If you’ve landed here, there’s a good chance you are a candidate for elected office or are seriously considering becoming one.
That also means you’ve come to the right place, because this is where you can to build and launch a political campaign, learn how to raise money, the fundamentals of political messaging, campaign marketing and much more.
All with the goal of one thing —> learning what to do (as well as what to avoid) when it comes to running a successful political campaign that can win an election.
Every candidate who has ever won an election did not know what to do when they started running for office.
They all learned how to successfully organize, launch, and run a winning political campaign.
They learned how to raise money, how to target voters, how to market their campaign’s message, and now to respond to attacks against them.
A lot of people think they know how to run a campaign and win an election.
They’re very interested in politics. They’ve seen many campaigns. They may have even worked some political candidates.
But that doesn’t mean they know what it takes to run a successful political campaign.
My name is Brian Floyd and I’m the founder of The Campaign School.
For 20 years I’ve worked as a professional political campaign consultant.
I’ve advised and candidates running for school board, city council, county offices, the state legislature, and the U.S. Congress.
The campaigns where my company has been the lead consultant have won 86% of the time.
In many of those races, the winners were candidates who had never run for office before.
Unfortunately, during my time in and around politics, I’ve seen a lot of good people with good ideas lose elections they should have won.
That’s because they didn’t know what they really needed to do, focused their energies on the wrong things, and often took advice from people who didn’t know how to win an election.
I started The Campaign School in 2015 to specifically help good people with good ideas learn what it really takes to run a successful political campaign that can win an election.
These are currently the most read political campaign advice that have been published here.
This is and always has been the most read article published on The Campaign School.
It surprises me to some degree, but the truth is that no matter how digital our world becomes, candidates are still sending out press releases.
Press releases are important to announce your candidacy, major endorsements, events, and even key policy decisions.
Voting by mail was growing in popularity, then in 2020 in the midst of the pandemic, it exploded.
No longer is mail in voting a small component of a campaign.
Today the candidate who wins over the mail in voters in many races will determine who wins the election.
If you’re running for office, there’s a good chance you’ll be challenging an incumbent office holder.
And you already know, that incumbents win re-election most of the time.
But not all of the time. You can beat an incumbent under the right circumstances.
It takes money to run a successful political campaign.
However, most first time candidates don’t know how to ask for contributions.
And even if they do, they feel sleazy about it, which wrongly harms their fundraising.
If you’re running for elected office you’re going to be giving speeches.
Lots of them.
Well, actually not that many. Just the same speech (or a variation of it) over and over and over again.
That’s your stump speech and you’ll need to have it down pat.