Running for office is an intimidating prospect, even in New Hampshire, where voting districts tend to be small. For the past several years, the New Hampshire Citizen Alliance has held ?Campaigning 101? workshops to show inexperienced candidates the ropes. NHPR Correspondent Trish Anderton attended last night?s workshop in Conway and filed this primer on how to be a candidate.
So you?ve thrown your hat in the ring. Perhaps your local party chair coaxed you into running. Maybe you decided you want to give something back to your community. You?re excited and bursting with ideas. Then you realize ? you have no idea what to do next.
That?s where campaign consultant and organizer Carin Schewe steps in. Her job is to gently channel your idealism into the cold hard task of winning. In a museum basement in Conway, she tells a dozen or so candidates and volunteers the first step ? is to figure out how many votes you need.
SCHIEWE: Its great if people liked you, its wonderful if you grew as a person and you usually do, but in the end, if your goal is to win, you have to get a certain number of votes
Schiewe runs through a couple of ways to calculate your vote total, based on the projected turnout and past voting patterns in your district. Then she asks the crowd: who?s going to vote for you? At first she gets ideological responses: people who like my platform, people who want change, and so forth. She reminds the candidates they have plenty of nonpolitical affiliations too. Religion, gender, your hometown, your ethnicity can all help. Then, once you?ve listed your sympathetic groups, you need names and addresses.
SCHIEWE: Businesspeople? How do I identify businesspeople? Is there a chamber of commerce listing? JOE: The town has a list on the tax roll. They can pull it off for you for a coupla bucks
The number of contacts Schiewe suggests is staggering, even for a small race. Say you need 800 votes to win. You should identify and get in touch with 2400 voters, and most of those you should contact three to six times. That?s where your campaign staff comes in. Luckily you can forget your images of movies like The War Room. You don?t need hundreds of people. Schiewe says the key is to get three to five committed, active leaders. But she says, be careful who you choose, because some people see campaigns as a social event.
SCHIEWE: They want to talk your ear off, they want to give you advice, and they don?t want to work. So never give a person a title until you?ve tested them out, and I mean test, like, I need you to make these hundred phone calls.
If this seems a little cold and Machiavellian, well ? it gets worse. Schiewe says if you?re serious, you should carefully track your potential voters. Keep a list of everyone you?ve contacted, make notes on what their concerns are, details about their family ? anything that?s relevant to the campaign. When one candidate balks, Schiewe says this sounds more manipulative than it really is.
SCHIEWE: you don?t have to come up to someone?s door and say hey hey, I got you on the voting list, mrs smith, I know you live here! I see your husband hasn?t voted in two years, what?s wrong with that. There's some discretion that you have ... but it?s a way of keeping track of what you?re doing. Because you need those 800 votes.
Finally, says Schiewe, it?s all about personal contact. Phone calls, knocking on doors, and personal notes win campaigns. Candidate Joe Chromy of Ossippee? offers the example of a candidate he met recently.
CHROMY: Every contact that this gentleman had, he took a notecard and thanked them and mailed it to them within 24 hours. Carin: Yes, and you know what? He probably won
So after all that, you still want to run for office? So did everyone at the meeting. Some have ideological reasons. Christine Kurtz White is concerned about development in Tamworth, where she lives. She?s boldly tackling the third rail of Tamworth politics ? zoning.
WHITE: There?s a group in our commty who don?t want to understand why we need zoning and why we need to do certain things, and I would love to convince them
Others are more pragmatic. John Gardiner, the sole republican in this crowd of Democrats, says he?s running for Coos County Commissioner as a transition to retirement. He found the workshop useful.
GARDINER: I had my own preconceptions of what I?ve wanted to do, I?ve played with it in my mind for a few years, but she reinforces it and gives me some new ideas.
Others used the occasion to make connections. Joe Chromy and two fellow democrats in his district are going to combine forces.
CHROMY: We?re gonna get together and I think the three of us are gonna appear together in each town, so the people of that town get to see all of us at the same time
If the reality of campaigning has soured you on the idea of running someday, Susan Bruce of Citizens Alliance says it shouldn?t. She took this workshop two years ago. She ran for state rep as a liberal democrat in a conservative district. She lost by a thousand votes ? and loved it.
BRUCE: Running for office changed my life dramatically in positive ways. It led to me getting this great job, I have a lot more confidence, know a lot more about what?s going on in the state. The best part is the people I met.
Bruce says the Citizens alliance runs these workshops to get more ?progressive? candidates involved. But the meetings are open to people of all political stripes. If you want to throw your hat in the ring, you may still have time. Because of a dispute over redistricting, the filing period for many state senate and house races is still open. For NHPR news, I?m
