Run for Something’s 2026 Strategic Plan

Over the last nine years, Run for Something has changed what leadership looks like and means in America.

We’ve built the largest candidate pipeline in politics. We’ve elected more than 1,600 millennial and Gen Z leaders to local offices in 49 states. Our bench is rising as dozens of our alumni are now running for higher office at a moment when Democratic voters are desperate and hungry for generational change.

Our belief that authentic, values-driven community-rooted candidates can run and win anywhere has been proven out over and over again.

Our approach of scaled recruitment in all 50 states — while prioritizing targets and going deep as needed — makes us perfectly prepared for a cycle in which we can and should be able to win in long-shot places.

We are ready for 2026. And just as importantly: We are ready for what comes beyond 2026.

Run for Something’s efforts to run and win locally in the short term will help generate the energy and momentum needed to support flipping the House, Senate, and governorships through “reverse coattails.”

Our candidates will run and win, securing state legislative seats, municipal offices, and seats on school and library boards across the country. They will fight like hell against Trump — and at the same time, they’ll proactively advance good policies, showing people what it could look like when our side is in charge.

In a year when all eyes will be on the federal offices, Run for Something’s work has never been more important. Our local leaders are both our defense and our offense.

This plan lays out exactly what we’re doing to get as many people as possible to run and to help them win big in order to build sustainable power — plus, what you can do to help.

Why it all matters now

To put it bluntly: Everything sucks right now.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. By the end of 2026, we could be looking at a Congress capable of performing oversight over Trump and, just as importantly, a new class of leaders at the state and local level who will both aggressively fight back and pave a new path forward.

As the expression goes, we can have nice things. We can have leaders we’re excited about and wins in deep red places and governance that actually delivers. We can have it all if we choose to put in the work now.

There is hope. The Run for Something team saw it in real-time over the last year and the years before: While the leaders of today may be failing us on many fronts, the leaders of tomorrow are ready.

What we accomplished in 2025

Before we look to 2026, let’s look back at 2025 — Run for Something’s biggest and best year yet.

• Nearly 80,000 people signed up to run for office in the last 12 months. That’s more in the last year than in the entirety of Trump’s first term

2025 Candidate Recruitment

• The biggest moments for candidate recruitment were right after Trump won last November, when the first big DOGE firings kicked in and thousands of federal workers looked into running for office, when Schumer folded on the first CR fight in the spring, and when Zohran Mamdani won the primary in June.
• Our candidate pipeline now includes over 250,000 people — it’s the largest list of potential leaders in politics. In just the last 3 months, these leaders have explored over 23,000 offices at runforwhat.net.
• 165 millennial and Gen Z leaders won races for local offices across the country, including 43 red-to-blue flips, including in states as varied as VA, TX, OH, MI, IA, PA, CO, WA, NY, and NH. Over 65% of our November candidates won their elections, our highest November win rate ever.
• We held our biggest candidate intro call ever, with more than 1,300 people logging on to learn more about running for office.
• In July, we launched Run for Something Community, our new online hub for the candidate pipeline, with thousands of people joining to talk to other potential candidates and mentors, and enroll in our two asynchronous and totally free trainings. This is allowing us to meet the scale and demand of the moment.
• We kicked off partnerships with Senator Bernie Sanders, MoveOn, and Vote Save America and continued our relationships with hundreds of other organizations to recruit thousands of future candidates.
• Through Run for Something Civics, we launched Renters Represent, a non-partisan effort to get more renters to run for office and tackle the housing crisis from a critical underrepresented perspective.
• In the fall, we rolled out our Battle Up plan — a 5 year $50 million vision to expand the battleground map ahead of 2032.
• We led the conversation on the need for a new generation of leaders. In February, we called for every Democrat over the age of 70 to retire and make this their last term — and in the 10 months since, many have heeded our call.
• Our bench is rising: There are at least six RFS alumni running for U.S. Senate, six running for governor, and a few dozen running for U.S. House and other statewide offices. Many are going to win. Hell yeah.

Just as importantly, we ended 2025 financially stable. Thanks to an incredible community of generous supporters (which you can join right here), Run for Something was able to sustain our operations throughout the year and is heading into 2026 with momentum.

What we’re doing in 2026

Last year was about stabilizing our internal infrastructure while the program and pipeline expanded exponentially. This year is about pushing it into high gear at a time when we could win big if we field the right candidates for each community.

Our program is broken into two core functions, and our Battle Up plan to expand the map lays overtop both areas.

Let’s break it down…

Recruitment and cultivation

The core of our work is recruiting candidates. Our pipeline continues to be the largest list of potential leaders — there is no one else doing the work at both our scale and depth.

After a successful 2025, our goal is to add an additional 50,000 people to the pipeline across all of our entities.

To do that, we’ll be running ads, hosting virtual events and celebrations like National Run for Office Day, and constantly refining our recruitment programs to ensure we’re bringing the best possible potential leaders into the program.

In particular, we’re looking to recruit three specific cohorts, each of whom fit into the larger efforts to take back power nationwide:

• **Candidates in rural areas, especially through our partnership with Dirt Road Campaign.** Rural candidates can help us expand the map and run up the margins through reverse coattails.
• Women, whose recruitment numbers have dropped through 2025 in part due to reduced investment in this work. At a time when women are so clearly leading in their communities and in the fight back against Trump, while also facing more serious threats when they enter public life, we’ve identified that women require more support, mentorship, and engagement in order to run.
• Gen Z, including through our renters program and other targeted efforts. We’re looking for candidates with lived experience that reflects how young voters are currently experiencing the affordability crisis. Young voters are rapidly turning against Trump and the MAGA agenda; our candidates can give them a positive forward-looking alternative.

Our partnerships will be a key part of this work, which is why we’re deeply embedded in state and local ecosystems. If there’s a state recruitment table working to find candidates, we’re on it — and often we’re the top source of leads for the table. If there’s an organization that has members who should run for office, we’ll be there asking them to get on the ballot.

To keep cultivating that pipeline, we’ll work through 2026 to keep expanding participation in RFS Community, adding more programming and ways for volunteers to engage with the pipeline in that space, along with expedited pathways to deeper support for those further in their candidate journey.

We have noted that leaders spend on average 311 days in our pipeline from signing up to filing for our endorsement — folks who sign up with us early prior to our endorsement are twice as likely to win their elections, and the longer someone spends in our pipeline, the more likely they are to win.

Through deeper early pipeline programming, we aim to speed up that conversion rate and increase our win rate.

Supporting campaigns

Through Run for Something PAC, we’ll endorse at least 300 candidates in 2026. (Our ability to endorse is limited entirely by staff capacity.)

As always, our endorsement process will stay rigorous, with a tight focus on values and a flexible approach to policy, acknowledging that candidates in different parts of the country running for different levels of office need to meet their communities where they are. Our priority above all else is finding leaders with deep community ties who can communicate authentically and directly with voters.

However, one big change we’re making to endorsements in 2026: We’ll now be endorsing candidates running as independents.

This is a strategic pivot for us because of two big factors:

1. There are communities where someone running as a Democrat simply cannot win with the partisan label attached to them.
2. More and more young people are identifying as independents — 56% of Gen Z and 54% of millennials now reject partisan labels.

Our endorsements will continue to come with deep 1:1 support, mentorship, and access to our broad network of partners and tools. This year, we’re prioritizing trainings and tools that enable candidates to run modern campaigns that meet the moment.

We are building a suite of new digital tools to help run modern campaigns:

• Campsight is a politics-specific Generative Engine Optimization tool to help candidates track the way consumer LLMs (like ChatGPT) are talking about them and their opponents. In 2026, millions of voters will ask ChatGPT and other LLMs who to vote for, particularly at the bottom of the ticket. Campsight is the “batteries-included” toolkit candidates need to ensure they’re the answer for the voters they are trying to reach.
• Votewallet Tickets are mobile wallet passes for candidates. Like how a boarding pass appears on your phone on the day of a flight, Votewallet Tickets are time-bound to appear on election day with a candidate’s details. Tickets can be shared by anyone who already has one, making them an ideal tool to scale relational organizing tactics. Votewallet Tickets are connected to a lightweight CRM to help candidates collect phone numbers, build their list, and track how supporters are sharing tickets on their own.

Our endorsed candidates stick with us as alumni, and we’re here to cheer for them and lift them up in service of inspiring other people to run, too — and to remind us all that good governance is actually possible. In 2026, we’ll be even more rigorous about keeping track of our alums’ growing careers. Our hope is to bring people together in early 2027 to further cement community ties (and celebrate 10 years of RFS!)

How Battle Up figures into all of this

The national battleground map as we knew it in 2024 is going to be completely upended in the next eight years. By 2030, population growth in Texas, Florida, and the South will lead to a redistricting process during which Democrats are projected to lose Electoral College votes in traditional blue states; we could see a third of current winning combinations disappear by the 2032 presidential election.

Democrats continually invest billions of dollars in the same places over and over again, driven by short-term incentives. Meanwhile, 70% of local and state legislative races go uncontested, leaving millions of potential voters without a reason to show up at all. When district lines shift, only communities with strong local leadership and rooted trust will be positioned to compete.

Our model identifies and trains local leaders who will, by the time the post-census new map reality is written, already have receipts in their communities: school board members, city councilors, county commissioners, state legislators who can run and win because they’ve already solved problems voters care about. When district lines move, these trusted messengers remain the constant.

RFS builds those trusted benches early, ensuring that when district lines change, our alumni are already the local favorites, ready to hold or flip seats from the bottom up.

With nearly 250,000 people in the RFS candidate pipeline, 1,500+ wins in 49 states, and pipeline alumni twice as likely to be elected as peers, RFS has the proven scale to do this work. Our data also shows every RFS candidate adds about 800 up-ballot votes, making our ability to both build a bench while simultaneously providing reverse coattails as one of the most cost-effective turnout multipliers in American politics at roughly $3 per vote.

The map will shift — and pro-democracy power-building must shift with it. Long before new district lines are drawn, the balance of electoral power is already changing. According to the Brennan Center, census projections and reapportionment forecasts show that Southern and Sun Belt states will gain seats, while many historically blue or industrial states are poised to lose them.

• Texas is forecasted to gain four congressional seats, and Florida three.
• Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, Idaho, and Utah are also projected to gain seats.
• Meanwhile, states like California, New York, Illinois, and Minnesota are likely to lose multiple districts.
• These shifts don’t just change congressional maps — they change Electoral College math, because each congressional seat influences electoral votes.

As one analysis recently warned, if current trends persist, the path to 270 electoral votes will require picking up new Sun Belt battlegrounds — even if Democrats retain traditional states. In fact, a coalition of states Biden won in 2024 plus the “Blue Wall” (Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin) may only sum to 256 electoral votes under 2032’s projected map — meaning Democrats will have to win Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, or other southern swing states to close the gap.

This is not a distant risk — it’s a looming challenge. To remain viable, Democrats must soften the ground now in growth states and growth counties, building credibility and trust before maps shift beneath them.

Redistricting creates both risks and opportunities — but only for communities that have already built trusted local benches. When lines are redrawn, the counties within new districts often determine who holds or flips a seat. Having credible, values-aligned leaders already serving locally means we’re not starting from scratch when new opportunities appear. At the same time, winning in the Sun Belt, South, or Rural West requires long-term investment — building community trust, developing emerging leaders, and aligning local momentum with pro-democracy gains during presidential cycles. The path to holding and expanding power after 2030 begins now, by strengthening local leadership in the counties where the next map will be won or lost.

That means the strategy must start today in counties and precincts that are strategically central, long before new district maps are drawn. By building bench strength, local organizing infrastructure, and trust in these counties now, RFS ensures that when redistricting happens, we already have electable leaders in place to contest or defend critical seats, and we will have softened the ground for statewide strategies to take stronger shape.

Our 5 year plan to Battle Up and expand the map is overlaid on all of our work. We’re working through the year to identify local recruitment partners, identify target districts, and in areas with high priority nested 2026 races (meaning: states where our local candidates can spur reverse coattails for the top of the ticket) doubling down on candidate support.

1. Lift the Bench: *States and counties positioned for near-term federal pickups (2026–28) and long-term investment — *Arizona, North Carolina, Ohio, Georgia

2. Grow the Bench: *Places with emerging counties reshaped by population and demographic shifts — *Utah, Iowa, Nebraska

3. Battle Up Long Term: *Historically neglected regions where rebuilding starts locally and compounds nationally — *Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Idaho

Our theory of change: fill the ballot, build trust locally, and the national map will follow. And we have our own receipts to prove it -– from 36 elected alumni in Arizona to sustained investment in Georgia that turned local school board and county wins into state legislative victories (and now, Congressional candidates). RFS is the only national organization built to turn local recruitment into national results.

We combine county-level precision, community-based authenticity, and data-driven scalability to build a generation of trusted leaders who can help rewrite the story of electoral maps, and move people from partisan encampments to trust (through proof points) in policy and policy makers.

What it all costs

Run for Something’s 2026 budget across all entities is $8.2 million — far less than a single competitive House race or even a state legislative chamber.

What you can do

Four ways you can help right now:

1. Run for office or ask someone to run for office. Look up where you can run at runforwhat.net — it’s (probably) not too late to get on the ballot in 2026, and never too early to start planning for 2027.
2. Make a donation. You can give to Run for Something PAC here or Run for Something Civics here. If you want to make a larger donation offline, need info on how to mail checks, want to give stock or from a DAF, or have other questions about giving, just send us a note at donate@runforsomething.net
3. Introduce us to someone we can work with! Whether that’s as a possible programmatic partner, a new supporter, or a possible candidate, we love to meet new people and collaborate with others. Just email us at hello@runforsomething.net.
4. Spread the word about our work. You can find us on social media on: Instagram, BlueSky, LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, and TikTok.

Thanks for being part of the Run for Something community. In dark times, this work gives us hope — you make it possible. ❤

(FOR PAST STRATEGIC PLANS, CHECK THESE OUT: YEAR ONE, YEAR TWO, YEAR THREE, YEAR FOUR, YEAR FIVE, YEAR SIX, YEAR SEVEN, YEAR EIGHT & YEAR NINE)

Note: The programs described in this plan cut across three entities — Run for Something Civics (501c3), Run for Something Action Fund (501c4), and Run for Something (a non-federal 527.) All activities under Civics are nonpartisan and educational in nature.