Founder of Heartland Patriots, Lucas Kunce, shared an update on Substack recently about his experience on the campaign trail as a normal person — along with seven tips for anyone considering a run for office.
Read an excerpt below, then please consider following Lucas on Substack.
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1. Be prepared to lose.
I believed that I could win every race I entered, even though the odds were long. And while that was important to me, particularly since I was asking so many people to support the campaign, I don't think it's a requirement when running for office. That may sound controversial (as might a few things I say later), but I think it's true.
You can run knowing you are going to lose and never believing you have a chance. Some people do it for fame or attention, because they want to become a TV pundit, for vanity, because they don't think the incumbent should get a free pass, because they have something to prove, or whatever. If you want to run for those reasons, there is nothing stopping you and history shows you can succeed.
I'll talk about motivations for running in number 4 below, but I am saving that for now because I think it's really important to understand that whether your seat is a sure thing for you because you cleared the primary field in a safe seat, whether it's winnable but contested, or whether it's a long shot, you need to be prepared both mentally and financially to lose. Way more people lose running for office than win (incumbent advantage, multiple people running for a seat, etc.). If you can't survive a loss, you shouldn't do it. Which brings me to number two.
2. Have personal financial security.
Remember, there is a good chance you will lose, so you have to have a way to survive that, especially if you have a family. This is probably the number one reason why normal people don't run for office and why most people who run for office, particularly higher office, are rich, are from political families (usually meaning they're rich), have someone rich backing them up, married rich, or have family wealth.
Because money is everything in politics, both for running and paying for a campaign, and also for surviving personally during a campaign. Every time I've talked to a normal person who is thinking about running for office, this is the thing we talk about the most. It's the biggest barrier to normal people running, winning, and then representing us in Congress. It's a reason why so many sell out in their pursuit of lower offices in order to climb the corrupt political ladder. Because that's the path that's ready built for a normal person. The system sucks.
But there are ways.
You can choose an office that doesn't take as much time and/or money to run for. I'll talk about choosing your office later. You can be self-employed or own a business. You can have a job that lets you work while you run.
A note on that: there are a decent number of people who have jobs that let them focus a lot of time on running while still paying them. Technically, that could be a campaign finance contribution from your employer if they let you do that, so there is risk involved, but it's a way. It is also a great reminder of what an advantage those incumbents who never do their actual elected jobs, or even those who do do their jobs most of the time, have while running for office. They can campaign full time while getting paid by us whereas if a normal person's job lets them do it that's a campaign contribution (which probably exceeds contribution limits). Again, the system sucks and it's built for rich people and incumbents.
For most of the time I was running, you could pay yourself out of campaign funds in a federal race, under certain circumstances, after filing, with limitations, and you would get skewered by the media and probably in tv ads, so people didn't do it. New rules came into effect last year that will hopefully make it better for federal candidates, but won't do anything for local candidates and who knows what the media or opponents will do with it.
Then, there's the old fashioned way, cut costs as much as possible and try to scrape by, which is what I did. Here are some details on how I got through each race, which should be good information for you no matter what office you are running for…
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