The ugly truth about running for office

Especially if you're not rich

Welcome to a Sunday edition of Progress Report.

First, I hope you’re having a nice and relaxing holiday break. And more importantly, if you’re having a shitty break or find yourself working through the holidays, I hope that things get better soon.

I can commiserate, having spent two weeks in the hospital before coming home to sink into my couch as part of my unexpectedly slow (and still-ongoing) recovery from my latest (sixth!) open-heart surgery. Not that I’m complaining: the only gift I wanted this year was to make it to the holidays (and now, selfishly, I’d like to be around for many, many more decades of holidays to come, and hope that I’m not jinxing it by putting it in writing).

A little over a month since the operation, it feels like I’m inching in the right direction (right now, about three city blocks at a time). There’s a lot of hard work ahead, but as my brain begins to clear and I start to catch my breath after two years of intermittent drowning, I feel confident saying that 2026 will be a big year for the newsletter.

Substack is a crowded mess these days; my plan is to avoid warmed-over hot takes and instead focus on reporting and insights that you won’t get elsewhere. I’m also ramping up my work inside campaigns (here’s my political media production and consulting site!), and today I’ve got an honest perspective from a world designed to obfuscate them. I’ll be back with a year-end good news post on Wednesday.

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Want to know what it’s like to run for Congress? Here’s a quick, droll glimpse into the harsh reality of regular people who deign to run for federal office, in the form of a spot for activist Cameron Kasky, who is running for Congress in NY-12.

I directed and produced this video, which was shot before my surgery and released last week. Any entertainment value comes from the absurd reality we filmed, flies on the wall as Cameron worked his way down a real donor call time list. He makes it look easy, but making these calls on camera — don’t worry, we didn’t record people on the other end — was actually an act of political bravery and a triumph of transparency in a world built on illusion.

Running for office almost always requires a slick dishonesty and false bravado when it comes to raising money, which is why you see candidates of all stripes boasting about “grassroots movements” and sending emails about just needing a few more bucks before the deadline.

They’re almost always lying, or at least exaggerating, and instead of participating in that farce, we decided to open up the process so that people could understand what happens behind the scenes.

Because more broadly speaking, it’s getting ugly out there.

Political spending continues to skyrocket as campaigns become more expensive, a reflection of loosening laws and changing tactics as well as the increasingly unprecedented wealth of the biggest donors. And it’s not just donors: wealthy candidates are pouring more money into their campaigns than ever before, including a combined $257 million on Senate and Congressional races last cycle.

The upshot of this influx of concentrated cash, from both self-funders and ultra-wealthy donors, is that it’s increasingly difficult for regular people to run for office. Last year was the first time in history that millionaires constituted a majority of Congress, while lawmakers from working class backgrounds made up just 2% of the People’s House.

To run for federal office nowadays generally requires being independently wealthy, maintaining close relationships with wealthy people who are ideologically simpatico, or at the very least, an eagerness to please deep-pocketed power brokers with what might be very divergent ideological viewpoints. Shadowy donors last year spent $1.9 billion in dark money, little of which went to people running progressive or populist campaigns.

Without any of those advantages, a regular person — no matter how smart or qualified — is usually stuck spending nearly all of their waking hours calling up strangers, pitching their campaign, and begging for donations. It’s miserable, inefficient, and not at all the way politics should work, and the reason the public doesn’t hear more specific complaints about the farcical process is that nowadays, fundraising is held up as the main indicator of candidate viability.

It’s one of the biggest points of dissonance between public and private political conversations: candidates hate call time, but they’ve got to project momentum and confidence, because any admission otherwise suggests that they’re struggling to raise money. And any suggestion that the money isn’t flowing kicks off a vicious cycle, because deep-pocketed donors only donate to candidates who are already raising lots of money.

Ideally, the video will inspire people to donate to the campaign, so Cameron can be freed to go meet voters and learn about the issues they face (and, well, we have money to make more videos). But if nothing else, we wanted this to shine a light on the ugly parts of the process, because nobody else is willing to do it.

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