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Run for Office: Find all elected offices you are eligible to run for

runforoffice.org

71–80 of 167 posts

Re: Run for Office: Find all elected offices you are eligible to run for

#71

This would be much more useful if they displayed some election statistics and information on incumbents and political parties. The stated purpose of the tool is: > Today, 40% of state legislature races go uncontested and the problem is worse at the local level. There is a crisis of leadership occurring in our democracy. We need more people to lead. We need more people to run for office. > Run for Office is a free ser…

You're correct in some regards, but the model of $=victory is not as consistent as it used to be. I think of David Brat beating House Speaker Jared Cantor in 2014 as being the canary in the coalmine. There's never an apples to apples comparison, but Cantor had Brat outraised by over 20 to 1, and Brat beat him. On top of that, campaign messages are more and more delivered and received via free mediums, like YouTube, w…

Brat defeated Eric Cantor who was House Majority Leader not Speaker. John Boehner was Speaker.

Re: Run for Office: Find all elected offices you are eligible to run for

#72

My name is Jim Cupples and I work on RunForOffice.org Thank you for the comments and suggestions. We agree with the comment on student governments, by the way, and would be happy to include them. Anyone can email me at jimcupples@gmail.com if they like

You probably want to include County and Tribal government positions also.

Re: Run for Office: Find all elected offices you are eligible to run for

#74

This would be much more useful if they displayed some election statistics and information on incumbents and political parties. The stated purpose of the tool is: > Today, 40% of state legislature races go uncontested and the problem is worse at the local level. There is a crisis of leadership occurring in our democracy. We need more people to lead. We need more people to run for office. > Run for Office is a free ser…

Sure but you have to start somewhere. If you're interested, it's best to start at the bottom and work your way up.

Re: Run for Office: Find all elected offices you are eligible to run for

#75
post #63

I work fulltime. Can we filter for positions that do not require a fulltime commitment?

That's going to very much vary depending on the size of the jurisdiction of the office but for NC they only have state level positions which will all be full time. As far as I know anything above a very small town position will be full time.

> state level positions which will all be full time

That depends on what we mean by "full-time". Here's a great wiki page regarding the amount of time each state legislature demands from members: https://ballotpedia.org/States_with_a_full-time_legislature

From the stats there, there are 10 states where legislator is 80% of a full-time job (avg. salary: $68,599), 23 where it's 70% of a full-time job (avg. salary: $35,326), and 17 where it's 54% of a full-time job (avg. salary: $15,984). In many of these states, legislators need to supplement their income with jobs in the off-season (only 9 state legislatures are year-round positions, and all of those are the ones that offer the highest salaries).

Re: Run for Office: Find all elected offices you are eligible to run for

#76
On a related note, Shea Silverman posted on his blog [0] about how he ran for office in an extremely cost effective manner. It was linked on HN about two months ago [1].

> This year I ran for Florida House of Representatives District 49 (Orlando). I lost, but I got 31% of the vote and I only spent $3000. My opponent got 69% of the vote and spent $100,000

He open sourced [2] several tools that he used to do this.

He advises participation in local hob-nobbing events (I presume this was a local Florida thing, but your local community may have similar), and More Facebook Advertising. He reminds us that signs should be big, and WILL be stolen. He also advised cultivating good relations with local media by doing press releases.

While he was running for a state office, you could probably use similar tactics for more local things.

0: http://blog.sheasilverman.com/2016/11/how-to-run-for-florida... 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13008071 2: https://github.com/SheaSilverman

Re: Run for Office: Find all elected offices you are eligible to run for

#77
post #5

This doesn't appear to include student offices, which, especially at large state universities, are very powerful and misunderstood. If you are a student, consider running for student office. It's likely (in fact almost certain) that your student government makes more decisions that impact your life and spends more of your money than the national government does. They typically have multi-million dollar budgets, seats…

[deleted]

Re: Run for Office: Find all elected offices you are eligible to run for

#78
post #5

This doesn't appear to include student offices, which, especially at large state universities, are very powerful and misunderstood. If you are a student, consider running for student office. It's likely (in fact almost certain) that your student government makes more decisions that impact your life and spends more of your money than the national government does. They typically have multi-million dollar budgets, seats…

Far more selfishly - you often get a few subsidy too.
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