"Roll Up Your Sleeves and Get Stuff Done."

We spend a lot of time asking everyday people one simple question: Will you consider running for office?

Not for Senate. Not for Congress. For the offices that decide whether your streets have potholes, whether someone’s trying to ban books at your library, whether you feel safe walking downtown on a Friday night, whether your neighborhood bakery can keep its doors open, whether you can afford a home.

These are the races where Democrats keep getting creamed. We can recite the stats — like that Democrats lost 80% of the 20,000 uncontested partisan races in 2024 — but what matters now is what we’re going to do about it.

We just ran our biggest candidate recruitment sprint to date: 36 states in 28 weeks, and the work we did over the past half-year will put more Democrats on the ballot.

• 36 states, and counting. Next wave launches April 25.

• 8.3 million people asked to run for office. (We ask a lot of Democrats to consider running, and connect those who are interested with local partners who help them take the next steps in their civic journey.)

• 59,900 said yes. They raised their hand to say they’re interested in running for local office.

• 507 candidates recruited through our grants program teams, with many more in the pipeline.

Not nearly all 59,900 will end up filing. But every one of them is someone who wasn’t thinking about running a month ago and now is. That’s how you build a pipeline.

Yes, it’s the midterms, but we can’t forget downballot races. According to BallotReady, there are more than 111,000 open seats across every level of government this cycle. 84% of state legislative seats are on the ballot. 35 U.S. Senate seats. 36 gubernatorial races. Over 18,000 school board seats. 19,000 city council seats. Over 50,000 races in the primaries alone.

Over 45,000 are local, in our backyards. Nearly 29,000 are at the city level. Federal races? Fewer than 500.

We’re expanding our Candidate Compass with new resources for volunteer mobilization, campaign websites, and fundraising — with more on the way. When someone raises their hand to run, we want to point them in the right direction fast.

We’re going big on recruiting women to run. Only 41% of women have considered running for office, compared to 59% of men — and men are two-thirds more likely to be recruited to run by a political leader. Women aren’t less likely to win; they’re less likely to be asked. And we aim to reach 10 million pro-Democracy women and get 500,000 of them to raise their hand by 2028. One for every elected office in the country.

We’re hosting Ready to Run rallies every quarter, putting prospective candidates on a Zoom with people who’ve done it and won. More on our most recent one below.

We’re growing our county grants program. Last year, 1,200 county teams applied. We could only fund 390. That gap needs to close, and we’re working on scaling up this year.

And we’re already prepping for 2027, because thousands of municipal races don’t wait for presidential years.

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Before Gretchen Whitmer was the Governor of Michigan, she was a 28-year-old who looked at her local politicians and thought, I can do this as well as any of these people. She decided to run. That’s the whole secret.

Research shows that political leaders are significantly less likely to recruit women to run, which means a lot of the best potential candidates are sitting on the sidelines waiting for an invitation that never comes.

At our most recent Ready to Run rally, Whitmer put it plainly:

“Too many people don’t think they’re good enough to run for office. They think they need to wait for the perfect moment or until they have the perfect resume. That’s BS. [...] You don’t need the perfect resume to run. You just need to be ready to roll up your sleeves and get stuff done.”

Heidi Garrido is what happens when somebody actually asks women to run. The city councilor from Hopkins, Minnesota, told the audience she made every excuse not to run. People in her community kept telling her she should. She kept telling them they were wrong.

She wasn’t “a government person.” She had a full-time job, a two-year-old, and two teenagers to manage.

But when she finally said yes, she won. And she just won re-election with 83% of the vote.

“Your calling isn’t asking for the perfect time. Your calling is asking you to step up and just do it now. So I did it.”

If you need a little inspiration today, watch the whole rally here. And make sure you’re at the next one this summer.

Steve Stajnrajh signed up for a Contest Every Race webinar in February. Ten months later, he won the auditor’s race in Worcester Township, Pennsylvania — a seat he says hasn’t been held by a Democrat in almost 300 years. We talked to him about what it took to go from watching a webinar to winning an election.

Can you tell us a little about yourself and what office you ran for?

My name is Steve Stajnrajh. I’m the auditor of Worcester Township in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania — the first Democrat to hold the seat in almost 300 years of township history. I was part of that blue wave we saw over the 2025 election cycle, so that was pretty exciting. And my running mate, Christine Steer, she’s also the first Democrat supervisor of Worcester Township ever.

Had you been involved in politics before this, or was this a totally new world for you?

Definitely a new world. The mantra I’ve been saying, and I guess what really motivated me to sign up for that Contest Every Race webinar, was that I felt like inaction was irresponsible. I didn’t like what I was seeing happen in the political sphere. It is easy to just sit around and be angry about it, but it got to the point where I was like, I feel like my freedoms might be under attack. So I looked into it, and now here we are.

Was there a specific moment where you decided, okay, I’m actually going to do this?

Christine ended up inviting me to what they call a petition party. When I first got there, she asked me what my interest gauge was from 1 to 10. I said it was like a 3.5 or a 4. And then by the time I left, I was sitting at a 7.

Seeing how passionate and driven everyone was to get it done was very inspiring. I also got talking with somebody else who was in a similar position, and I think that was the main thing. I told Christine, let me go talk to some friends and family. My parents said it would be cool. My significant other said it would be something they support. And so I ended up saying yes.

What would you say to someone who’s at that “willing to be talked into running” stage right now?

On a national scale, everything seems like the end of the world, but the thing that really matters is local government. That’s where anything that actually happens realistically will affect you. What’s happening with your neighbors matters. Because if shit hits the fan, the community around you is going to be who you have to rely on and who you have to work with to figure stuff out. It’ll be your neighbors next door and the people down the road, not our president.

Any thoughts about running for other offices or moving up the chain?

When I was running, my foot was getting in the door. Now my foot is in the door, and I am very much open to opening the door. I think we need more young blood in our government more than anything. So to ultimately answer your question, yes — I’m willing, I’m interested, maybe a little less interested than willing, but the door is definitely open.