May 12, 2026 • 43 mins
Amanda Litman is an author, digital strategist, and the co-founder and president of “Run For Something” - an organization which recruits and supports young, diverse progressive candidates. Since launching in 2017, Run For Something has helped to elect more than 1,500 leaders across 49 states- primarily women and people of color. Outspoken against “bad boomer leadership” and a “boomer mentality” in politics, Litman is also president of RFS Civics - a 501c3 that works to end the gerontocracy. Shortly after launching Run for Something, Amanda wrote the book Run for Something: A Real-Talk Guide to Fixing the System Yourself and has recently published her latest book, When We’re in Charge: The Next Generation’s Guide to Leadership in May 2025. Litman cites Barack Obama as her inspiration to work in politics and started her career as an email writer for his 2012 re-election campaign. From there, Litman worked as a digital strategist for Hilary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, Charlie Crist's 2014 Florida gubernatorial campaign, and served as the deputy email director for Organizing for Action. Litman is a strong advocate for a new style of “next gen” leadership and setting a new standard for this upcoming generation of leaders.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
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.
(00:25):
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
(00:47):
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
(01:08):
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
(01:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
I find boomer leadership to do a very good foil
for what the next generation needs to be working against.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
Yeah, in what way?
Speaker 3 (01:52):
Well?
Speaker 2 (01:52):
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,
(02:15):
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,
(02:38):
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
(02:59):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
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
(03:39):
don't want anything to do with these recent generations. Do
you agree?
Speaker 2 (03:42):
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
(04:05):
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.
(04:25):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
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,
(04:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
You're happy with the way things are.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
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
(06:48):
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
(07:09):
a lot of money three hundred and thirty million dollars. Yeah,
did you like raising money?
Speaker 2 (07:14):
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
(07:36):
it was also, I hope, the hardest thing I'll ever do.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
What way?
Speaker 2 (07:39):
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
(08:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
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
(09:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
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
(09:42):
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
(10:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
West because you wanted to be proximate to his work.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
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,
(10:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
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
(11:38):
why primary is. It's like a fight with your family.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
It sucks.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
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
(12:02):
fifty chance it's someone nobody's talking about right now.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
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?
Speaker 2 (12:24):
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
(12:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
It was.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
It was tough. It was so tough because what a
great president she would have been.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
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
(14:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
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
(15:05):
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?
Speaker 2 (15:23):
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
(15:45):
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.
(16:05):
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,
(16:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
What do you attribute that to?
Speaker 2 (16:44):
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
(17:05):
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
(17:26):
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
(17:47):
work when you get really good people in it.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Is it safe to say that when Mom Donnie won,
you were glad because you were glad somebody else didn't win.
Speaker 2 (18:25):
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
(18:45):
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
(19:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
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
(19:48):
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
(20:10):
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
(20:32):
to help people with everything that isn't the stuff that
you like. They have innately, but.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
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?
Speaker 2 (20:48):
Absolutely?
Speaker 1 (20:49):
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?
Speaker 2 (20:55):
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,
(21:16):
people like Mallory McMorrow in Michigan.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
You had her on the show.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
Part of the country where this plays more than other
parts in a region or a state for that matter.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
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,
(22:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
Now, let's just confine ourselves to the run for something
period of your career when you began.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
Which is like, what year was a twenty seventeen.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
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
(23:18):
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
(23:41):
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
(24:03):
I expected.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
Because they want the money used to go straight to
a party.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
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
(24:27):
after year after year.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
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
(24:51):
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
(25:15):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
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
(25:51):
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,
(26:15):
I think you will get better people, You'll get.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
More working class under paid.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
Yeah, you will get more.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
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,
(26:50):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
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.
(27:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
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,
(27:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:59):
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
(28:19):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
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,
(29:07):
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.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
You know.
Speaker 2 (29:21):
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,
(29:43):
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
(30:03):
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
(30:27):
be in community with others.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
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
(31:05):
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
(31:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
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
(31:58):
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
(32:21):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
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
(32:53):
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,
(33:13):
but I do think it creates an opportunity because.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
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?
Speaker 2 (33:36):
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
(33:56):
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
(34:17):
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
(34:38):
women's responsibilities directly make a difference for women, for families,
for kids in a way that's really powerful.
Speaker 1 (34:43):
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?
Speaker 2 (34:50):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
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.
(35:37):
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
(35:58):
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
(36:20):
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
(36:40):
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
(37:03):
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
(37:25):
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,
(37:47):
they can win in a long shot race.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
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?
Speaker 2 (37:59):
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
(38:19):
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,
(38:43):
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
(39:05):
everything on the table now.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
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?
Speaker 2 (39:19):
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
(39:40):
the campaigns. If you want to knock doors, make calls,
whatever did you want to do? We have ways that
you can help.
Speaker 1 (39:46):
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.
(40:09):
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?
Speaker 2 (40:22):
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
(40:43):
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
(41:05):
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
(41:27):
the status quo.
Speaker 1 (41:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:34):
And I was blown away, pleasantly surprised.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
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
(42:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
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
Speaker 2 (43:01):
Two.
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.
(00:25):
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
(00:47):
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
(01:08):
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
(01:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
I find boomer leadership to do a very good foil
for what the next generation needs to be working against.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
Yeah, in what way?
Speaker 3 (01:52):
Well?
Speaker 2 (01:52):
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,
(02:15):
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,
(02:38):
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
(02:59):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
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
(03:39):
don't want anything to do with these recent generations. Do
you agree?
Speaker 2 (03:42):
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
(04:05):
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.
(04:25):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
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,
(04:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
You're happy with the way things are.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
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
(06:48):
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
(07:09):
a lot of money three hundred and thirty million dollars. Yeah,
did you like raising money?
Speaker 2 (07:14):
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
(07:36):
it was also, I hope, the hardest thing I'll ever do.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
What way?
Speaker 2 (07:39):
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
(08:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
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
(09:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
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
(09:42):
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
(10:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
West because you wanted to be proximate to his work.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
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,
(10:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
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
(11:38):
why primary is. It's like a fight with your family.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
It sucks.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
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
(12:02):
fifty chance it's someone nobody's talking about right now.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
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?
Speaker 2 (12:24):
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
(12:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
It was.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
It was tough. It was so tough because what a
great president she would have been.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
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
(14:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
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
(15:05):
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?
Speaker 2 (15:23):
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
(15:45):
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.
(16:05):
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,
(16:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
What do you attribute that to?
Speaker 2 (16:44):
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
(17:05):
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
(17:26):
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
(17:47):
work when you get really good people in it.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Is it safe to say that when Mom Donnie won,
you were glad because you were glad somebody else didn't win.
Speaker 2 (18:25):
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
(18:45):
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
(19:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
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
(19:48):
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
(20:10):
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
(20:32):
to help people with everything that isn't the stuff that
you like. They have innately, but.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
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?
Speaker 2 (20:48):
Absolutely?
Speaker 1 (20:49):
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?
Speaker 2 (20:55):
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,
(21:16):
people like Mallory McMorrow in Michigan.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
You had her on the show.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
Part of the country where this plays more than other
parts in a region or a state for that matter.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
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,
(22:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
Now, let's just confine ourselves to the run for something
period of your career when you began.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
Which is like, what year was a twenty seventeen.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
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
(23:18):
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
(23:41):
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
(24:03):
I expected.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
Because they want the money used to go straight to
a party.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
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
(24:27):
after year after year.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
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
(24:51):
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
(25:15):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
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
(25:51):
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,
(26:15):
I think you will get better people, You'll get.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
More working class under paid.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
Yeah, you will get more.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
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,
(26:50):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
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.
(27:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
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,
(27:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:59):
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
(28:19):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
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,
(29:07):
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.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
You know.
Speaker 2 (29:21):
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,
(29:43):
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
(30:03):
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
(30:27):
be in community with others.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
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
(31:05):
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
(31:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
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
(31:58):
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
(32:21):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
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
(32:53):
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,
(33:13):
but I do think it creates an opportunity because.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
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?
Speaker 2 (33:36):
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
(33:56):
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
(34:17):
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
(34:38):
women's responsibilities directly make a difference for women, for families,
for kids in a way that's really powerful.
Speaker 1 (34:43):
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?
Speaker 2 (34:50):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
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.
(35:37):
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
(35:58):
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
(36:20):
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
(36:40):
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
(37:03):
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
(37:25):
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,
(37:47):
they can win in a long shot race.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
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?
Speaker 2 (37:59):
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
(38:19):
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,
(38:43):
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
(39:05):
everything on the table now.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
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?
Speaker 2 (39:19):
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
(39:40):
the campaigns. If you want to knock doors, make calls,
whatever did you want to do? We have ways that
you can help.
Speaker 1 (39:46):
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.
(40:09):
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?
Speaker 2 (40:22):
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
(40:43):
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
(41:05):
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
(41:27):
the status quo.
Speaker 1 (41:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:34):
And I was blown away, pleasantly surprised.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
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
(42:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
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
Speaker 2 (43:01):
Two.
Host
Alec Baldwin
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