RFS feel-good update (12/30): Ahead of 2025...

Thank you

Hi all -

While I am still on maternity leave for a few more weeks, and Run for Something is officially closed this week, I didn’t want to miss the chance before 2024 finally ends to send you a quick-ish note to say thanks.

If you are getting this email, you’ve played a key role in building Run for Something — whether you’ve been part of this community since we launched on January 20th, 2017, or are new to it in the last few weeks, thank you.

You’ve understood that in order to build long-term sustainable power, we need to invest in the next generation of leaders at all levels of office.

You’ve made local candidate recruitment and support a priority, and in the process you’ve helped elect leaders who’ve made housing more affordable, made voting easier, made school lunches free, fought for abortion access, cheaper insulin, and more.

In 2024 alone:

• Run for Something endorsed 600+ candidates, including 51% people of color, 52% women, and 31% LGBTQIA+.

• We saw 443 candidates make it to the November general election with a 50% win rate — including in some deep red places and in districts Trump also won.

• We flipped 17 red-to-blue seats, in places as varied as New York, Iowa, Washington, and Kentucky.

• We reached a milestone of 1,491 election wins since 2017 — that means in the last 8 years, nearly 1500 millennials and Gen Zers have been elected to state and local office because of this community. That’s the bench — those leaders are the present & future of our party.

Plus, since Election Day, more than 12,000 people have signed up to run for office — the Run for Something Candidate Pipeline now includes over 180,000 people who’ve expressed interest in running, the largest list of its kind on the left. We’re staying in touch with all of them through regular emails, texts, calls, and personal outreach to make sure they can get started on running for office when the time is right.

(We’ve also got our next free candidate intro call scheduled for January 21st — RSVP now if you’re thinking about running or send the link to someone who should!)

You’ve made all that possible. Thank you.

In the weeks since the election, there’s been lots of ~discourse~ about what the Democratic Party needs to do next — debates on what we have to do to win back working class and non-college educated voters, how to break through in this information ecosystem, whether we need more podcasts (🙄) — and more.

Here’s what I know for sure: The work Run for Something does is a key part of how we move forward together.

While we started on Trump’s first inauguration day, the work Run for Something does has never been about Trump. In fact, only 3% of the folks we worked with in the first few years mentioned Trump in their intake survey!

It’s about the future. It’s about bringing in new leaders who can genuinely and authentically connect with voters about the things they care about in ways they can relate to.

Run for Something candidates are young (all are under 40!), most are online (as one would expect from millennials and Gen Z), nearly 60% self-identify as low-income, and they all communicate like ordinary people, because they are ordinary people who just happen to be doing an extraordinary thing by putting their name on the ballot.

We need them.

As I said in my email right after Election Day:

In a second Trump presidency, we will need strong state and local leadership more than ever.

The fight is once again returning to cities, counties, and states.

We will need principled school board members willing to protect public education. We will require strong municipal leaders who will fight for their communities in the face of an adversarial federal government. State legislators will be asked to do it all — protect the right to vote, expand access to abortion care where they can, advance climate legislation and more.

In the short term, our work with state and local leaders will be instrumental to stopping Trump and the MAGA federal government from the absolute worst they can do. We’ll need to mitigate harm in the red states and fight for progress in the blue ones.

2025 is not an off-year. We are already recruiting candidates for school board and municipal elections — the Wisconsin filing deadline is right around the corner — and we’ll keep building a pipeline for the 2026 midterms.

Long-term, we are doing the hard but necessary work of rebuilding the party from the ground up. We have to keep filling our bench and make sure our candidates can win at every level, in every kind of community.

To be more specific: Per BallotReady, there are more than 100,000 offices on the ballot in 2025 — in raw numbers, it’s a bigger election year than 2024! — and a vast majority of those elections happen in the first half of the year.

That means the work can’t wait.

If you’re ready, commit right now to an automatic monthly donation to Run for Something. It means the world to know we can count on you.

If you prefer to do your end-of-year giving to a tax-deductible 501c3, consider giving to Run for Something Civics, a non-partisan non-profit that that brings young people into leadership.

If you want to give through a DAF or another way, reply to this email and I’ll get you the info you need!

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Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I’ll be back in your inbox more regularly at the end of January. Until then, happy holidays and happy new year.

- Amanda