, like in six years, especially post redistricting, it's not even though we won't have multiple options, we
won't have a path to victory. We got to keep everything on the table now.
When people want to help you, when people want to embrace the work you're doing, and assist you in any way. Is it just only funding or can they offer you something else? So? Can I come and give acting lessons to political candidates?
You absolutely could. We have a whole mentorship program where people can sign up. They can give their services, their skills to candidates for free. We ask you to charge people anything because most of our candidates are not full time candidates. They're working people with jobs and this is what they do outside of their job. We don't charge candidates anything for our help as much as we can. So yeah, we have ways you can volunteer, ways you can help make calls. Ways you can work directly with
the campaigns. If you want to knock doors, make calls, whatever did you want to do? We have ways that you can help.
I think to myself back then, it seemed like there was something to root for. I mean, did I like Kamala Harrise? I didn't want you about like or whatever, but I worried about her. I had a friend of mine this is not me, but I had a friend of mine lean over to me at a fundraiser for her one This is years ago in the nevers. She's a little two four to one five. For my liking you know, kind of northern California, like unabashed, unshielded liberalism. Is that going to sell right now? Maybe not, you
know when we found that it didn't. But I really really look now and it comes to this thought, and that was, do Americans really just have the government that they deserve right now?
I hope not. I think we're at a tipping point. Like you know, you got to get to rock bottom before you can get better. I do think Trump two point zero is hopefully rock bottom, and it's going to be uncomfortable to get out, you know, like you go to the gym, you work out, your muscles are sore after growth is painful. I look at the next generation
of leaders that are coming up. Both ones that run for something has helped, but also you know, countless others across the country, these mayors, these state legislators, even these governors, who make me think democracy can work and there is possibility. You know, I often joke I am an optimist in spite of this all, but also I do this because I'm an optimist, because I believe that better things are
possible and change is possible. And when I've seen what our leaders have done, even in spite of all of the bullshit over the last decade, I have to think that it's going to get better, and I'm gonna do everything I can to make that sound no doubt about that, for better or for worse, or die trying, I suppose, but I really, I do believe because the people who are stepping up to lead now are not settling for the status quo.
I just went to a meeting with Hokel about something involved in my mother's charity of breast cancer charity in New York, and we went to go meet with Hochel.
And I was blown away, pleasantly surprised.
You meet her and she's dynamic and smart and on it. And I thought, seeing her in the press as you perceive her through that prison or through that lens, it's so diminishing. And I met her when we sat with her for like an hour or forty five minutes, and she was just so engaging and smart. I walked out of there going I'm her fan.
Now, well, I'm the really good candidates, the ones who are gonna be able to thrive in the next couple of years. Are there going to be the ones who are so good at using the Internet that they can make you feel the way that you feel when you're in the room with them, that they can create that parasocial connection that they can connect. I mean, like mom, Donnie's really good at this, but he's not the only one. Tall Rico is good at this. Mcmarrow Mallory is really
good at this. There's a number of others for whom you feel the same way, whether you're watching their Instagram story or sitting around a table with them. And those are the people who can really use the tools of twenty twenty six to lead in twenty twenty six.
My thanks to Amanda Littman. This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City. Were produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach MacNeice, and Victoria de Martin. Our engineer is Isaac Kaplin Woolner. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio
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