I Never Expected To Run For Office—Here's What I Learned

I didn't win, but I'll never see politics the same way again.

(Photo by Will Stancil for Minnesota State House)

Last February, I decided to run for office. I live in Minneapolis, and after two decades of service, my state-house member abruptly decided to retire. I became one of several Democratic candidates to jump into the race to replace him. Being a deep-blue district, the Democratic primary would be the decisive contest, which gave me approximately six months to build a campaign from scratch. I had to make the decision in a matter of hours. The first few days afterwards were some of the most terrifying I’d ever experienced—more than once I woke up at two in the morning, wondering if I’d ruined my life.

I was an unusual candidate in some ways, and my decision to run attracted controversy. I’m what my teenage cousins call a “niche internet microcelebrity.” For years I’ve been very active on Twitter, mostly sharing my views on politics, policy, and the economy. In that capacity I’ve built a sizable social-media audience. 

That’s not why I chose to run. In my day job I’m a civil-rights attorney and policy researcher, and the state legislature controls policy over most of the issues I care about—public schools, housing, regional planning. My decision was an extension of my real work, not my internet presence.

I was determined to run a real race. Periodically, social media influencers have run for office. Almost invariably, those efforts flop. Influencers often don’t understand that winning voters is different from building an audience. 

On the internet, your followers find you, because they think you’re funny or insightful or interesting. But politicians don’t get to select their constituents. Instead, constituents are chosen by accident of geography. Your job is to go to them, win them over. 

The only way to succeed in a local political campaign is the hard way: talking to as many voters as possible, however you can reach them. That means mail, email, phone calls, and—above all else—door knocking.

The race began in February. The primary was August 13^th. I came in second among three candidates, with 36 percent of the vote to the winner’s 43 percent. It was a real, hard-fought campaign. We raised over $100,000 dollars, one of the highest totals for state legislature in the entirety of Minnesota, and knocked 20,000 doors. (To give an idea of how aggressive that canvassing effort was, we reached many voters’ doors three or four times in as many months.) Although no polls exist at this level, my campaign’s sense was that the election was only determined in the final few days, when the retiring incumbent endorsed my opponent and there was a noticeable momentum shift among voters. The results suggested the same: I was leading in early vote, and fell behind on election day.

Losing a close contest hurts, but it’s an intrinsic part of politics. As one of my campaign advisors told me early on, nobody can ever be assured of winning an election. If I were to do it again, there are a handful of tactical choices I’d make differently—pursuing more endorsements from elected leaders, spending more on text blasts, pushing back more aggressively against attacks. But it’s easy to win any race in hindsight, and my campaign was careful and deliberate about all our decisions. I don’t have many regrets. And through the experience, I developed some sympathy for the politicians I’ve criticized.

DON’T TRY IT ‘TIL YOU KNOCK IT

The part of the campaign that will stick with me longest isn’t those kinds of tactical and strategic choices. It’s the conversations.

I knocked about 10,000 doors personally. There simply wasn’t any alternative. In a race this small—a Minnesota house district includes about 40,000 people—most voters are, at best, vaguely aware of the candidates. And it’s hard to get them to pay closer attention. Mail is easy to throw out. Emails and texts are easy to ignore.

But a political candidate knocking on someone’s front door usually earns a conversation (at least, if anybody answers—which they did approximately 17 percent of the time, according to our data). Those conversations were the only reliable way to pick up a vote. And it had to be me, because voters are rarely persuaded by even the most committed canvassers.

So knock doors I did—day in, day out, without break, for four months. I knocked doors 5:00 - 8:30 p.m. on weekdays and 10:00 a.m. - 7:00 p.m. on weekends. I knocked doors on my birthday in July. I knocked doors in sweltering heat. By the third month, every night I would go to bed and dream about the doors—not in any abstract way, but about specific houses, specific voters, specific streets I’d walked down over and over.

This ceaseless avalanche of voter engagement had a profound impact on how I saw the district and the election. I’ve been involved in politics much of my life, as an advocate, commentator, and campaign worker. I’d trained myself to see political campaigns as an exercise in brand management. A candidate’s job is to present themselves in the way that appeals to the maximum number of voters.

But when it was actually me out there, talking to people, the election felt less about managing my image and more about managing relationships. An extraordinary number of them. Before long the district became a web of hundreds, if not thousands, of personal acquaintances. I could could walk through neighborhoods, point at random homes on every street, and recall facts about the residents: “These people care most about housing. The husband over here is a teacher. This couple has a giant golden retriever named Maggie.” I doubt there’s any other occupation that produces such an intensely detailed level of knowledge about a place.

When you become so familiar with the people in the district, it’s hard to escape another realization: Maybe you entered the race because you felt like you had clever views on policy. But once you get to know the people in the district better, you become more keenly aware what you’re asking of them: to be their representative.

That realization started to color every conversation. Marching up to someone's door and informing them of my opinions felt very wrong. Of course I needed to tell voters about myself. But what I wanted even more was to hear about them: their worries, concerns, and priorities.

But you can't become a cipher either, learning voters' views and reflecting them back. It's usually not hard to figure out what someone believes about a given topic, which means it's easy, if you're so inclined, to simply feed people the answers you know they'd like best. The temptation to do so is omnipresent—"You've got my support" are the sweetest words you can hear while campaigning. I’m sure some candidates give in to that temptation. But it’s slippery and insincere. Besides, agreeing with everyone is a surefire way to get into trouble eventually. Word gets around: I said one thing to Janine, and the opposite to Mark down the street. What happens if they talk? Where do I really stand? 

So the conversations, necessary as a means of breaking past the basic information deficit that hangs over local elections, begin to become a lot more than that. They become a place where you're forced to continually confront new perspectives, and synthesize them into your own.

In my campaign this came up countless times. One good example was policing, an issue that has loomed over Minneapolis since the murder of George Floyd. I entered the race with several simple, straightforward views on policing, mostly focused on the need for accountability and reform. In the advocacy and commentary circles I was coming from, those were the only views I needed to have.

But talking to voters immediately exposed me to stories that complicated things. Richard was held up at gunpoint in his own front lawn, part of a recent spate of robberies that have frightened several neighborhoods. Kathy lost a friend when understaffed first responders delayed a wellness check. Joan had a stranger bang on her door in the middle of the night, and when she dialed 911, was told “to call back if he gets in”—there weren’t enough officers on duty.

Immediately the tidy narratives, the "correct" answers, begin to dissolve. It's not that they were wrong—few could deny that Minneapolis policing is in need of reform. It's that the conversations invariably exposed me to a vast well of experience outside those narratives. Maybe police shortages were a bigger problem than I thought. Maybe gun crime was a bigger threat than I realized. If I wanted to take my neighbors’ experiences seriously, I had to find a way to fit all of it together.

LOCAL VS. VOCAL

There was a moment where it dawned on me: Nobody was going to show up and give me the solution. There was no consensus to turn to. No expert bearing all the right answers. An election wasn't really a contest with a prize. It was a course of study. It was the process of trying to become the world's premier authority in what my neighbors wanted and needed from their government, so that I could help them get it. The responsibility of finding the path forward, navigating their countless concerns, making decisions that were consistent, defensible, ethical, and productive, choosing a course that made the world better while serving the people whose votes I was seeking, fell to me and me alone. And I might choose the wrong answer, and the responsibility for that would be on me alone, too. 

That was sobering. 

Coming out of my campaign, I think it helped explain something I’ve wondered about for years. We live in an era of intensely nationalized politics. Swings between the two parties tend to be uniform across the country. The political and media environment of the moment rewards partisan maximalism. As I’ve often written in the past, it would benefit Democrats to be noisier and more aggressive. Democrats would be smart to spend more time on the offensive and leave no procedural stone unturned while pursuing their agenda.

And yet, despite this, many Democrats have seemed reluctant to turn up the heat. For years, their rhetoric veered towards bipartisanship and bridge-building. Even with a clear majority at their backs, they often seemed to court the GOP minority instead of rolling over it.

In the past I’ve chalked this tendency up to habitual conflict aversion, or even political cowardice. Maybe that’s part of it, but I now see how those instincts might have formed. It’s one thing to go on CNN and blast your ideological opponent. It’s quite another to go to your constituent's  front door and tell them they’re wrong. If your political values were molded in conversations like the ones I had, switching to intense partisan warfare is bound to feel wrong.

“All politics is local,” goes the cliché. It’s wronger today than ever before. In 2024, all politics is, if anything, national. But local politics are where you can glimpse what politics used to be—before 24/7 cable news, before Trump, before social media sloganeering. Today's hyper-polarized elections are simpler, flatter, and meaner. They reduce people to numbers in a bloc, and strip away the voices of everyone in the smaller share. In these local campaigns you can still see the vestiges of a more complicated, less-certain style of democracy than we have today. Once seen, it's hard to unsee, whatever the electoral benefits of doing so.