Mike who? House Republicans have managed to elevate someone so obscure to the speakership that even we scarcely know who he is. But that's why we're devoting this week's episode of "The Downballot" to exposing Louisiana Rep. Mike Johnson and his crazy, weird, extreme views. Johnson voted to overturn the 2020 election, supports a nationwide abortion ban, and voted to shut down the government just last month—and he won unanimously, meaning vulnerable Republicans now own all that, too. Plus, Johnson has zero track record when it comes to one of the House speaker's most important duties to his party: raising tons of money. How long before he starts pissing his caucus off?
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We're also joined this week by Amanda Litman, the co-founder of Run for Something, which is devoted to encouraging young, diverse progressives to seek local office. Her group just launched a new project specifically targeting school board races, an enormous battleground that gets far too little attention. Litman tells us how Run for Something recruits candidates and advises them on the challenges unique to school board elections, including the importance of retail campaigning and how to push back against attacks from Moms for Liberty-type extremists.
Transcript lightly edited for clarity.
David Beard: Hello and welcome. I'm David Beard, Contributing Editor for Daily Kos Elections.
David Nir: And I'm David Nir, Political Director of Daily Kos. “The Downballot” is a weekly podcast dedicated to the many elections that take place below the presidency, from the Senate to city council. Please subscribe to “The Downballot” on Apple Podcasts and leave us a five-star rating and review.
Beard: There's white smoke over the Capitol. It seems that we finally have a speaker again.
Nir: Yes, Mike Johnson, the name you don't know, is now speaker of the House, and we are going to be talking all about the vote that led to his extremely unlikely ascension, and the problems that he still poses for House Republicans. Then we are going to wrap up our discussion from last week about North Carolina's extreme new Republican gerrymanders and the impacts that they are having on other races in the state, including next year's all-important race for governor.
And afterward, we are joined by Amanda Litman, who is the co-founder of Run For Something and is speaking with us today about a new project designed to help elect young diverse progressives to school boards all around the country. This is a topic that is woefully under-covered, so we are extremely eager to dive in. Let's get rolling.
Beard, I don't know what your sense is of things, but even though we are now less than two weeks away from the November 7 elections, I kind of feel like the GOP insanity in the House of Representatives has sucked up so much oxygen and also maybe discouraged folks from wanting to even try to make campaign news, just because it's so difficult to get attention, that we've been in a weird kind of lull.
Beard: Yeah, I think definitely, particularly at the Senate and congressional level, everything has been so focused on this insane speakership weeks-long absence, and now election, that it's been little news anywhere else. I think obviously if you're in one of the 2023 states, you're getting some news about, if you're in Pennsylvania or Kentucky or Virginia, you're getting some news around those races specifically. But at a more national level, it's been all speakership all the time. It's hard for anything else to break through.
Nir: Yeah. Well, I know that Republicans are extremely relieved to finally have this nightmare over, but I kind of feel like they have walked into just another huge set of problems of their own making. Last week we talked about all of these ding-dongs in these vulnerable districts who voted for Jim Jordan, and they had that on their permanent record, but it's not like Mike Johnson is any better. And yeah, Mike ... Hold on a minute. Mike Johnson is the speaker. Wait, who?
Beard: Yeah. I'm still trying to come to terms with the idea that Mike Johnson is somebody I should know and care about because before he got however many votes against Emmer in the previous race before Emmer dropped out, I could not have picked him out of a lineup. I would've expected that was a made-up name of a congressman that somebody just thought of because they were in a hurry. They were like, "Mike Johnson. Yeah, yeah, that's a congressman." Right? But now he's the third-highest official in the federal government, so I guess we're going to learn a lot about him, and so far what I've seen is not good.
Nir: Yeah. Mike Johnson, it sounds like the median name for a white Republican member of Congress. But he is not a median member of Congress by any stretch of the imagination, and he's unknown right now, but that is going to change because he is just as freaking extreme as Jim Jordan. Jim Jordan liked to put himself out there and really make a name for himself as this bomb-throwing a-hole. But Johnson, maybe his demeanor is a bit different, but his views are exactly the same. He voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election, so now we have an insurrectionist, as you said, Beard, the third-highest elected official in the federal government. He voted against recognizing same-sex marriage. We're now in 2023, and he's one of these reactionary Republicans who does not support same-sex marriage, but also, that bill to codify same-sex marriage also recognized interracial marriage, which of course in living memory was not legal in many parts of the country, and so Republicans are voting against interracial marriage. It just freaking blows my mind.
Last month, Mike Johnson voted to shut down the government. This happened just last month. He voted against the 45-day continuing resolution that ended Kevin McCarthy's career in one way or another. So come November 17, the government's going to run out of money yet again, so what's he going to do then? Are we going to have another shutdown? That always works out really well for Republicans. He's voted against recent Ukraine funding bills.
This gets back to the whole Brian Fitzpatrick thing that we were talking about last week. He represents this very heavily Ukrainian-American district in the Philadelphia suburbs, and he has been like Mr. Ukraine. Good for him for being out there and supporting our allies in this war against Vladimir Putin, but he just went and voted for Mike Johnson who opposes ... His number one priority on top of everything, he supports a nationwide ban on abortion. This is a simple, very clear, and easy thing to explain to people; Mike Johnson voted to ban abortion everywhere in the country, period, end of story.
Beard: And that's something that I think Democrats were going to be pushing regardless. Obviously, abortion has been a huge point since the Dobbs decision, as we've talked about many times on the show, but I think in particular now that the speaker of the House has such an extreme and aggressive stance on it, it makes it that much more believable to regular voters because you can sort of make this argument and then the Republican you're running against might try to make some sort of counter-argument. “They're not that extreme. They just want to do some sort of compromise or something.”
But now you can point to a lot of these incumbent Republicans and be like, "Then why did you vote for this guy who has this extreme zero exceptions universal ban bill if you want some sort of compromise position?" That doesn't make sense, and it shows folks the falsehood behind these Republican attempts to get out of their own way on abortion.
Nir: Yeah. These super PACs can all run ads slamming the Fitzpatricks of the world and the David Valadaos, et cetera, et cetera, because the vote for Johnson was unanimous, and Fitzpatrick or whoever can whine as much as he likes, but the TV stations won't take those ads down because he voted for the guy who wants a ban on abortion. And it's not just the abortion ban though. It's the arguments around it, and I feel like if you probe just a little bit beneath the surface, their views go from being just completely hateful and misogynistic to being downright weird. And here is a clip from Mike Johnson speaking at the House Judiciary Committee explaining one of his rationales for opposing Roe v. Wade.
Nir:
I thought that the whole reason these people opposed abortion rights is because, oh, they're murdering babies, but Mike Johnson is also saying that abortion is bad because of Social Security and Medicare, that we don't have enough "able-bodied workers", and if only we didn't allow abortion, we would have a larger workforce able to support entitlement programs. That feels completely, completely bonkers to me for two reasons. One is shouldn't they oppose abortion even if it had nothing to do with saving Medicare and Social Security? Even if it harmed Medicare's finances, wouldn't they still say, "Well, abortion is still wrong?" Okay, that's A. B, this is a fantastic argument for increased legal immigration. If you're worried about the size of our workforce supporting older Americans, hell yeah, there are jabillions of people who want to come here and work, work hard, pay taxes, and be law-abiding citizens. Let's welcome them in, Mike Johnson. Maybe we can find grounds for a compromise
Beard: Somehow I doubt that. I doubt those are the workers that Mike Johnson is looking for to fill in the workforce of America. But I do think this gets to an underlying issue that we haven't talked much about, which is Johnson also chaired the Republican Study Committee, which puts out budgets that have extreme cuts to programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
And so I think this sort of very strange argument, I totally agree, it's a very strange argument, is trying to blame Democrats for them having to cut Social Security and Medicare. They're like, "Well, if you hadn't made abortion legal, we'd have more workers and I wouldn't have to cut Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, so you're forcing me to pass all these billions of dollars in cuts in these entitlement programs because you made abortion legal," which is, again, totally crazy, but is trying to square all of his extreme positions into one argument.
Nir: I think that's a really good way of looking at things, which just gets back to my point. These guys' views are so weird. Imagine explaining that to voters on the campaign trail, like yeah, sure, maybe at a GOP candidate forum they're all nodding along, but to normal voters, we have to cut Medicare because abortion is legal? That's just complete lunacy.
Beard: And I think this goes back more broadly to a lot of Republican positions when you try to really dig into them, are very incoherent. The same thing is true around, we just talked about immigration. They have totally incoherent beliefs and desires around immigration, so they don't actually want some sort of coherent policy to take to voters. They just want to scream about what's the headline on Fox News and then get people to vote for them that way. The policy part is less important, which is why you get these totally crazy arguments.
Nir: There is another aspect to the GOP elevating Mike Johnson to this position. That still sounds so weird to talk about, Speaker Johnson, but he has been in office for a very short amount of time. He was only first elected in 2016, and he has basically no track record when it comes to raising serious money. Kevin McCarthy sucked at everything, except he could bring in the big bucks. If you add in all his various campaign committees, joint fundraising committees, leadership PACs, super PACs, et cetera, et cetera, we are talking hundreds of millions of dollars raised for fellow Republicans over the course of his career. Johnson, by contrast, has raised in his time in office a little over $4 million. That is just pitiful. And now of course Johnson is in a safe seat in northwest Louisiana, but McCarthy's also in a safe seat, and McCarthy understood that the road to the speakership is paved with greenbacks.
Johnson somehow skipped over that whole process, which is very, very strange. I'm not sure that any other speaker has made it to the top post in that way, and now the fact that he is speaker now means that money will start to flow to him that no one ever would've given him before. But Republicans have just proven how weak the speakership is, and especially with Democrats still in control of the Senate, Biden still in the White House. If you are a K Street lobbyist or a well-financed PAC from an industry group and you give a bunch of money to Mike Johnson, is he really going to be able to get your priorities through Congress the way things are right now? I don't know, man. I think he's going to really be almost starting from scratch in terms of building these fundraising relationships, and we're already halfway through an election cycle.
Beard: And who's to say he's going to be speaker for the remainder of this Congress? I mean, maybe, but we've certainly seen that Republicans are more than happy to chuck over a speaker and move on to the next guy; they've done it a lot of times in the past few weeks. But I do agree that this, I think, shows more than people might even think because there are lots of back-bench representatives who get elected, they're in a safe seat and they just don't raise a bunch of money year after year because they don't face any tough challengers, and that's fine for them.
That's probably hundreds of members of Congress, but people who have leadership aspirations, even when they're not in leadership, they have leadership PACs; there is money, they donate to freshmen, to challengers they think might become congressman and congresswoman in the next Congress. This is a tried and true method, and Johnson hasn't really done that even as he was chair of the Republican Study Committee, so he's held some leadership-esque positions. You'd think there'd be more of a fundraising track record here, and there's really not. As you said, he'll certainly raise money. Every speaker raises money, but some speakers are better at it than others. It certainly seems like he's likely not going to be great at it the way that McCarthy was very good at it.
Nir: That all puts me in mind of another Johnson. I'm talking about LBJ here. One of the reasons why, maybe, I don't know, the reason why LBJ was so successful as a legislative leader in getting shit done in a way that almost no one has ever matched, maybe except for Nancy Pelosi, is that he had deep, long-term relationships with many, many other folks in Congress who owed him favors.
And a key reason they owed him favors was because he was a phenomenal fundraiser. If you read Caro, you can read all about this. If you're listening to “The Downballot,” you should definitely read Robert Caro's biography of LBJ. He was excellent at raising money, particularly from Texas oilmen, and giving it to vulnerable Democrats around the country. By the time he was Senate majority leader and then later president, everyone owed him something. And that was critical to his success.
Johnson, Mike Johnson to clarify, is coming into the speakership and nobody owes him jack. When it comes time for him to lean on someone, that's like, there's no there there. How do you get something done when no one owes you anything? You owe them.
Beard: Yeah. And not to get too into the weeds of this process, but really the reason that he became speaker is because he managed to get second place against Emmer in that race when I think it was him and Donalds and Hern were the other representatives who were the more conservative side who were all running against Emmer. And Emmer had first place. Everybody knew he'd get a majority of the votes and then not be able to get 217. And so then when Emmer dropped out, Johnson became the next alternative just because he got a few more votes than Donalds and Hern in one of those earlier rounds of votes.
And so that was maybe 50 representatives who voted for him in that race that turned him into the front-runner that then turned him into the speaker. Because at that point, everyone was so tired of it on the Republican side, we saw everybody just give up and vote for him at the end.
The number of people who got him elected is very, very small. And I think you'll have a little bit of leeway in the next few weeks just because Republicans are so embarrassed by how this all went down, and they know they need to not immediately jump into another disaster. I think there'll be a short window where he'll be able to have a lot of leeway, but I think that'll end pretty quickly because Republicans, they love to just blow things up.
Nir: You're exactly right. And I also have this strong feeling that Mike Johnson is now speaker because he never really managed to piss anyone off because he was never in a leadership position. McCarthy, Jordan, Scalise, Emmer: they were all top leaders of the House Republican Caucus in one way, shape, or form over the years.
And in the LBJ days, being in a leadership role meant that you would fill up your favor bank over the years. In today's Republican politics, it seems like being a party leader is simply just a way to get people to hate you and for them to put you on their enemies list. Yeah, Mike Johnson is coming in without any kind of favor bank, but he is also coming in without any kind of enemy bank. But like you said, Beard, that is not going to last for long.
Beard: Yeah. The Republicans are so into being the anti-establishment party that the leaders of their own caucuses become the establishment that they must revolt against inevitably. It's almost like a cycle that they can't stop because, by definition, the leader of the Republican caucus is the establishment. They define themselves as against the establishment, particularly the House Freedom Caucus. And so they will have to take down Johnson eventually because he's the establishment. And then so on and so forth in the future cycles.
Nir: Well, that concludes the abortion-related portion of the program. Now we're onto the North Carolina-related portion of “The Downballot” because we have an update on the GOP's new gerrymanders that we talked about last week. Beard, obviously I'm going to hand this one over to you.
Beard: Yeah. Obviously, North Carolina didn't stop having politics in the past few weeks while the speakership disaster was going on. The North Carolina Republicans took this opportunity to, as we said last week, introduce new gerrymandered maps into the legislature. And now that they introduced those maps, a week later they've passed them all. Because why would you want to spend time debating over the maps trying to get them as good as possible for North Carolina voters when you've already perfected them for the North Carolina Republican Party? Which is the important people in this case.
They went and passed through these GOP gerrymanders for the congressional map we talked about last week. There were two maps that they presented. They ended up going with the one that has 10 Republican districts, three Democratic districts, and one competitive district. That's the current representative, Don Davis, who is a Democrat. He'll have a very difficult but doable reelection in his northeastern North Carolina seat.
But that means the other three Democrats who were targeted, Jeff Jackson, Kathy Manning, and Wiley Nickel, they likely have no real path to reelection. It's possible they may run for another office. We talked about Jeff Jackson potentially running for Attorney General. That's been rumored for a while. But the seats have been so chopped up and made so Republican it's really hard to see, even in a Democratic year, a Democrat winning any of these seats.
The state legislative gerrymanders also were introduced last Wednesday. We didn't get a chance to talk much about those, but they've also already been passed into law. They give the GOP veto-proof majorities in a neutral year. That's 60% in North Carolina, not the two-thirds that it is at federally and in a lot of states.
They would control at least 60% of seats in a neutral year. Democrats could conceivably overturn their supermajorities if they have a good year, and get them below 60%. That, with the governor's race, would at least give Democrats a modicum of power in the state, but they have no chance to have majorities of their own under these maps. It would just be a bridge too far to expect Democrats to be able to win any kind of majority in either state legislature as long as these maps are in place.
Now, I would expect lawsuits to come against all of these maps. The ones with the best likelihood of success are probably Voting Rights Act-based lawsuits against the state legislative maps, which could potentially affect a few districts on those maps, change them, and probably make them more beneficial for Democrats. But the timeline there is very unknown. It could easily take years for that to happen.
Nir: And it's also possible that the Alabama VRA case that we have talked so much about might be the high-water mark for section two of the Voting Rights Act. It may be that the Supreme Court finally decides to take an axe to what remains of the VRA. And this is also whether or not any suits succeed. This is also just classic GOP standard operating procedure.
They are more than happy to get one, two, three or more cycles out of illegal maps. And then, in the year ending in six or the year ending in eight in a decade, get told, "Oh, oh, you have to redraw your maps." Okay, so fine. They won unwarranted victories for a number of years, every decade. It's just a classic case over and over again of justice delayed being justice denied.
Beard: Yeah. And as we've talked about, long-term, Democrats are looking to win back the North Carolina Supreme Court, but they've got to win back a number of races over the next few years to do so. Or potentially obviously if Democrats could pass federal legislation barring partisan gerrymandering. But both of those are long-term projects. Looking towards 2024, there's a Supreme Court seat to defend that's obviously extremely important for Democrats in North Carolina. And then they're going to have to run the best races they can under these maps most likely.
Nir: And also federal legislation, congress has the power to outlaw congressional gerrymandering. But they don't have the power to outlaw legislative gerrymandering. Even if we pass a great bill through Congress, and we absolutely should, it should be our number one priority, there are still those legislative gerrymanders. And one thing we should add is that under the North Carolina constitution, the Governor does not have the power to veto most redistricting plans, including for Congress and the state legislature.
Even though Roy Cooper Democrat is the governor, he can't veto the maps. Though even if he could Republicans have those Ill-gotten gerrymandered supermajorities so they'd be able to overturn his veto anyway. It just really feels absolutely endless there. And this is the definition of entrenchment.
Beard: Yeah, and of course, we talked about Wisconsin last week. There's a long road. We've seen Wisconsin hopefully come close to the end of that long road where the new progressive majority is going to overturn the gerrymandered maps for the Wisconsin State legislature. And that's the same road North Carolina is going to be traveling now. And we just have to put in that long-term work to overcome these.
Meanwhile, these redistricted maps are already having an effect on the North Carolina governor's race, where former Congressman Mark Walker is dropping out of the race, which he really didn't have much of a chance at any way at this point, to run in the gerrymandered 6th district. Now in 2020, when the old North Carolina GOP gerrymander was first struck down, Walker decided not to run for reelection because the un-gerrymandered district was Democratic-leaning and he didn't want to deal with that. But now that the gerrymander is back, he can parachute right back into something close to his old seat, and again, not have to worry about talking to democratic voters or winning over independents or anything like that.
Meanwhile though, in the governor's race with Walker's exit, we've seen businessman Bill Graham jump into the GOP side to challenge the front-runner on that side, which is Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson. Graham has $5 million that he's promised to use to self-fund his campaign. He's got some support in the GOP among those who believe that Robinson is too politically damaged to win a general election, which is absolutely potentially the case. But Robinson is too well known and really popular among the GOP base in North Carolina so it's hard to imagine Graham actually getting much traction. But we'll see.
State Treasurer Dale Folwell is also still running for some reason, but he hasn't gotten any traction. I don't think anybody's mentioned his name in months. If Graham can't make a move quickly, I think it's going to remain Robinson's for the taking.
Nir: Yeah, and that primary is on the early side. I don't know. It feels like establishment GOP attempts to stop Jeff Landry in Louisiana. Except there that was mostly business interests, not wanting to have to deal with an unpredictable maniac like Landry. Obviously, as we talked about, Landry has already won the election as governor of Louisiana. North Carolina is a swing state, obviously a very different sort of situation.
It's amazing with Robinson. He is so disgusting and I feel does not get nearly the amount of attention that he ought to, even though every week there is yet another new article about the horrifying crap that he said. Jewish Insider's Matthew Kassel just published a piece on Wednesday, unearthing even more social media posts from Mark Robinson quoting Hitler, because that's what you do if you're a totally normal candidate. You quote Adolf Hitler when you're running for Congress.
And he compared the toppling of a Confederate statue to Kristallnacht. Fuck you, dude. Are you fucking kidding me? How dare you even bring the Holocaust into this? But this is the way these maniacs think.
Beard: Yeah. No, even for the modern GOP Trumpist Wing of the party, Robinson is really far out there. Which is why, understandably, there are these people in the GOP who are concerned that he's going to lose the general election next year. And I think all of these articles that are coming out now, obviously they're not getting the attention they deserve, but I think that they will appear in a lot of TV ads next summer and next fall after he's won the primary election, courtesy of Josh Stein and the Democratic Governor's Association. I'm pretty sure by the end of the election, people in North Carolina will be aware of all the crazy things that he said.
Nir: But it will be Stein who makes them aware because the problem for Republicans is that they know this stuff doesn't play with normal voters, but all of the hits on Robinson for all the horrible shit he said, they can't use that in a GOP primary. That doesn't make for a good attack ad. Not at all. How do they even stop him? What's the argument? What does the anti-Robinson ad in a Republican primary even look like? I can't even really begin to figure that out
Beard: Yeah. And to make a unified theory of the Republican Party for a second.
Nir: Yes, I really want to hear this.
Beard: And to go back to my anti-establishment point from earlier, it's the same problem where attacking someone for saying crazy things is the wrong direction because you're attacking somebody for being anti-establishment. Even if the establishment is normal people who aren't crazy and the anti-establishment is crazy people, you're still left with, you can't go after Mark Robinson because then you're just part of the establishment preventing the anti-establishment of Mark Robinson from taking power.
It's the same problem we've seen at the presidential level where everyone keeps trying to attack Trump from the right for Trump's not conservative enough because if you're just like, "Oh, Trump's crazy. Trump's done all these terrible things," they're just like, "Oh, well, you're just the establishment." It's this whole... The most important thing in the Republican Party is to be anti-establishment. So everything has to be attacked as the establishment because you can't attack in any other direction, which means, yeah, it's next to impossible to attack somebody as crazy as Mark Robinson because he is the very definition of anti-establishment because he says crazy things.
Nir: Beard, I think that this grand unified theory of the GOP has tremendous explanatory power. I absolutely love it. I'm also horrified by it and terrified but this is a good one. This is a good note to play us out on.
Joining us this week on The Downballot is Amanda Litman, who is the co-founder and co-executive director of Run for Something, an awesome organization that recruits and supports young diverse progressives in all 50 states. Amanda, welcome back to “The Downballot.”
Amanda Litman: Thank you for having me.
Nir: Amanda, you actually, believe it or not, were the very first guest we ever had on “The Downballot” from outside the Daily Kos organization when we launched the show last year. I haven't forgotten that. I am still incredibly grateful and it is really wonderful to be able to talk with you once more.
Litman: Well, I'm excited because as you know, downballot offices and downballot politics is my whole shtick, so I'm ready. Let's do it.
Nir: Let's do it. So for folks who maybe didn't hear that episode, which did come out quite a while ago after all, why don't you just give us a little background about Run For Something and then maybe talk about what candidate recruitment has looked like so far in the 2023, '24 cycle.
Litman: So for those who aren't familiar, Run for Something was launched on Trump's inauguration day in 2017. We recruit and support young, diverse progressives running for local office all across the country. Young is folks 40 and under, diverse; we’re particularly looking for women, people of color, people from underrepresented backgrounds, local office for us that's state house, state senate, city council, school board, library board.
Progressives, that's people who generally share progressive values, but we know that a progressive say in New York is going to be a little different than a progressive in Iowa or Alaska. So we think about this expansively. We have in the lifetime of the organization now identified more than 140,000 young people all across the country who've raised their hands to say they want to run, including nearly 14,000 in 2023 alone. That is both a lot and admittedly not as much as in years prior, which I think gives us a little bit of context of how excitement and interest in running for office have changed since Trump won back in 2017. But that being said, it is not an off-year for us. Run for Something has 312 endorsed candidates on the ballot in just a couple of weeks, half women, half people of color, 25% LGBTQ, across more than half the country who are absolutely amazing and we expect to have hundreds, hundreds more on the ballot in 2024.
Beard: So obviously you've been doing this for a few years now, and I'm just curious, I'm sure there was a big surge during the Trump era. How have you seen interest come and go over the Biden years so far and now into 2023?
Litman: Well, in the beginning of the Biden years, we saw a continued interest in running, and in particular after the Dobbs decision. Last year there was a huge surge in folks signing up to think about running for office in particular to protect abortion access. Now the numbers have scaled back just a little. We still get between 200 to 300 people per week signing up to run for office. But one of the things that we've really been intentional about is not just waiting for them to come to us, but really building systems and outreach to allow us to go to them. So through our Clerk Work program, which is our program to recruit people running for local election administrator roles to make sure democracy is preserved from the place where it's really at risk in these city councils and city clerks and county clerks who want to undermine the process.
We've done things like hundreds and thousands of cold text messages and phone calls to people asking them to run for office. In Wisconsin in particular, we were able to get about 130 people on the ballot within just a couple of weeks, more than half of whom ended up winning elections in April, 15 against insurrectionists who were on the ballot for things like town council and county clerk that actually administer these races. That's people who wouldn't have run if we hadn't sent them a text message during a Sunday football game saying, have you thought about getting on the ballot? So we really learned a lot over the last year and I think that helps shape our program moving forward.
Nir: I'm super curious about that because at Daily Kos we ask people to do all sorts of things, whether it's sign a petition, make a donation, or volunteer for a campaign. It seems like running for office is about the highest level ask you could possibly imagine. So how did you figure out your target universe? And maybe talk through us a little bit about some sample folks maybe from Wisconsin or maybe a prototypical person who gets this text message during that football game and their response and how it goes from the text message all the way to qualifying for the ballot.
Litman: Well, we're using the voter file to help identify people who are likely aligned with our values, but from there and then looking again at some geographic targeting for where there might be open races or opportunities to field candidates that are pro-democracy or who share our values in that particular race. But from there, it's really just asking, "Have you ever thought about running for office? Would you like to have a conversation?" Anyone who said, "Yes," or, "Maybe," got looped in with an organizer on the ground to sit down for coffee.
The thing with candidate recruitment we have found is that it is very much not like volunteering or voting. It is a giant shift, not just in your maybe career or way of life, but in your identity. You go from a person who cares, to a person whose name is on the ballot to maybe elected official or politician. Like, the way you become a writer is by writing. The way you become a painter is by painting. The way you become a candidate is by running for office. It's not predetermined when you're born. So I think the thing that we really love about working with our candidates is they are all so different, but the thing they share is a real commitment to solving a problem and a willingness to do the work.
Beard: So one of the new big projects that Run for Something just announced that we really wanted to talk to you about is the 50 State School Board Strategy targeted specifically to combat a lot of what we've seen out of groups like Moms for Liberty and these other far-right groups targeting school boards. So can you tell us a little bit about what you've seen with these school board races over the past couple of years and why this is so necessary?
Litman: As a relatively new parent, I am obsessed with our school board work. As I think about where my kid is going to go to school in a couple of years, it's become even more obvious to me how important this is, not that I needed to have a kid to think that, but it has become more personal. There are more than 80,000 elected school board positions across the country. Something I don't think people realize. Of half a million elected offices in the United States, almost 20% of them are school board races. And a fifth to a quarter of those happen any given year, half of those happen in November, the other half happen throughout the calendar. That's a long way of saying that there are always school board races happening somewhere in the country. In 2023, there's about 24,000 up on the ballot in 2024, about 21,000.
What we launched with the 50 State School Board Strategy is trying to build the infrastructure that will allow us to work in as many of those races as possible because we've seen really for decades, but especially in the last three years, the far right and the just straight-up Republican establishment institutions have built out a machine that is ready to fight for school boards everywhere.
That includes organizations like Moms for Liberty, the 1776 PAC Project, the Leadership Institute… which had just the most boring podcast about how to run for a school board… but also seminars and speakers like Ted Cruz training school board candidates. They're supporting protesters, they're harassing elected officials, they're scaring people out of running.
And when they win, which in a lot of cases they are because these races are often very low turnout and there isn't incredible infrastructure on the left to work on them, they're firing teachers and administrators, they're ending DEI programs, they're banning books, they're making schools dangerous for queer kids and kids of color. They're changing curriculums to make them incredibly dishonest. So we want to be there to fight back anywhere that public education is under attack, which unfortunately is everywhere.
Nir: So we'd love getting into the nitty-gritty of elections at “The Downballot” and the further into the weeds the better. Amanda, I would love it if you could walk us through just a little bit about the nuts and bolts about how this project came together. You mentioned there are some 24,000 races for school board up this year. How do you even begin researching that? How do you identify these races? How do you figure out how to even get on the ballot? What does the whole soup to nuts here about how this project is working?
Litman: Well, we're lucky we have really good partners in a lot of this work. People like the Pipeline Initiative, BallotReady, and others have been doing incredible research about where school board races happen in the first place. So that gives us a sense of the map. But one of the things we've been really intentional about, especially with school board races in particular, is we can't target preemptively. You're not going to know where the hotspots are until it's too late to field a candidate. So we're thinking about scaled recruitment work. Can we get just as many people as possible who generally share our values to think about running for a school board? Then we can start to identify where the best candidates are, where the hottest races might be, where the worst opposition is, knowing that more is more in this case.
Now, we also have been doing school board races now for about seven years. We've endorsed more than 340 election-related candidates, we've elected 150 and we've been experimenting with some different ways to get people trained for these offices. So for example, in Pennsylvania over the last year, we worked with a bunch of local partners including LEAD PA, Working Families Party PA, and a couple of others to host three intensive school board trainings. As part of the preparation for this pilot, they reviewed how and why, and the importance of running for the school board. 52% of the people who attended those trainings ended up filing to run for school board. And of every one of those 52% who were eligible for Run for Something's endorsement, we endorsed. 52% is an incredible conversion rate. Nothing is that high of a conversion rate for literally changing your life. So we want to do more programming like that.
We're thinking about campaigns like Banned Book Week, work that we did a couple of weeks ago. We're launching some stuff with influencers over the next couple of weeks. We're thinking also about how we can build resources for school board candidates specifically. In particular, one of the hesitations a lot of folks have about running for school board is that they're caregivers, often have kids under the age of 18, and they're parents. We really try and see candidates not as candidates first, but as people first and candidates second. So how can we support them through that? Whether that's working with partners like Vote Mama to help them become allowed to use campaign funds for childcare or creating community among parents running for office or caregivers running, thinking about that as a component of their identity.
Or thinking about message research. School board races are incredibly localized. The school board, say, in Philadelphia is going to be a very different conversation than that of Iowa or Blue Springs, Missouri, or Miami-Dade, and there's a lot of commonality there. So we want to make sure we can help candidates find the safe landing when issues get really tricky but also help them localize that conversation wherever possible. And then ultimately, making sure we have the compliance infrastructure we need to work on school board races, which is actually a thing that I didn't know a ton about until we started doing this work. But for example, we're working with a candidate for school board in Manchester, New Hampshire. In order to work most effectively with her, we had to set up a PAC in the city of Manchester.
Nir: Wow.
Litman: A whole bunch more legal paperwork we had to file and register, but it's worth it because that allows us to really engage with her in a meaningful way.
Nir: I imagine the answer to my next question could be really variable, but I imagine that folks ask you, what is the time commitment for running for a school board race? And also, what's the time of commitment if you win for serving on a typical school board? Are there good answers? I assume with error bars for that question or does it really depend?
Litman: It really depends on how big of a school board we're talking about. But generally, we tell folks that if you're going to run for any of these offices, you should expect it to be your full-time job outside your full-time job. So if you're working a nine to five, you're going to be campaigning five to the next morning's nine. It can be all-consuming and there will be an end date at a certain point like election day will come, and the campaigning will shift. As you serve, many of our folks have told us it can take anywhere from 10 hours a week to 40 hours a week or five hours a week. And then it will take as much as you're willing to give but we have worked with enough folks at this point that if you are say a new mom who's just won a position on a school board and is also thinking about how to balance your caregiving, we can connect you to a new mom who's gone through doing that and has learned some life hacks, so to speak.
Beard: So in terms of the strategic aspects of these school board races, we talked about Moms for Liberty, we talked about these aggressive far-right campaigns. Have we seen on the ground, what is the response from voters? And then when there are progressive candidates who are pushing back, how is that working? What are the best effective strategies for a progressive candidate that's running against the Moms for Liberty type opponent to be effective?
Litman: So a couple of different factors here. One, we have seen that Moms for Liberty is not as effective as they say they are. They have gone too far in many cases, and when there are effective candidates on the ballot against them, their win rate is under 50%. So that should give you at least a little bit of hope. There is a backlash to these people pushing book bans. There is a backlash to the people who are making places unsafe for LGBTQ kids and teenagers.
In 2022, we did some really interesting research to help our school board candidates. We wanted to gather some grounding on how people thought and felt, related to the experience of children in schools. We found that really what voters wanted to hear and what moved them the most was a message that focused on shared values, especially freedom.
So Moms For Liberty is on something in there. They want to hear about liberty. They wanted candidates to be really explicit about the role that race and class play. They wanted an explicit focus on the actual problems and solutions.
And we hear this anecdotally from our candidates now. They're like, I'm knocking on doors and people don't want to talk about book bans, they want to talk about teacher pay and facility funding and the actual stuff that school boards meaningfully have to get done. And they wanted to hear a clear focus on the extremism and the intent at hand of that extremism. They wanted to know that they were pushing this to divide us. They're pushing us to antagonize you. They're pushing us to distract from things that you really care about, but you're making sure your kids are free to learn, free to be safe, free to be themselves in the schools that we send them to. So we really wanted to help our candidates find that safe landing as it makes sense for their race.
Nir: So of course, we here at Daily Kos Elections, our whole purpose is devoted to the down-ballot, but compared to other down-ballot races, school board elections are almost criminally undercovered. I mean state legislature, by comparison, almost looks like the presidential race. It can be really hard to find information about a lot of contests and many races are of course nonpartisan. So you don't even have D or R labels to go by on the ballot. How do you guys help candidates to deal with those information problems? And also how do those candidates communicate with voters about the importance of these races and try to really break out of the pack and get attention for contests that often do not get any attention?
Litman: Well, we try to be really intentional about whose attention do they need. Do they need national media attention? Probably not. What they need are 400 or 800 or 1,400 voters in their community because most of these school board races are really small. You think about the LA School Board. Yeah, that's a lot of people. Miami School Board, that's a lot of people. 75% of school board races cost a thousand dollars or less, and 85% cost under $5,000. 87% I believe cost under $10,000. These races are tiny.
So what we really encourage school board candidates to do is be present in their community, knock doors, talk to voters, and show up where they are. Do not under-count someone, or underestimate someone's voice here, you don't know who the most influential people are going to be in these conversations.
But there is no amount of advertising or spending or even viral news story that can out-influence a conversation that you have in someone's home about something that is so deeply personal to them. Like the quality of their kids' education or "how good", quote-unquote, a school is. Because you think about it, how good or bad a school is is often understood as a shortcut for understanding how good or bad a place is to live and to work and to call home.
Now that, in and of itself, is a little problematic because there are a bunch of race and class and wealth equity issues there. But for better or for worse, people understand a good school district is a good place to live, so how can you make sure that people really understand this is how they can affect that?
Nir: So we're really talking about truly traditional retail politics that, like you were saying, the social media is not relevant. Advertising for a race with 400 or 800 voters, I mean, really not going to be relevant. We're talking about getting on the doors, pounding the pavement, talking to voters, having face-to-face conversations almost in a way, the way I think that people idealize politics with a real personal touch, not the impersonal mass media politics we've been used to for the last century.
Litman: It's why school board races are such effective training grounds, both for potential future leaders but also for activists, for volunteers, for donors. It's like a really good entry point. That’s something that the right has understood for a long time, and it's one of the reasons they've invested so much in these races, to begin with, is because if you want to get people fired up about what's happening in politics, a school board race is an incredible way to do so.
Beard: So before we let you go, we definitely want to talk a little bit about election 2023, which is less than two weeks away. Obviously, like you said, you have a bunch of Run for Something candidates running that are facing an election imminently. Are there a couple that you'd like to highlight for us, that are particularly interesting or to keep an eye on on election night, for our listeners?
Litman: I would love to. We have, I said earlier, 312 candidates on the ballot across the country, including some in Virginia where we're trying to make sure we can hold access to abortion in the last state in the south where it's still the case.
I'm rooting for Susanna Gibson who's running for House of Delegates in District 57. It's one of the most competitive districts in Virginia. She's a nurse practitioner who signed up to run for office after the Dobbs decision. Fierce advocate for reproductive health, for women's rights for LGBTQA rights. She is dealing with some just unbelievable bullshit from the Virginia Republican Party who is, as of this week, mailing explicit photos of her to voters to try and undermine her candidacy because they know that if she wins, she'll stand up for abortion access. We've got Susanna's back.
We're looking at Lily Franklin, also House of Delegates in Virginia. She's a former teacher. She's a fifth-generation Virginian, a working-class family in Roanoke Valley. Her family has struggled with addiction and substance abuse issues. She's amazing.
We have Michael Feggans in Virginia Beach. He served 20 years in the Air Force. He's running to flip that seat. Kimberly Adams, also a House of Delegates candidate, running in Virginia. She's a working single mom who got her MBA. She's knocking doors, talking to voters about her personal experience with pregnancy loss and having to get an abortion procedure afterward and how this is not an abstraction for her.
Madison Irving, who's a school board candidate in Virginia. He's running against a Moms for Liberty candidate. He would flip the school board control and he would be the deciding vote for it. He's a current teacher. He's a high school football coach. I think that's really cool.
Nir: What part of the state is that?
Litman: Henrico County.
Outside of Virginia, Amelia McMillan is running for school board in York County, Pennsylvania. It's a deep red district. She's running to replace some extremist officials who in 2020 enacted a book ban. They've been advocating for really harmful policies. She was born and raised in the community. She's part of a slate of candidates that also includes another Run for Something endorsed person, Benjamin Walker.
In Kansas, Claire Reagan, who's running for school board in Olathe, Kansas. It's a place where hot-button issues and misinformation have really taken hold. She wants to make sure that the school district is actually providing resources to students.
One more, if you'll grant me. Jaime Martinez is running for school board in North Allegheny in Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh. He's a 21-year-old college senior. He's the youngest candidate in his race. He grew up in the school district. He was senior class president in 2020, so he really saw the impact of the pandemic firsthand on lost learning. The school district is on its fourth superintendent in four years. It has a 6-3 Republican majority. Jaime is aiming to flip one of the six GOP-held seats. He's running along a couple of other candidates as a joint slate. He's just awesome. And the kind of person you want helping govern a school district, who really understands what the students are facing.
Nir: I absolutely love hearing that broad-based litany of candidates running across the country. Amanda, you need to tell our listeners where they can learn more about Run for Something, and how they can find out about the candidates you're supporting. And if they're interested in running for something themselves, what they should do.
Litman: Okay, so let's start with the last question first. If you're thinking about running for office, especially if you're thinking in 2024 or 2025 or 2028 or 2032, or if you're thinking about thinking about thinking about it, it is never too early and very rarely too late to get started. So you can go to runforwhat.net. You can enter your name, and your information, and you'll see all the offices available to you this year. You'll start getting information from our team. You'll get invited to webinars. We'll talk you through how to file. You don't need to know what you want to run for yet, or even if you want to run, it's just telling us you're interested and we will help you.
If you want to learn more about volunteering or working with any of our candidates, or how you can support us with a donation, which is always appreciated, you can go to runforsomething.net and you can find us on social media. We are runforsomethingnow on Instagram and Threads, and Run for Something on whatever we call Twitter now and Facebook.
Nir: And what about you, Amanda? Can folks also find you on social media?
Litman: Unfortunately, I am not very much on Twitter anymore at AmandaLitman, but Amandalitm on Instagram and Threads, and am unfortunately forcing myself to make TikToks every once in a while so you can find me there too.
Nir: Well, we have been talking with Amanda Litman, the co-founder and co-executive director of Run for Something. Amanda, this has been a fantastic conversation. I am super excited to see what your school board project brings and we look forward to having you on in the future once again to hear more about it.
Litman: Always happy to. Thanks. Thanks, guys.
Beard: That's all from us this week. Thanks to Amanda Litman for joining us. The Downballot comes out every Thursday everywhere you listen to podcasts. You can reach out to us by emailing thedownballot@dailykos.com.
If you haven't already, please subscribe to The Downballot on Apple Podcast and leave us a five-star rating and review. Thanks to our editor Trever Jones, and we'll be back next week with a new episode.
Embedded Content
We're also joined this week by Amanda Litman, the co-founder of Run for Something, which is devoted to encouraging young, diverse progressives to seek local office. Her group just launched a new project specifically targeting school board races, an enormous battleground that gets far too little attention. Litman tells us how Run for Something recruits candidates and advises them on the challenges unique to school board elections, including the importance of retail campaigning and how to push back against attacks from Moms for Liberty-type extremists.
Transcript lightly edited for clarity.
David Beard: Hello and welcome. I'm David Beard, Contributing Editor for Daily Kos Elections.
David Nir: And I'm David Nir, Political Director of Daily Kos. “The Downballot” is a weekly podcast dedicated to the many elections that take place below the presidency, from the Senate to city council. Please subscribe to “The Downballot” on Apple Podcasts and leave us a five-star rating and review.
Beard: There's white smoke over the Capitol. It seems that we finally have a speaker again.
Nir: Yes, Mike Johnson, the name you don't know, is now speaker of the House, and we are going to be talking all about the vote that led to his extremely unlikely ascension, and the problems that he still poses for House Republicans. Then we are going to wrap up our discussion from last week about North Carolina's extreme new Republican gerrymanders and the impacts that they are having on other races in the state, including next year's all-important race for governor.
And afterward, we are joined by Amanda Litman, who is the co-founder of Run For Something and is speaking with us today about a new project designed to help elect young diverse progressives to school boards all around the country. This is a topic that is woefully under-covered, so we are extremely eager to dive in. Let's get rolling.
Beard, I don't know what your sense is of things, but even though we are now less than two weeks away from the November 7 elections, I kind of feel like the GOP insanity in the House of Representatives has sucked up so much oxygen and also maybe discouraged folks from wanting to even try to make campaign news, just because it's so difficult to get attention, that we've been in a weird kind of lull.
Beard: Yeah, I think definitely, particularly at the Senate and congressional level, everything has been so focused on this insane speakership weeks-long absence, and now election, that it's been little news anywhere else. I think obviously if you're in one of the 2023 states, you're getting some news about, if you're in Pennsylvania or Kentucky or Virginia, you're getting some news around those races specifically. But at a more national level, it's been all speakership all the time. It's hard for anything else to break through.
Nir: Yeah. Well, I know that Republicans are extremely relieved to finally have this nightmare over, but I kind of feel like they have walked into just another huge set of problems of their own making. Last week we talked about all of these ding-dongs in these vulnerable districts who voted for Jim Jordan, and they had that on their permanent record, but it's not like Mike Johnson is any better. And yeah, Mike ... Hold on a minute. Mike Johnson is the speaker. Wait, who?
Beard: Yeah. I'm still trying to come to terms with the idea that Mike Johnson is somebody I should know and care about because before he got however many votes against Emmer in the previous race before Emmer dropped out, I could not have picked him out of a lineup. I would've expected that was a made-up name of a congressman that somebody just thought of because they were in a hurry. They were like, "Mike Johnson. Yeah, yeah, that's a congressman." Right? But now he's the third-highest official in the federal government, so I guess we're going to learn a lot about him, and so far what I've seen is not good.
Nir: Yeah. Mike Johnson, it sounds like the median name for a white Republican member of Congress. But he is not a median member of Congress by any stretch of the imagination, and he's unknown right now, but that is going to change because he is just as freaking extreme as Jim Jordan. Jim Jordan liked to put himself out there and really make a name for himself as this bomb-throwing a-hole. But Johnson, maybe his demeanor is a bit different, but his views are exactly the same. He voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election, so now we have an insurrectionist, as you said, Beard, the third-highest elected official in the federal government. He voted against recognizing same-sex marriage. We're now in 2023, and he's one of these reactionary Republicans who does not support same-sex marriage, but also, that bill to codify same-sex marriage also recognized interracial marriage, which of course in living memory was not legal in many parts of the country, and so Republicans are voting against interracial marriage. It just freaking blows my mind.
Last month, Mike Johnson voted to shut down the government. This happened just last month. He voted against the 45-day continuing resolution that ended Kevin McCarthy's career in one way or another. So come November 17, the government's going to run out of money yet again, so what's he going to do then? Are we going to have another shutdown? That always works out really well for Republicans. He's voted against recent Ukraine funding bills.
This gets back to the whole Brian Fitzpatrick thing that we were talking about last week. He represents this very heavily Ukrainian-American district in the Philadelphia suburbs, and he has been like Mr. Ukraine. Good for him for being out there and supporting our allies in this war against Vladimir Putin, but he just went and voted for Mike Johnson who opposes ... His number one priority on top of everything, he supports a nationwide ban on abortion. This is a simple, very clear, and easy thing to explain to people; Mike Johnson voted to ban abortion everywhere in the country, period, end of story.
Beard: And that's something that I think Democrats were going to be pushing regardless. Obviously, abortion has been a huge point since the Dobbs decision, as we've talked about many times on the show, but I think in particular now that the speaker of the House has such an extreme and aggressive stance on it, it makes it that much more believable to regular voters because you can sort of make this argument and then the Republican you're running against might try to make some sort of counter-argument. “They're not that extreme. They just want to do some sort of compromise or something.”
But now you can point to a lot of these incumbent Republicans and be like, "Then why did you vote for this guy who has this extreme zero exceptions universal ban bill if you want some sort of compromise position?" That doesn't make sense, and it shows folks the falsehood behind these Republican attempts to get out of their own way on abortion.
Nir: Yeah. These super PACs can all run ads slamming the Fitzpatricks of the world and the David Valadaos, et cetera, et cetera, because the vote for Johnson was unanimous, and Fitzpatrick or whoever can whine as much as he likes, but the TV stations won't take those ads down because he voted for the guy who wants a ban on abortion. And it's not just the abortion ban though. It's the arguments around it, and I feel like if you probe just a little bit beneath the surface, their views go from being just completely hateful and misogynistic to being downright weird. And here is a clip from Mike Johnson speaking at the House Judiciary Committee explaining one of his rationales for opposing Roe v. Wade.
Nir:
I thought that the whole reason these people opposed abortion rights is because, oh, they're murdering babies, but Mike Johnson is also saying that abortion is bad because of Social Security and Medicare, that we don't have enough "able-bodied workers", and if only we didn't allow abortion, we would have a larger workforce able to support entitlement programs. That feels completely, completely bonkers to me for two reasons. One is shouldn't they oppose abortion even if it had nothing to do with saving Medicare and Social Security? Even if it harmed Medicare's finances, wouldn't they still say, "Well, abortion is still wrong?" Okay, that's A. B, this is a fantastic argument for increased legal immigration. If you're worried about the size of our workforce supporting older Americans, hell yeah, there are jabillions of people who want to come here and work, work hard, pay taxes, and be law-abiding citizens. Let's welcome them in, Mike Johnson. Maybe we can find grounds for a compromise
Beard: Somehow I doubt that. I doubt those are the workers that Mike Johnson is looking for to fill in the workforce of America. But I do think this gets to an underlying issue that we haven't talked much about, which is Johnson also chaired the Republican Study Committee, which puts out budgets that have extreme cuts to programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
And so I think this sort of very strange argument, I totally agree, it's a very strange argument, is trying to blame Democrats for them having to cut Social Security and Medicare. They're like, "Well, if you hadn't made abortion legal, we'd have more workers and I wouldn't have to cut Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, so you're forcing me to pass all these billions of dollars in cuts in these entitlement programs because you made abortion legal," which is, again, totally crazy, but is trying to square all of his extreme positions into one argument.
Nir: I think that's a really good way of looking at things, which just gets back to my point. These guys' views are so weird. Imagine explaining that to voters on the campaign trail, like yeah, sure, maybe at a GOP candidate forum they're all nodding along, but to normal voters, we have to cut Medicare because abortion is legal? That's just complete lunacy.
Beard: And I think this goes back more broadly to a lot of Republican positions when you try to really dig into them, are very incoherent. The same thing is true around, we just talked about immigration. They have totally incoherent beliefs and desires around immigration, so they don't actually want some sort of coherent policy to take to voters. They just want to scream about what's the headline on Fox News and then get people to vote for them that way. The policy part is less important, which is why you get these totally crazy arguments.
Nir: There is another aspect to the GOP elevating Mike Johnson to this position. That still sounds so weird to talk about, Speaker Johnson, but he has been in office for a very short amount of time. He was only first elected in 2016, and he has basically no track record when it comes to raising serious money. Kevin McCarthy sucked at everything, except he could bring in the big bucks. If you add in all his various campaign committees, joint fundraising committees, leadership PACs, super PACs, et cetera, et cetera, we are talking hundreds of millions of dollars raised for fellow Republicans over the course of his career. Johnson, by contrast, has raised in his time in office a little over $4 million. That is just pitiful. And now of course Johnson is in a safe seat in northwest Louisiana, but McCarthy's also in a safe seat, and McCarthy understood that the road to the speakership is paved with greenbacks.
Johnson somehow skipped over that whole process, which is very, very strange. I'm not sure that any other speaker has made it to the top post in that way, and now the fact that he is speaker now means that money will start to flow to him that no one ever would've given him before. But Republicans have just proven how weak the speakership is, and especially with Democrats still in control of the Senate, Biden still in the White House. If you are a K Street lobbyist or a well-financed PAC from an industry group and you give a bunch of money to Mike Johnson, is he really going to be able to get your priorities through Congress the way things are right now? I don't know, man. I think he's going to really be almost starting from scratch in terms of building these fundraising relationships, and we're already halfway through an election cycle.
Beard: And who's to say he's going to be speaker for the remainder of this Congress? I mean, maybe, but we've certainly seen that Republicans are more than happy to chuck over a speaker and move on to the next guy; they've done it a lot of times in the past few weeks. But I do agree that this, I think, shows more than people might even think because there are lots of back-bench representatives who get elected, they're in a safe seat and they just don't raise a bunch of money year after year because they don't face any tough challengers, and that's fine for them.
That's probably hundreds of members of Congress, but people who have leadership aspirations, even when they're not in leadership, they have leadership PACs; there is money, they donate to freshmen, to challengers they think might become congressman and congresswoman in the next Congress. This is a tried and true method, and Johnson hasn't really done that even as he was chair of the Republican Study Committee, so he's held some leadership-esque positions. You'd think there'd be more of a fundraising track record here, and there's really not. As you said, he'll certainly raise money. Every speaker raises money, but some speakers are better at it than others. It certainly seems like he's likely not going to be great at it the way that McCarthy was very good at it.
Nir: That all puts me in mind of another Johnson. I'm talking about LBJ here. One of the reasons why, maybe, I don't know, the reason why LBJ was so successful as a legislative leader in getting shit done in a way that almost no one has ever matched, maybe except for Nancy Pelosi, is that he had deep, long-term relationships with many, many other folks in Congress who owed him favors.
And a key reason they owed him favors was because he was a phenomenal fundraiser. If you read Caro, you can read all about this. If you're listening to “The Downballot,” you should definitely read Robert Caro's biography of LBJ. He was excellent at raising money, particularly from Texas oilmen, and giving it to vulnerable Democrats around the country. By the time he was Senate majority leader and then later president, everyone owed him something. And that was critical to his success.
Johnson, Mike Johnson to clarify, is coming into the speakership and nobody owes him jack. When it comes time for him to lean on someone, that's like, there's no there there. How do you get something done when no one owes you anything? You owe them.
Beard: Yeah. And not to get too into the weeds of this process, but really the reason that he became speaker is because he managed to get second place against Emmer in that race when I think it was him and Donalds and Hern were the other representatives who were the more conservative side who were all running against Emmer. And Emmer had first place. Everybody knew he'd get a majority of the votes and then not be able to get 217. And so then when Emmer dropped out, Johnson became the next alternative just because he got a few more votes than Donalds and Hern in one of those earlier rounds of votes.
And so that was maybe 50 representatives who voted for him in that race that turned him into the front-runner that then turned him into the speaker. Because at that point, everyone was so tired of it on the Republican side, we saw everybody just give up and vote for him at the end.
The number of people who got him elected is very, very small. And I think you'll have a little bit of leeway in the next few weeks just because Republicans are so embarrassed by how this all went down, and they know they need to not immediately jump into another disaster. I think there'll be a short window where he'll be able to have a lot of leeway, but I think that'll end pretty quickly because Republicans, they love to just blow things up.
Nir: You're exactly right. And I also have this strong feeling that Mike Johnson is now speaker because he never really managed to piss anyone off because he was never in a leadership position. McCarthy, Jordan, Scalise, Emmer: they were all top leaders of the House Republican Caucus in one way, shape, or form over the years.
And in the LBJ days, being in a leadership role meant that you would fill up your favor bank over the years. In today's Republican politics, it seems like being a party leader is simply just a way to get people to hate you and for them to put you on their enemies list. Yeah, Mike Johnson is coming in without any kind of favor bank, but he is also coming in without any kind of enemy bank. But like you said, Beard, that is not going to last for long.
Beard: Yeah. The Republicans are so into being the anti-establishment party that the leaders of their own caucuses become the establishment that they must revolt against inevitably. It's almost like a cycle that they can't stop because, by definition, the leader of the Republican caucus is the establishment. They define themselves as against the establishment, particularly the House Freedom Caucus. And so they will have to take down Johnson eventually because he's the establishment. And then so on and so forth in the future cycles.
Nir: Well, that concludes the abortion-related portion of the program. Now we're onto the North Carolina-related portion of “The Downballot” because we have an update on the GOP's new gerrymanders that we talked about last week. Beard, obviously I'm going to hand this one over to you.
Beard: Yeah. Obviously, North Carolina didn't stop having politics in the past few weeks while the speakership disaster was going on. The North Carolina Republicans took this opportunity to, as we said last week, introduce new gerrymandered maps into the legislature. And now that they introduced those maps, a week later they've passed them all. Because why would you want to spend time debating over the maps trying to get them as good as possible for North Carolina voters when you've already perfected them for the North Carolina Republican Party? Which is the important people in this case.
They went and passed through these GOP gerrymanders for the congressional map we talked about last week. There were two maps that they presented. They ended up going with the one that has 10 Republican districts, three Democratic districts, and one competitive district. That's the current representative, Don Davis, who is a Democrat. He'll have a very difficult but doable reelection in his northeastern North Carolina seat.
But that means the other three Democrats who were targeted, Jeff Jackson, Kathy Manning, and Wiley Nickel, they likely have no real path to reelection. It's possible they may run for another office. We talked about Jeff Jackson potentially running for Attorney General. That's been rumored for a while. But the seats have been so chopped up and made so Republican it's really hard to see, even in a Democratic year, a Democrat winning any of these seats.
The state legislative gerrymanders also were introduced last Wednesday. We didn't get a chance to talk much about those, but they've also already been passed into law. They give the GOP veto-proof majorities in a neutral year. That's 60% in North Carolina, not the two-thirds that it is at federally and in a lot of states.
They would control at least 60% of seats in a neutral year. Democrats could conceivably overturn their supermajorities if they have a good year, and get them below 60%. That, with the governor's race, would at least give Democrats a modicum of power in the state, but they have no chance to have majorities of their own under these maps. It would just be a bridge too far to expect Democrats to be able to win any kind of majority in either state legislature as long as these maps are in place.
Now, I would expect lawsuits to come against all of these maps. The ones with the best likelihood of success are probably Voting Rights Act-based lawsuits against the state legislative maps, which could potentially affect a few districts on those maps, change them, and probably make them more beneficial for Democrats. But the timeline there is very unknown. It could easily take years for that to happen.
Nir: And it's also possible that the Alabama VRA case that we have talked so much about might be the high-water mark for section two of the Voting Rights Act. It may be that the Supreme Court finally decides to take an axe to what remains of the VRA. And this is also whether or not any suits succeed. This is also just classic GOP standard operating procedure.
They are more than happy to get one, two, three or more cycles out of illegal maps. And then, in the year ending in six or the year ending in eight in a decade, get told, "Oh, oh, you have to redraw your maps." Okay, so fine. They won unwarranted victories for a number of years, every decade. It's just a classic case over and over again of justice delayed being justice denied.
Beard: Yeah. And as we've talked about, long-term, Democrats are looking to win back the North Carolina Supreme Court, but they've got to win back a number of races over the next few years to do so. Or potentially obviously if Democrats could pass federal legislation barring partisan gerrymandering. But both of those are long-term projects. Looking towards 2024, there's a Supreme Court seat to defend that's obviously extremely important for Democrats in North Carolina. And then they're going to have to run the best races they can under these maps most likely.
Nir: And also federal legislation, congress has the power to outlaw congressional gerrymandering. But they don't have the power to outlaw legislative gerrymandering. Even if we pass a great bill through Congress, and we absolutely should, it should be our number one priority, there are still those legislative gerrymanders. And one thing we should add is that under the North Carolina constitution, the Governor does not have the power to veto most redistricting plans, including for Congress and the state legislature.
Even though Roy Cooper Democrat is the governor, he can't veto the maps. Though even if he could Republicans have those Ill-gotten gerrymandered supermajorities so they'd be able to overturn his veto anyway. It just really feels absolutely endless there. And this is the definition of entrenchment.
Beard: Yeah, and of course, we talked about Wisconsin last week. There's a long road. We've seen Wisconsin hopefully come close to the end of that long road where the new progressive majority is going to overturn the gerrymandered maps for the Wisconsin State legislature. And that's the same road North Carolina is going to be traveling now. And we just have to put in that long-term work to overcome these.
Meanwhile, these redistricted maps are already having an effect on the North Carolina governor's race, where former Congressman Mark Walker is dropping out of the race, which he really didn't have much of a chance at any way at this point, to run in the gerrymandered 6th district. Now in 2020, when the old North Carolina GOP gerrymander was first struck down, Walker decided not to run for reelection because the un-gerrymandered district was Democratic-leaning and he didn't want to deal with that. But now that the gerrymander is back, he can parachute right back into something close to his old seat, and again, not have to worry about talking to democratic voters or winning over independents or anything like that.
Meanwhile though, in the governor's race with Walker's exit, we've seen businessman Bill Graham jump into the GOP side to challenge the front-runner on that side, which is Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson. Graham has $5 million that he's promised to use to self-fund his campaign. He's got some support in the GOP among those who believe that Robinson is too politically damaged to win a general election, which is absolutely potentially the case. But Robinson is too well known and really popular among the GOP base in North Carolina so it's hard to imagine Graham actually getting much traction. But we'll see.
State Treasurer Dale Folwell is also still running for some reason, but he hasn't gotten any traction. I don't think anybody's mentioned his name in months. If Graham can't make a move quickly, I think it's going to remain Robinson's for the taking.
Nir: Yeah, and that primary is on the early side. I don't know. It feels like establishment GOP attempts to stop Jeff Landry in Louisiana. Except there that was mostly business interests, not wanting to have to deal with an unpredictable maniac like Landry. Obviously, as we talked about, Landry has already won the election as governor of Louisiana. North Carolina is a swing state, obviously a very different sort of situation.
It's amazing with Robinson. He is so disgusting and I feel does not get nearly the amount of attention that he ought to, even though every week there is yet another new article about the horrifying crap that he said. Jewish Insider's Matthew Kassel just published a piece on Wednesday, unearthing even more social media posts from Mark Robinson quoting Hitler, because that's what you do if you're a totally normal candidate. You quote Adolf Hitler when you're running for Congress.
And he compared the toppling of a Confederate statue to Kristallnacht. Fuck you, dude. Are you fucking kidding me? How dare you even bring the Holocaust into this? But this is the way these maniacs think.
Beard: Yeah. No, even for the modern GOP Trumpist Wing of the party, Robinson is really far out there. Which is why, understandably, there are these people in the GOP who are concerned that he's going to lose the general election next year. And I think all of these articles that are coming out now, obviously they're not getting the attention they deserve, but I think that they will appear in a lot of TV ads next summer and next fall after he's won the primary election, courtesy of Josh Stein and the Democratic Governor's Association. I'm pretty sure by the end of the election, people in North Carolina will be aware of all the crazy things that he said.
Nir: But it will be Stein who makes them aware because the problem for Republicans is that they know this stuff doesn't play with normal voters, but all of the hits on Robinson for all the horrible shit he said, they can't use that in a GOP primary. That doesn't make for a good attack ad. Not at all. How do they even stop him? What's the argument? What does the anti-Robinson ad in a Republican primary even look like? I can't even really begin to figure that out
Beard: Yeah. And to make a unified theory of the Republican Party for a second.
Nir: Yes, I really want to hear this.
Beard: And to go back to my anti-establishment point from earlier, it's the same problem where attacking someone for saying crazy things is the wrong direction because you're attacking somebody for being anti-establishment. Even if the establishment is normal people who aren't crazy and the anti-establishment is crazy people, you're still left with, you can't go after Mark Robinson because then you're just part of the establishment preventing the anti-establishment of Mark Robinson from taking power.
It's the same problem we've seen at the presidential level where everyone keeps trying to attack Trump from the right for Trump's not conservative enough because if you're just like, "Oh, Trump's crazy. Trump's done all these terrible things," they're just like, "Oh, well, you're just the establishment." It's this whole... The most important thing in the Republican Party is to be anti-establishment. So everything has to be attacked as the establishment because you can't attack in any other direction, which means, yeah, it's next to impossible to attack somebody as crazy as Mark Robinson because he is the very definition of anti-establishment because he says crazy things.
Nir: Beard, I think that this grand unified theory of the GOP has tremendous explanatory power. I absolutely love it. I'm also horrified by it and terrified but this is a good one. This is a good note to play us out on.
Joining us this week on The Downballot is Amanda Litman, who is the co-founder and co-executive director of Run for Something, an awesome organization that recruits and supports young diverse progressives in all 50 states. Amanda, welcome back to “The Downballot.”
Amanda Litman: Thank you for having me.
Nir: Amanda, you actually, believe it or not, were the very first guest we ever had on “The Downballot” from outside the Daily Kos organization when we launched the show last year. I haven't forgotten that. I am still incredibly grateful and it is really wonderful to be able to talk with you once more.
Litman: Well, I'm excited because as you know, downballot offices and downballot politics is my whole shtick, so I'm ready. Let's do it.
Nir: Let's do it. So for folks who maybe didn't hear that episode, which did come out quite a while ago after all, why don't you just give us a little background about Run For Something and then maybe talk about what candidate recruitment has looked like so far in the 2023, '24 cycle.
Litman: So for those who aren't familiar, Run for Something was launched on Trump's inauguration day in 2017. We recruit and support young, diverse progressives running for local office all across the country. Young is folks 40 and under, diverse; we’re particularly looking for women, people of color, people from underrepresented backgrounds, local office for us that's state house, state senate, city council, school board, library board.
Progressives, that's people who generally share progressive values, but we know that a progressive say in New York is going to be a little different than a progressive in Iowa or Alaska. So we think about this expansively. We have in the lifetime of the organization now identified more than 140,000 young people all across the country who've raised their hands to say they want to run, including nearly 14,000 in 2023 alone. That is both a lot and admittedly not as much as in years prior, which I think gives us a little bit of context of how excitement and interest in running for office have changed since Trump won back in 2017. But that being said, it is not an off-year for us. Run for Something has 312 endorsed candidates on the ballot in just a couple of weeks, half women, half people of color, 25% LGBTQ, across more than half the country who are absolutely amazing and we expect to have hundreds, hundreds more on the ballot in 2024.
Beard: So obviously you've been doing this for a few years now, and I'm just curious, I'm sure there was a big surge during the Trump era. How have you seen interest come and go over the Biden years so far and now into 2023?
Litman: Well, in the beginning of the Biden years, we saw a continued interest in running, and in particular after the Dobbs decision. Last year there was a huge surge in folks signing up to think about running for office in particular to protect abortion access. Now the numbers have scaled back just a little. We still get between 200 to 300 people per week signing up to run for office. But one of the things that we've really been intentional about is not just waiting for them to come to us, but really building systems and outreach to allow us to go to them. So through our Clerk Work program, which is our program to recruit people running for local election administrator roles to make sure democracy is preserved from the place where it's really at risk in these city councils and city clerks and county clerks who want to undermine the process.
We've done things like hundreds and thousands of cold text messages and phone calls to people asking them to run for office. In Wisconsin in particular, we were able to get about 130 people on the ballot within just a couple of weeks, more than half of whom ended up winning elections in April, 15 against insurrectionists who were on the ballot for things like town council and county clerk that actually administer these races. That's people who wouldn't have run if we hadn't sent them a text message during a Sunday football game saying, have you thought about getting on the ballot? So we really learned a lot over the last year and I think that helps shape our program moving forward.
Nir: I'm super curious about that because at Daily Kos we ask people to do all sorts of things, whether it's sign a petition, make a donation, or volunteer for a campaign. It seems like running for office is about the highest level ask you could possibly imagine. So how did you figure out your target universe? And maybe talk through us a little bit about some sample folks maybe from Wisconsin or maybe a prototypical person who gets this text message during that football game and their response and how it goes from the text message all the way to qualifying for the ballot.
Litman: Well, we're using the voter file to help identify people who are likely aligned with our values, but from there and then looking again at some geographic targeting for where there might be open races or opportunities to field candidates that are pro-democracy or who share our values in that particular race. But from there, it's really just asking, "Have you ever thought about running for office? Would you like to have a conversation?" Anyone who said, "Yes," or, "Maybe," got looped in with an organizer on the ground to sit down for coffee.
The thing with candidate recruitment we have found is that it is very much not like volunteering or voting. It is a giant shift, not just in your maybe career or way of life, but in your identity. You go from a person who cares, to a person whose name is on the ballot to maybe elected official or politician. Like, the way you become a writer is by writing. The way you become a painter is by painting. The way you become a candidate is by running for office. It's not predetermined when you're born. So I think the thing that we really love about working with our candidates is they are all so different, but the thing they share is a real commitment to solving a problem and a willingness to do the work.
Beard: So one of the new big projects that Run for Something just announced that we really wanted to talk to you about is the 50 State School Board Strategy targeted specifically to combat a lot of what we've seen out of groups like Moms for Liberty and these other far-right groups targeting school boards. So can you tell us a little bit about what you've seen with these school board races over the past couple of years and why this is so necessary?
Litman: As a relatively new parent, I am obsessed with our school board work. As I think about where my kid is going to go to school in a couple of years, it's become even more obvious to me how important this is, not that I needed to have a kid to think that, but it has become more personal. There are more than 80,000 elected school board positions across the country. Something I don't think people realize. Of half a million elected offices in the United States, almost 20% of them are school board races. And a fifth to a quarter of those happen any given year, half of those happen in November, the other half happen throughout the calendar. That's a long way of saying that there are always school board races happening somewhere in the country. In 2023, there's about 24,000 up on the ballot in 2024, about 21,000.
What we launched with the 50 State School Board Strategy is trying to build the infrastructure that will allow us to work in as many of those races as possible because we've seen really for decades, but especially in the last three years, the far right and the just straight-up Republican establishment institutions have built out a machine that is ready to fight for school boards everywhere.
That includes organizations like Moms for Liberty, the 1776 PAC Project, the Leadership Institute… which had just the most boring podcast about how to run for a school board… but also seminars and speakers like Ted Cruz training school board candidates. They're supporting protesters, they're harassing elected officials, they're scaring people out of running.
And when they win, which in a lot of cases they are because these races are often very low turnout and there isn't incredible infrastructure on the left to work on them, they're firing teachers and administrators, they're ending DEI programs, they're banning books, they're making schools dangerous for queer kids and kids of color. They're changing curriculums to make them incredibly dishonest. So we want to be there to fight back anywhere that public education is under attack, which unfortunately is everywhere.
Nir: So we'd love getting into the nitty-gritty of elections at “The Downballot” and the further into the weeds the better. Amanda, I would love it if you could walk us through just a little bit about the nuts and bolts about how this project came together. You mentioned there are some 24,000 races for school board up this year. How do you even begin researching that? How do you identify these races? How do you figure out how to even get on the ballot? What does the whole soup to nuts here about how this project is working?
Litman: Well, we're lucky we have really good partners in a lot of this work. People like the Pipeline Initiative, BallotReady, and others have been doing incredible research about where school board races happen in the first place. So that gives us a sense of the map. But one of the things we've been really intentional about, especially with school board races in particular, is we can't target preemptively. You're not going to know where the hotspots are until it's too late to field a candidate. So we're thinking about scaled recruitment work. Can we get just as many people as possible who generally share our values to think about running for a school board? Then we can start to identify where the best candidates are, where the hottest races might be, where the worst opposition is, knowing that more is more in this case.
Now, we also have been doing school board races now for about seven years. We've endorsed more than 340 election-related candidates, we've elected 150 and we've been experimenting with some different ways to get people trained for these offices. So for example, in Pennsylvania over the last year, we worked with a bunch of local partners including LEAD PA, Working Families Party PA, and a couple of others to host three intensive school board trainings. As part of the preparation for this pilot, they reviewed how and why, and the importance of running for the school board. 52% of the people who attended those trainings ended up filing to run for school board. And of every one of those 52% who were eligible for Run for Something's endorsement, we endorsed. 52% is an incredible conversion rate. Nothing is that high of a conversion rate for literally changing your life. So we want to do more programming like that.
We're thinking about campaigns like Banned Book Week, work that we did a couple of weeks ago. We're launching some stuff with influencers over the next couple of weeks. We're thinking also about how we can build resources for school board candidates specifically. In particular, one of the hesitations a lot of folks have about running for school board is that they're caregivers, often have kids under the age of 18, and they're parents. We really try and see candidates not as candidates first, but as people first and candidates second. So how can we support them through that? Whether that's working with partners like Vote Mama to help them become allowed to use campaign funds for childcare or creating community among parents running for office or caregivers running, thinking about that as a component of their identity.
Or thinking about message research. School board races are incredibly localized. The school board, say, in Philadelphia is going to be a very different conversation than that of Iowa or Blue Springs, Missouri, or Miami-Dade, and there's a lot of commonality there. So we want to make sure we can help candidates find the safe landing when issues get really tricky but also help them localize that conversation wherever possible. And then ultimately, making sure we have the compliance infrastructure we need to work on school board races, which is actually a thing that I didn't know a ton about until we started doing this work. But for example, we're working with a candidate for school board in Manchester, New Hampshire. In order to work most effectively with her, we had to set up a PAC in the city of Manchester.
Nir: Wow.
Litman: A whole bunch more legal paperwork we had to file and register, but it's worth it because that allows us to really engage with her in a meaningful way.
Nir: I imagine the answer to my next question could be really variable, but I imagine that folks ask you, what is the time commitment for running for a school board race? And also, what's the time of commitment if you win for serving on a typical school board? Are there good answers? I assume with error bars for that question or does it really depend?
Litman: It really depends on how big of a school board we're talking about. But generally, we tell folks that if you're going to run for any of these offices, you should expect it to be your full-time job outside your full-time job. So if you're working a nine to five, you're going to be campaigning five to the next morning's nine. It can be all-consuming and there will be an end date at a certain point like election day will come, and the campaigning will shift. As you serve, many of our folks have told us it can take anywhere from 10 hours a week to 40 hours a week or five hours a week. And then it will take as much as you're willing to give but we have worked with enough folks at this point that if you are say a new mom who's just won a position on a school board and is also thinking about how to balance your caregiving, we can connect you to a new mom who's gone through doing that and has learned some life hacks, so to speak.
Beard: So in terms of the strategic aspects of these school board races, we talked about Moms for Liberty, we talked about these aggressive far-right campaigns. Have we seen on the ground, what is the response from voters? And then when there are progressive candidates who are pushing back, how is that working? What are the best effective strategies for a progressive candidate that's running against the Moms for Liberty type opponent to be effective?
Litman: So a couple of different factors here. One, we have seen that Moms for Liberty is not as effective as they say they are. They have gone too far in many cases, and when there are effective candidates on the ballot against them, their win rate is under 50%. So that should give you at least a little bit of hope. There is a backlash to these people pushing book bans. There is a backlash to the people who are making places unsafe for LGBTQ kids and teenagers.
In 2022, we did some really interesting research to help our school board candidates. We wanted to gather some grounding on how people thought and felt, related to the experience of children in schools. We found that really what voters wanted to hear and what moved them the most was a message that focused on shared values, especially freedom.
So Moms For Liberty is on something in there. They want to hear about liberty. They wanted candidates to be really explicit about the role that race and class play. They wanted an explicit focus on the actual problems and solutions.
And we hear this anecdotally from our candidates now. They're like, I'm knocking on doors and people don't want to talk about book bans, they want to talk about teacher pay and facility funding and the actual stuff that school boards meaningfully have to get done. And they wanted to hear a clear focus on the extremism and the intent at hand of that extremism. They wanted to know that they were pushing this to divide us. They're pushing us to antagonize you. They're pushing us to distract from things that you really care about, but you're making sure your kids are free to learn, free to be safe, free to be themselves in the schools that we send them to. So we really wanted to help our candidates find that safe landing as it makes sense for their race.
Nir: So of course, we here at Daily Kos Elections, our whole purpose is devoted to the down-ballot, but compared to other down-ballot races, school board elections are almost criminally undercovered. I mean state legislature, by comparison, almost looks like the presidential race. It can be really hard to find information about a lot of contests and many races are of course nonpartisan. So you don't even have D or R labels to go by on the ballot. How do you guys help candidates to deal with those information problems? And also how do those candidates communicate with voters about the importance of these races and try to really break out of the pack and get attention for contests that often do not get any attention?
Litman: Well, we try to be really intentional about whose attention do they need. Do they need national media attention? Probably not. What they need are 400 or 800 or 1,400 voters in their community because most of these school board races are really small. You think about the LA School Board. Yeah, that's a lot of people. Miami School Board, that's a lot of people. 75% of school board races cost a thousand dollars or less, and 85% cost under $5,000. 87% I believe cost under $10,000. These races are tiny.
So what we really encourage school board candidates to do is be present in their community, knock doors, talk to voters, and show up where they are. Do not under-count someone, or underestimate someone's voice here, you don't know who the most influential people are going to be in these conversations.
But there is no amount of advertising or spending or even viral news story that can out-influence a conversation that you have in someone's home about something that is so deeply personal to them. Like the quality of their kids' education or "how good", quote-unquote, a school is. Because you think about it, how good or bad a school is is often understood as a shortcut for understanding how good or bad a place is to live and to work and to call home.
Now that, in and of itself, is a little problematic because there are a bunch of race and class and wealth equity issues there. But for better or for worse, people understand a good school district is a good place to live, so how can you make sure that people really understand this is how they can affect that?
Nir: So we're really talking about truly traditional retail politics that, like you were saying, the social media is not relevant. Advertising for a race with 400 or 800 voters, I mean, really not going to be relevant. We're talking about getting on the doors, pounding the pavement, talking to voters, having face-to-face conversations almost in a way, the way I think that people idealize politics with a real personal touch, not the impersonal mass media politics we've been used to for the last century.
Litman: It's why school board races are such effective training grounds, both for potential future leaders but also for activists, for volunteers, for donors. It's like a really good entry point. That’s something that the right has understood for a long time, and it's one of the reasons they've invested so much in these races, to begin with, is because if you want to get people fired up about what's happening in politics, a school board race is an incredible way to do so.
Beard: So before we let you go, we definitely want to talk a little bit about election 2023, which is less than two weeks away. Obviously, like you said, you have a bunch of Run for Something candidates running that are facing an election imminently. Are there a couple that you'd like to highlight for us, that are particularly interesting or to keep an eye on on election night, for our listeners?
Litman: I would love to. We have, I said earlier, 312 candidates on the ballot across the country, including some in Virginia where we're trying to make sure we can hold access to abortion in the last state in the south where it's still the case.
I'm rooting for Susanna Gibson who's running for House of Delegates in District 57. It's one of the most competitive districts in Virginia. She's a nurse practitioner who signed up to run for office after the Dobbs decision. Fierce advocate for reproductive health, for women's rights for LGBTQA rights. She is dealing with some just unbelievable bullshit from the Virginia Republican Party who is, as of this week, mailing explicit photos of her to voters to try and undermine her candidacy because they know that if she wins, she'll stand up for abortion access. We've got Susanna's back.
We're looking at Lily Franklin, also House of Delegates in Virginia. She's a former teacher. She's a fifth-generation Virginian, a working-class family in Roanoke Valley. Her family has struggled with addiction and substance abuse issues. She's amazing.
We have Michael Feggans in Virginia Beach. He served 20 years in the Air Force. He's running to flip that seat. Kimberly Adams, also a House of Delegates candidate, running in Virginia. She's a working single mom who got her MBA. She's knocking doors, talking to voters about her personal experience with pregnancy loss and having to get an abortion procedure afterward and how this is not an abstraction for her.
Madison Irving, who's a school board candidate in Virginia. He's running against a Moms for Liberty candidate. He would flip the school board control and he would be the deciding vote for it. He's a current teacher. He's a high school football coach. I think that's really cool.
Nir: What part of the state is that?
Litman: Henrico County.
Outside of Virginia, Amelia McMillan is running for school board in York County, Pennsylvania. It's a deep red district. She's running to replace some extremist officials who in 2020 enacted a book ban. They've been advocating for really harmful policies. She was born and raised in the community. She's part of a slate of candidates that also includes another Run for Something endorsed person, Benjamin Walker.
In Kansas, Claire Reagan, who's running for school board in Olathe, Kansas. It's a place where hot-button issues and misinformation have really taken hold. She wants to make sure that the school district is actually providing resources to students.
One more, if you'll grant me. Jaime Martinez is running for school board in North Allegheny in Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh. He's a 21-year-old college senior. He's the youngest candidate in his race. He grew up in the school district. He was senior class president in 2020, so he really saw the impact of the pandemic firsthand on lost learning. The school district is on its fourth superintendent in four years. It has a 6-3 Republican majority. Jaime is aiming to flip one of the six GOP-held seats. He's running along a couple of other candidates as a joint slate. He's just awesome. And the kind of person you want helping govern a school district, who really understands what the students are facing.
Nir: I absolutely love hearing that broad-based litany of candidates running across the country. Amanda, you need to tell our listeners where they can learn more about Run for Something, and how they can find out about the candidates you're supporting. And if they're interested in running for something themselves, what they should do.
Litman: Okay, so let's start with the last question first. If you're thinking about running for office, especially if you're thinking in 2024 or 2025 or 2028 or 2032, or if you're thinking about thinking about thinking about it, it is never too early and very rarely too late to get started. So you can go to runforwhat.net. You can enter your name, and your information, and you'll see all the offices available to you this year. You'll start getting information from our team. You'll get invited to webinars. We'll talk you through how to file. You don't need to know what you want to run for yet, or even if you want to run, it's just telling us you're interested and we will help you.
If you want to learn more about volunteering or working with any of our candidates, or how you can support us with a donation, which is always appreciated, you can go to runforsomething.net and you can find us on social media. We are runforsomethingnow on Instagram and Threads, and Run for Something on whatever we call Twitter now and Facebook.
Nir: And what about you, Amanda? Can folks also find you on social media?
Litman: Unfortunately, I am not very much on Twitter anymore at AmandaLitman, but Amandalitm on Instagram and Threads, and am unfortunately forcing myself to make TikToks every once in a while so you can find me there too.
Nir: Well, we have been talking with Amanda Litman, the co-founder and co-executive director of Run for Something. Amanda, this has been a fantastic conversation. I am super excited to see what your school board project brings and we look forward to having you on in the future once again to hear more about it.
Litman: Always happy to. Thanks. Thanks, guys.
Beard: That's all from us this week. Thanks to Amanda Litman for joining us. The Downballot comes out every Thursday everywhere you listen to podcasts. You can reach out to us by emailing thedownballot@dailykos.com.
If you haven't already, please subscribe to The Downballot on Apple Podcast and leave us a five-star rating and review. Thanks to our editor Trever Jones, and we'll be back next week with a new episode.