Democrats’ Secret Weapon? Thousands of Candidates You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

Democrats are worried.

Admittedly, that’s par for the course. Worrying is what Democrats do—it’s as natural to us as breathing.

But when it comes to President Joe Biden’s problem with young voters, we have good reason to be nervous. Recent polls show Biden polling well below his 2020 margin with young voters. Some polls even show him losing young voters to Donald Trump outright.

That’s a BFP—a big f-ing problem—for Biden, whose 2020 success wouldn’t have been possible without near-record turnout and a 20-point margin of victory among young voters, particularly in swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

The good news is, we have a solution to the Democrats’ problem at the top of the ticket. But to find it, you’ll have to look to the bottom.

Run for Something is an organization dedicated to recruiting and supporting candidates running for down-ballot offices. We launched on Jan. 20, 2017—Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day—and have since helped elect more than 1,000 candidates to local office. They’ve fought back against book bans and extreme abortion laws, and fought for affordable housing, public safety, and environmental justice—all while building the Democratic bench.

At Run for Something, we often make the point that to win the big things, we need to win the small things first. That’s certainly true—we have already seen candidates we helped elect to local office go on to win election to Congress, like Texas Representative Jasmine Crockett and Colorado Representative Yadira Caraveo, and state offices, like Michigan Lieutenant Governor Garlin Gilchrist and Michigan Supreme Court Justice Kyra Harris Bolden. And we’ve seen small wins have big impacts, like Justin Douglas, who flipped the Dauphin County Commission in Pennsylvania in 2023, by fewer than 150 votes, and now is taking concrete steps to make it easier for Pennsylvanians to vote.

But along the way, we have learned something else—that investing in the small races actually helps us win the big races in the same election.

You might be familiar with the idea that the top-of-the-ticket candidate has “coattails”—that the big-name elections like for president or Senate bring people to the polls, and those people also vote for the rest of the ticket.

But we’ve found that the reverse is also true: When Democrats run for down-ballot seats, whether or not they win, they help increase Democratic turnout and help elect Democrats at the top of the ticket. We call it “reverse coattails.”

Take Georgia, a state that President Biden won by about 11,000 votes (0.23 percent) in 2020, becoming the first Democratic presidential candidate to win there since Bill Clinton in 1992. In post-election analysis we conducted with BlueLabs Analytics, we found that increased turnout from Democrats running down-ballot may have netted Biden as many as 22,000 additional votes—twice his margin of victory.

Looking at the results in not just Georgia but also Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Wisconsin, and Florida, we found that having Democratic candidates contest state legislative seats in 2020 meaningfully increased Democratic vote-share for the entire ticket. Simply having a Democratic candidate on the ballot increased turnout for the top of the ticket by anywhere from 0.4 percent to 2.3 percent, compared to a district where the Republican candidate ran unopposed.

That’s a small number with a big impact when you consider that in the last election, Biden won three states by 0.6 percent or less.

And when we talk about the top of the ticket, we are not just talking about the race for president, but for Senate and governor as well. Think about candidates like Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Jon Tester in Montana. These are critical races that will decide control of the Senate—but not states where the Biden campaign is likely going to be investing significant resources. That’s where having Democratic candidates for school board, city council, and state legislature out knocking on doors across the state is going to be incredibly important, and maybe even decisive.

This year we decided to do a bit more research, focusing on young voters in particular. We commissioned a poll of 18- to 29-year-olds in battleground states, asking how local candidates could influence their likelihood of voting this fall.

The result: 61 percent of young Democrats said they would be more likely to vote this November if there was a young, progressive candidate for local or state office on the ballot alongside Biden.

This is just more evidence that the phenomenon of “reverse coattails” is not only real, but could be the key to winning in 2024.

The future of our democracy is at stake in this election, and we can’t win without young voters. Shaming or berating them will not work. Democrats have to give them something and someone to vote for.

That is why we are so focused on recruiting and supporting promising young candidates who are running for office at the local level—and why more Democrats should be looking down-ballot, too. An investment in these races is not just an investment in our future—it’s an urgent and necessary investment in our present.

Amanda Litman is the co-founder and co-executive director of Run for Something, an organization that helps recruit and support young, diverse, first-time candidates running for state and local office.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.