Political Campaign Checklist for First-Time Candidates
This political campaign checklist walks first-time candidates through every step of a campaign, from your first conversation with your spouse through Election Day. A first-time candidate who does the first four items on this checklist before announcing is already ahead of most people who run for office.
Deciding to Run
Before you announce anything, get these questions answered. A campaign is expensive, time-consuming, and stressful on everyone around you. Know what you're signing up for before you sign up.
If you're married, the first question I ask is what your spouse thinks. Before you ask voters for their support, you need your inner circle behind you. Talk to your family and close friends, ask directly, and figure out what each person is willing to do. Write it down, because these are your first volunteers and donors.
The best-case scenario is that party leaders recruit you. If that hasn't happened, start attending local events and meeting the people who run things. They may connect you with donors and volunteers. More important, you want to know whether your party will be an asset or a complication before you announce.
In most cases, you are going to need to put some of your own money into this. You can structure it as a loan to the campaign, but donors want to see that you've invested before they do the same. For local or state office, I generally recommend putting $5,000 to $10,000 into the campaign account, even if you plan to pay it back at the end of the campaign.
Unless you're running uncontested for an open seat, you're taking a risk. Think about what you get out of this race even if you lose. An issue you want to push into the public conversation, a profile you want to build, a network you want to develop.
Research and Planning
Good strategy starts with good information. Before you build a plan, you need to understand the district, the voters, and the competition.
For a step-by-step walkthrough of scoring and segmenting your voter data, see the voter file analysis guide.
Look at results from the last several elections across every precinct in your district, not just the race you're running for. Build a spreadsheet cross-referencing party and precinct. Average the totals. That tells you where your base lives, where the swing voters are, and how favorable the district is overall.
Cross-reference Census data against your favorable and unfavorable precincts. You'll start to see which communities you need to target and what issues will land with them.
Find out which organizations, clubs, unions, faith communities, and civic groups exist in your target precincts. The people running those groups will often matter more to your race than any single voter. Get their events on your calendar now.
Have other candidates run this race before? If they're running again, they're your competition. If they're not, their donor lists, volunteers, and networks may be available to you. Find out who ran, how they did, and where those relationships went.
Writing Your Campaign Plan
Once the research is done, put together a plan. Every serious donor and advisor will want to see one before they commit. Work through at least these sections:
Why does this campaign need to happen? Why is this candidate you, specifically? These are the questions every donor will ask, often without asking them out loud. Answer them directly in your plan.
Decide what you will do and what you will not do. Scope creep kills campaigns. Activities slowly expand until no one has time to do any of them well. Set boundaries early and hold them.
Get real cost estimates for staff, materials, office space, and fees. Add a buffer for expenses you haven't thought of. Your budget should work backward from what you can actually raise, not forward from what you wish you had.
Advisors, staff, volunteers, anyone else invested in the outcome. Write down what you can realistically expect from each of them and what they expect in return. Unspoken expectations can cause a split and this problem is completely avoidable.
Run a basic SWOT. What threats could knock your campaign off track? What opportunities aren't your opponents positioned to take? When a reporter or opponent asks a hard question, this is the part of your plan you'll point to.
Digital Presence
Donors, volunteers, and potential supporters will look you up online before they do anything else. What they find will determine whether they take you seriously. This is not optional.
You need a set of photos: some of you alone, some with community members, some with your family. Phone camera shots from a volunteer do not cut it. Hire a photographer.
Every page on your site needs text: About Me, Top Issues, and some kind of news or blog section at minimum. Have someone you trust proofread everything. Typos on a candidate website are gifts to your opponent.
The fastest way to look like a hobbyist is a bad website. There are solid do-it-yourself platforms like NationBuilder, but spending a portion of your seed money on professional design is worth it. Make sure visitors can contact you and donate or sign up to volunteer in as few clicks as possible.
You do not need every platform. One well-run account beats three neglected ones. Older voters are on Facebook. Younger voters are on Instagram. Twitter and its successors are for news releases and outreach to journalists and influencers. Pick what fits your district and your team's capacity, and do that one well.
Fundraising
Fundraising is not something you can afford to figure out later. Trying causes candidates to underperform their goals. Build your list and start your calls before you think you're ready.
The campaign fundraising guide covers how to build and tier your list in detail.
Come up with as many names as possible of people who might donate. A consultant I respect tells candidates that if they can't produce 100 names, they're not ready to run, and I agree. For each name, note their best contact method, why they'd give, and how much they might contribute.
Your script needs a strong opening that speaks to what this specific donor cares about. Write a different version for each type of motivation you identified on your list. Practice until you can run the whole conversation without notes and ad-lib as needed.
If your closest supporters won't give, that's your answer about the viability of your campaign. Call the guaranteed donors first. They're also good practice because the personal connection makes it uncomfortable, and you need to get comfortable with the discomfort of asking for money.
Call everyone. Find out if they'll give, and if not, find out what would change their mind. Donors will give you some of your most useful feedback about what your campaign is missing. Listen to it.
One Rule on Fundraising
- The best book on asking for money is Making the Dough Rise by EMILY's List. It doesn't matter where you stand on their issues. The mechanics of the ask are the same for any campaign. Find the PDF online and read it before you make your first call.
Building Your Team
You cannot run a campaign alone. Staff, volunteers, and advisors each play a different role, and getting that structure right early saves you from scrambling later.
These are your closest, most politically connected supporters. They fill leadership roles before you have paid staff to fill them. Choose carefully. Make sure their goals line up with the ones you wrote down in step 4, because misaligned advisors cause more problems than no advisors.
Start with a Campaign Manager and a Finance Director. Smaller races often roll several roles into one person. As the campaign grows, you'll eventually need a Political Director, Field Director, and Communications and Digital Director. Campaign Managers usually have a background in one of those areas and can cover a dual role until you find someone to fill it.
As soon as you have a staffer who can manage them, bring volunteers on. Give them something real to do. Keep them engaged. Make them feel like they matter to the outcome, because they do. Volunteers who feel like props stop showing up.
Download the volunteer sign-up sheet templates to capture commitments at events.
Find your strongest volunteers and train them for leadership roles. Invest in field and digital training from the start. Make training regular, not a one-time event. If you need outside help designing the program, bring in a consultant. Untrained teams produce bad data and burn out faster.
Coalitions and Outreach
Voter contact is the whole point. Every other piece of the campaign exists to make direct voter contact possible. Here's how the major outreach methods work and where each one fits.
A well-run coalition gives you a pipeline for volunteers, donations, and earned media. Identify the key groups and community leaders in your district, figure out what they need, and approach the ones whose goals line up with yours. A coalition you can't manage is worse than none!
Events let you meet a lot of people in a short time, but most of those people won't be on your targeted voter list. Use events primarily to recruit volunteers and build your newsletter list. Bring a clipboard. Get names and contact info.
Phones let you move through a large list quickly and record responses in real time. Not many voters will pick up, but it's a good way to cover a lot of ground early in the cycle or in districts where door knocking isn't practical. Ask your party whether they have a dialer. If not, CallHub is a reasonable option for smaller races.
Nothing else comes close for persuasion and identification. A real conversation at someone's door produces better data and better results than any other contact method. The vast majority of your field time should be at the doors of unidentified and likely swing voters. Ask directly: "Can I count on your support?" If yes, ask if they'll volunteer. If yes, get their email. Most candidates skip those follow-up asks. Don't.
Read the complete field organizing guide for scripts, shift prep, and the full GOTV sequence.
Get Out the Vote
Identifying supporters and persuading undecideds means nothing if those people don't vote. GOTV is the last phase of the campaign, and it now stretches across weeks rather than a single day.
Election Day is no longer a single day. Voters who mail in ballots, vote early, or vote on Election Day need to be contacted at the right time for each method. Once a ballot is cast and submitted, that voter is done. Look at past voting history to predict when each person is likely to vote. Hard partisans tend to vote earlier. Plan your contact schedule around that.
Voters who have voted by mail or voted early in past cycles tend to keep doing it. Your plan should make sure your supporters can vote the way they prefer and feel comfortable doing so. Talk to your lawyer before you build this out. The rules vary significantly from state to state.
Poll watchers, election judges, and literature passers outside polling places are three separate jobs with different training and legal requirements. Make sure your team covers the high-traffic polls and that every person knows their specific role. Plan a results-watching party for your volunteers. They earned it, and it matters for your next campaign.
The GOTV Principle
All the identification and persuasion work you did earlier only pays off if your supporters actually vote. Keep your GOTV universe focused on identified supporters only. Don't waste field time in the final weeks talking to people you haven't already identified. You should know who you're going after before GOTV begins.
FAQ
No, but the first four should be settled before you say anything publicly. Personal support, party relationships, seed money, and your goals. Everything else can develop after you announce, but those four determine whether you should run at all.
It depends on the race. For most local and state legislative offices, $5,000 to $10,000 shows donors that you've committed before asking them to. Congressional races need more. The number matters less than the signal it sends: you've put real money behind this, which means donors can too.
You can still run. But be realistic about what you're giving up: party infrastructure, donor connections, and potentially the ability to access voter file data or field tools the party controls. If you're running without party backing, your personal network and your finance committee matter even more than usual.
No. A website is where donors send money, where volunteers sign up, and where reporters go to fact-check your biography. Social media is a complement, not a substitute. If someone finds you on Facebook and there's no website, they'll assume the campaign isn't serious. They're probably right.
As soon as you have someone who can manage them. For smaller campaigns, that's your Campaign Manager. Don't recruit volunteers before you have a person and a system to keep them engaged, or they'll do one shift and disappear. But once that infrastructure is in place, start immediately. Early volunteers become your best captains.
Waiting too long to fundraise and waiting too long to knock doors. Both feel uncomfortable at first, and most new candidates find reasons to delay. The candidates who start both early are the ones who are the most likely to be competitive in the final weeks.
Ready to Build a Real Campaign?
If you've read this far and you're still serious about running, you're already ahead of most first-time candidates. The strategy call is where we figure out whether your race is winnable, what it would take, and whether working together makes sense.
Schedule a Strategy Call