How to Run for Office and Win – This Guide Covers It All [2022]

Complete guide on how to run for political office.

Running for office or working on a political campaign will be one of the hardest things you’ll ever do and one of the most rewarding. How do we know? We’ve lived it. Brian ran for Congress and was one of the most successful campaign fundraisers in the country and Eric spent more than ten years working on political campaigns from local to Presidential.

Working on political campaigns we learned the unwritten rules and strategies that only campaign insiders knew. We’ve spent hundreds of hours capturing that insider knowledge to help make you a better candidate or campaign staffer.

From how to open a bank account for a campaign (it’s more complicated than you imagine) to whether your first hire should be your campaign manager or your finance director (it’s not what you think) we cover it all — providing you with sample campaign budgets, campaign donor fundraising scripts, campaign staff salaries, and job descriptions.

The nine guides we’ve written are listed in a timeline order of when you’ll need to know what during your political campaign but feel free to skip to whatever section is most helpful. As a bonus, we’ve also included a political campaign dictionary of the slang most commonly used by campaign insiders. Readers have kept the political campaign dictionary open on their laptop as campaign consultants wow them with their knowledge but mystify them with their insider campaign slang.

1. How to Start a Political Campaign – Quick Bureaucracy Guide
2. Primary vs General Election – Campaign Types and Strategy
3. Creating a Healthy Political Campaign Budget [with a sample]
4. US Campaign Finance Laws – Contribution Limits and more
5. The Complete Political Fundraising 2022 Guide [with ideas]
6. Political Campaign Staff: Structure, Rolls, Salaries, Consultants
7. The Guide to Voter Engagement – GOTV, Field, Events and more
8. Working with party Caucuses, Committees and State Parties
9. Political Endorsements – the 2022 complete candidates guide
10. Political Campaign Dictionary of Insider Terms

We hope you find our set of guides helpful as you run your campaign. We’re here to help you so please send us an email or give us a call if you have any questions about what we’ve written or if you’ve learned something we should add to the guides to help others.