I need Democrats to try getting weird

We should be running creative, chaotic, and experimental state legislative campaigns

If you have clever ideas about how to fix politics, especially ones that are cheap or free, you should be trying them out in state legislative elections. Hear me out.

Personally, I adore state legislatures. It’s a whole pile of elections, with extremely different dynamics, and many of them are so tiny that it’s all kind of adorably local. As an election forecaster, I am damn proud of the fact that for a bit there I was running a model predicting all five thousand ish state leg elections, and the results were pretty good. It was a huge logistical nightmare and I now know so many things about multimember districts and the hated floterial district. I take seriously the idea that they are laboratories of democracy, and a place where early stage campaign tactics and strategy can get tested out.

Here’s my pitch: we, as Democrats and people interested in Democratic elections, are not getting nearly weird enough with it. Local races are (relatively) cheap to campaign in, there’s a ton of them, most of them are safe districts or longshots. I will be on here hassling you to donate to swing district candidates and defending their need for professional, competent campaigns and adequate funding, but for all those +30 / -30 seats? Try some shit! Take whatever strategy you have cooked up online or in a group chat, find a plausible candidate, run a campaign where you communicate entirely through puppet theater, I don’t know. See what works.

State legislative candidates are already pushing the bounds of weirdo scandals. This is part of why I love it: we can theorize plenty about what exactly WOULD happen if a candidate got caught pouring water into someone else’s backpack but now it’s happened. We will know if the water pouring thing mattered once she faces reelection in 2026, btw. Candidates are already going to make odd choices. We should pair that with the longest shot campaign strategy we can muster.

To some extent this is tricky because the sort of people who want to run for office are nice, serious, and want to improve their communities. They don’t tend to be in it for the zany antics. Part of the job of campaign strategists (and comms people, of which I am not one) is to get our candidates out of their shells enough to show the world how cool they are. In the scheme of things, I’d guess it’s harder to get some candidates to do direct to camera videos than it would be to have them do Zoom calls from a canoe while fishing. Maybe what your district needs is an entirely row-boat-based campaign. There’s essentially no downside here. If you’re running in an R +20 district, that marginal 10 votes from a careful, ordinary campaign is just not going to matter. It should be hail-mary all the way.

On the RCT nerd side, we should be using these races to *test stuff*. One of the most difficult parts about running RCTs on campaigns is getting people to agree to have a control group. No campaign or IE I’ve ever worked with has been chill with the idea that we have to leave people out of our treatment group and potentially lose those votes. I have a whole speech about how that’s mathematically fine and that 2 votes you might be leaving on the table won’t matter. But in a long shot state legislative election, the odds you have funding to get your treatment to every single possible target are slim to none. This scarcity is the original condition for an RCT- if you can’t target everyone, randomize your targets so you can learn. I’m not inventing an original idea here- there’s already structures in place to help campaigns and groups run RCTs- but I want us to do it more, and with higher uncertainty ideas. I love the 100th RCT on mailers, but I would even *more* love the first RCT on leaving paper cranes at voters’ doorsteps, or on putting canvassers in bear costumes.

The salty part of this proposal is that it would create a prove-it zone for commentators. If you’ve talked a big game about how your one weird trick will make Democrats win, you should be shoved towards a R +20 district and told to go to town. If it works, amazing. If it doesn’t work, no real harm done. We should not be trying our newest hottest shit in competitive races. There are an absolute PILE of elections where you can safely experiment (and, ideally, build the party brand) without giving me heartburn about a competitive House or Senate seat.

Democratic campaigns tend to look pretty similar. Nationalization and the big national Democratic brand come for us all, but we don’t HAVE to run traditional campaigns. We can just do...whatever. Data-wise, it would be a huge help to expand the standard deviations so we aren’t all just arguing about the marginal advantage of an essentially-ordinary Democrat who said tariffs were good as if that was the maximum imaginable deviating posture. Do it for the modeling. What happens if you run zero TV ads and go all in on TikTok? If I had to guess, it’s not great, but I *do not know*. Find out! This playing it safe stuff is a path to barely eking out a majority occasionally and then having most of our policy thrown out the next cycle. It’s a path to increasingly perfect mailers that go immediately in the trash. We’re stuck in a local maximum and unwilling to hunt widely enough to get to the real high point.

So, please, try some shit. Give people money to try some shit. I bet there’s someone who would run a hell of a state legislative campaign if you dropped 50k on their heads and said “try something funky, let’s measure how it goes”. And if you’re talking online about how everyone would win elections with your cool new idea, in all seriousness, local elections need you. Find out if it works. Go, be free, write us a fun report afterwards.