Offering a potential roadmap to 2024, a Democratic-aligned group specializing in training staff believes they’ve found a moneyball strategy that worked in 2022 and could change statehouse campaign spending going forward.
In a memo obtained exclusively by The Daily Beast, the theory of the case goes something like this: For just $25,000, you can win a competitive seat. It just depends on when you spend the money, and, who—not what—you spend it on.
As Managing Partner Lauren Baer put it, the pilot program led by Arena—a nonprofit group backing Democrats and looking to “expand and diversify who can enter politics”—targets spending earlier in the cycle and delivering trained staff to campaigns that otherwise couldn’t afford them.
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They won eight out of the 11 battleground races in Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania where a staffer on a six-month contract earned $25,000, usually as a field organizer or director.
“Typically, you have a campaign manager, and that’s usually the only person you’ll have on a state House campaign,” Trevor Southerland, executive director of the Pennsylvania House Democratic Campaign Committee told The Daily Beast, crediting Arena’s program for making all the difference in flipping the Pennsylvania House for the first time in 12 years, and winning it by just one seat.
The race was decided by just 63 votes, and the winner, rookie campaigner Melissa Cerato—whose resume includes a stint as an Uber driver, house cleaner, and nanny—was one of the 11 candidates who received Arena-trained staff.
Finding field organizers for state-level campaigns can be a tough task, Southerland explained, with the bulk of talent concentrated in Washington and New York.
“You tend to be a field organizer right at the beginning of your career, and then you move up to campaign manager or something,” Southerland said. “But oftentimes finding those youngest people is hard, because there’s only so many political job boards out there, and if they haven’t figured that side out of it yet, they’re not able to find you.”
So when you get somebody who actually knows what they’re doing instead of a volunteer who might be prone to flaking?
“What it does is cut a few months of on-the-job-training right off,” the Pennsylvania Democrat continued.
Volunteers need to learn the fundamentals: how to drop literature, how to cut up turf, how to make the most of the few seconds you might be able to speak before someone slams the door in your face.
“And in this, they have the basics when they’re hired, so we’re able to jump more straight into getting the work done rather than having to spend extra time training them,” Southerland said.
For Johanny Cepeda-Freytiz, a restaurant owner coming from her first elected position as the Reading City Council president and now the first Latina ever elected to the Pennsylvania State House, the Arena-trained staff helped raise the level of her entire team, including volunteers.
“Now that it’s been proven to work—and oh my gosh, it was a major win this election,” the newly sworn-in state lawmaker told The Daily Beast. “At the House level, it’s 26 freshmen coming in. Now that they’ve created something that works, keep doing it. In fact, when I think of Arena and what they’ve established, this is a great system.”
Baer said the timing of the spending is key to the “outsize impact” Arena sought after.
“It is categorically true that earlier investments in races can have a greater impact than late cycle investment,” Baer said.
By the time the third and fourth quarter roll around, campaign staff have already been hired and much of the campaign is already set in motion. The easiest place to spend it, by and large, is on ads.
By contrast, Baer said, if candidates get into races earlier and invest in staff, the early money has a “multiplier effect in terms of voters they can contact, that they can turn out, the capacity that they can build on the ground.”
Arena’s trainees were on the trail for an average of five months. But they would like to see that number pushed up if they can get donors on board.
“There is still an overwhelming bias in Democratic politics in late cycle investment, when dollars have the least flexibility in terms of how they can be deployed,” she said. “So we’ve really hit on a low-cost and effective way of deploying resources, but it fundamentally depends on donors being willing to put in money earlier in the cycle.”
Southerland said he could see the same methodology being adopted at the congressional and even presidential level, particularly in suburban areas where the art of efficient door knocking can make all the difference.
“It can become a model. It’s certainly scalable to a larger level and reaching more states,” he said.
The Keystone State Democrat cautioned, however, that relying on one organization or set of donors isn’t the way to get there.
“We’re supposed to be the party of the people,” Southerland said. “And we have to understand that our people are a big part of why we’re able to do what we do, and that we need to look at really putting investments into our staff for the long term.”
