Campaign like you're going to lose

A few years ago, I was helping with a ballot initiative. At a campaign event, I had a chance to talk with an advisor to a candidate running for statewide office. I asked whether the candidate planned to endorse the initiative. The advisor told me the candidate personally agreed with it, but given where the party stood and the primary battle underway, an endorsement wasn't possible yet.

We ended up in a friendly, candid conversation. I told them, politely but bluntly, that I thought the candidate was likely to lose by campaigning the way they were, because they weren't going to outcompete their opponents on the opponents' own turf. If the candidate was going to lose anyway, I asked, wouldn't it be better, for the future's sake, to use the campaign to push the party toward the positions they actually believed in, rather than perpetuate a style of politics they didn't agree with?

We had a fairly honest exchange. The advisor admitted that in a better world, that is exactly what they'd want. But they didn't think it would ever happen. Playing it "safe," in their view, gave the candidate the best chance to win and then correct the party's course from office.

That conversation was not an isolated one. I hear versions of it constantly in my political and political-adjacent nonprofit work. Candidates and people considering a run for office tell me they dislike the hyperbole they feel compelled to use against opponents, and sometimes even against their own side in a primary. They tell me they feel forced to take positions they don't fully believe in. Because that's where their party or their community currently stands, they see it as the only way to win, and they tell themselves they can pivot later to bring constituents along gradually.

Every time, I preach like a street-corner evangelist: I wish they would campaign differently, run on where they want things to go, and let the chips fall where they may. Most of them agree, at least in principle, that they'd prefer it that way. But they don't believe they can win in today's climate, so they hold their nose and stay the course.

Here is my proposal to anyone running for office right now, or considering a future run. In most races, between gerrymandered districts, crowded primaries, and the frequent absence of real competition, the odds are not in your favor. You are more likely to lose than to win. Campaign with that in mind.

Run on the integrity of your actual ideals, in a way that pushes public discourse toward something more honest, so that we might finally have the chance at real conversations about the issues and policies that affect our lives. If you win, you'll know you moved the needle. But even if you lose, you'll have sown the seeds for someone else to move it next time. And yes, I'm fully aware I just mixed my metaphors. Call it bipartisanship.

Because here's the catch: even if you win while campaigning on positions you don't fully believe, using rhetoric you know is corrosive, what have you actually won? You now have to govern in a manner you don't agree with. The evidence is all around us in state and national politics, where it's an open secret that many officials don't believe what they're saying or doing, yet keep doing it because they'll argue the alternative is worse.

And even if you fully intend to shift your party and your community toward more rational ground once elected, you now face an uphill climb of your own making, because you are in debt to the voters, and most likely funders, who took you at your word.

So instead of running a campaign that costs you your convictions, run it as though you have nothing to lose. Even if you do lose, you'll know you did your part to move society toward a healthier place, one where honest discussion about the problems we face replaces the cheap, corrosive talking points and hyperbolic rhetoric that divide us and keep real solutions for "We the People" perpetually out of reach.