In 2016, Bernie Sanders’s candidacy inspired progressives around the US to run unapologetically progressive and spirited campaigns and with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s success in 2018, the number of candidates challenging the status quo of electoral politics at all levels truly skyrocketed.

In 2014, I ran for and got elected as a progressive to the Flagstaff City Council in Arizona at a time when the word “progressive” was still considered fringe and before it was co-opted by the corporate Democrats. With a local campaign under my belt and two successful minimum wage ballot measure campaigns in 2016 and 2018, I was still surprised by the lessons I learned as a congressional candidate in 2020. In retrospect, I wish I had somebody with real-world experience as a candidate helping me to prepare. Each campaign is different and each district has its own dynamics, but most candidates challenging incumbents share similar struggles. 

Despite many candidate training programs, there’s no coaching program out there run by former candidates. And being a candidate is very different from being a campaign manager, even if some of the campaign management duties fall on the shoulders of grassroots candidates. When my congressional campaign was over and after some reflection, I realized just how successful it really was. While not enough to advance to the general election, with 41.4% of the vote, we were among the most successful challengers nationally. Here’s a little retrospective slide show for anyone interested in how a congressional campaign looks like. I decided to pass on the lessons to future candidates and to continue learning from the subsequent cycles by staying in touch with the new cohort of truly progressive grassroots candidates. 

With my former communications director Steven Piasecki, we co-founded Catch Fire Movement to build progressive leadership from the bottom up. We are focusing not only on helping to coach future congressional candidates, but also on coaching all across-the-board progressives who want to make a difference at any level of the government.

Our Blaze the Trail Coaching Program is unique because we focus on preparation of the candidates rather than just on the mechanics of campaigning. That preparation may start years before a person decides to declare their candidacy and we encourage people to join this program as soon as they come to a conclusion that one day they would like to run for a public office. The program is carefully structured to cover all aspects of candidacy—from making decisions on how to support yourself financially while running a campaign, to clearly articulating the goals of the campaign—getting elected is not the only reason why somebody may want to run—to thinking through the culture a future candidate want to foster inside their campaign.  

We invite interesting guests to our biweekly sessions—former candidates, campaign professionals, policy experts, psychologists, and others, who share their lessons, insights, and guidance. Importantly, the program is structured to create a true community within each cohort, so the participants learn from each other in a safe, welcoming, and inspiring environment. Each participant also prepares their own candidate plan, inclusive of a campaign plan. We encourage all across-the-board progressives with political aspirations to apply for the Blaze the Trail Coaching program here.

What we need in the U.S., and around the world, are courageous everyday people to lead in policymaking, so that we can have a peaceful, prosperous, healthy planet where people collaborate rather than compete. Our program is open to any future candidate with or without a party affiliation as long as their value system is deeply rooted in the human rights perspective. 

For more information, contact Eva at [email protected].

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