Choosing Your Political Campaign: The Easiest Race to Win
We touched earlier on making sure you’re qualified for the first political race you decide to enter, but now let’s talk about an equally important strategy: choosing the easiest race to win.
Quite often, a prospective candidate is faced with several options when it comes time to choose which office to run for. In any given year, you might have the opportunity to run for the school board, a ward council spot, an at-large council seat, auditor, law director, treasurer, mayor and perhaps even more.
We are hardly the first to note that success in politics has much to do with timing.
If you’ve been involved in local campaigns and have expressed some interest in eventually running yourself, you’ll inevitably be approached by someone from your party or community about tossing your hat in the ring for a specific race.
It can initially be a very flattering request, but don’t let it cloud your judgment. After asking yourself if you’re qualified to run, you need to do a serious assessment of the odds you’ll be facing to pull of a win.
You’re goal is to ascertain whether this particular race offers the best chances of winning when weighed against other political options you might have in the near future. A lot of different factors enter into this formula, but we’ll touch on a few of the most important below.
- Will you be facing a primary challenge? While primaries can work to your advantage by increasing name recognition before a general election, they can also drain valuable financial resources and fracture your base if it ends up becoming too contentious.
- Will you be facing an incumbent in the general election? Even if “common knowledge” says that the incumbent isn’t popular, it’s hard to know with any certainty just how vulnerable a local officeholder is without solid polling data. Because of a pre-existing fundraising base and automatic name recognition, running against an incumbent is almost always more difficult than vying for an open seat.
- If is is an open seat, who is your opponent likely to be? If it’s a relative unknown, your chances will be much better than they would against a popular community leader, a former office holder, or a challenger who can fund an aggressive campaign out of their own pocket.
If the answer to any of these questions leads you to believe that you’re likely to lose, you may want to consider waiting for a more opportune moment to launch your maiden campaign. Odds are that you won’t have to wait long; a year is an eternity in local and national politics, and many factors can change drastically before the next election season.
Let me include an important disclaimer, though: while it’s nice to come out a winner in your first campaign, some of the most successful local and national politicians in the world lost several races before finally being elected to office.
While trying to choose the most winnable race before jumping in might make victory more likely, nothing can guarantee that you’ll prevail in any campaign.
If you can’t accept the prospect of losing, and can’t learn from your experiences to mount an even better campaign next time, then it’s probably best for you to stay out of the race altogether . . . regardless of how “easy” you think it might be to win.
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