The Accidental Campaign Manager (Unlikely, Part II)

After too long a delay, here is the second installment in the series of posts I am making about my recent experience in politics…

Read Part I First

My immediate reaction when Dan asked me to be his campaign manager was, “No.” It really made no sense, and there were several major factors against me. The two biggest ones were:
1. I have absolutely no political experience, and have no idea how to run a campaign.
2. I was already struggling to keep up with the requirements of my four part-time jobs, I couldn’t imagine having the time to add the responsibilities required of a campaign manager.

I told Dan that it was a great honor for him to ask me. I told him that had I known three months earlier that this opportunity was going to arise, I would have cleared my schedule. And I told him that if I agreed to do it, I would just be holding him (and the campaign) back. I didn’t want to turn it down, but I had to.

There really isn’t a good explanation for what happened over the course of the next few months, but some how, some way, I accidentally became Dan’s campaign manager anyway. It started because we were filling out a form for an event that required some information about the campaign. Naturally, there was a place to write in the name of Dan’s campaign manager. We decided to put my name there, but it was understood that I would only hold that title temporarily – until someone else was found to fill that role. But that “someone else” never came, and so I was it.

Quite honestly, I don’t really have a good grasp of what a campaign manager does. I have learned a great deal through the process, but I still have a very long way to go. All of us working on the campaign were volunteers – people with full-time jobs and other responsibilities. We were only able to schedule about one campaign meeting a week, and we never had everybody at any one meeting. I had a good idea of the kinds of things we needed to do, so I just let my natural management instincts kick in and I did my best to hold all the pieces together and keep the ship headed in the right direction.

One thing Dan and I agreed on from the beginning was that it just didn’t make sense for me to stay in the role of campaign manager for very long. From the earliest days of campaign planning, we discussed what kinds of things we would need to do strategically – especially focusing on what we would need to do after we won the primary. On the top of the list was hiring a campaign manager and/or other paid staff to take on the bulk of the workload that I had on my plate. We were making things happen with me in that role, but we knew that it would be insufficient to make it to November with only volunteers.

I suppose the biggest lesson learned in all of this is that money really does drive just about everything else in the campaign. If we had raised more money earlier, we would have been able to hire staff. And, of course, hiring staff (done the right way) would have allowed us to raise even more money. I’ll probably address why money is so important in a later post … But the point I am trying to make here is that it takes money to hire staff, and (more often than not) it takes a paid staff to run a successful campaign. I was doing the best I could, and all of our volunteers were also. And we did have quite a bit of success – we won Wake County and we finished just about 4% out of first place. But I think that if we had paid staff in addition to all of our hard-working volunteers, we would have won.

Coming up in Part III: The Republican Machine

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