Political campaigns offer prospective staffers an opportunity to learn about promoting ideas and influencing public policy, gain valuable professional experience in a fast-paced environment, and build a meaningful career. Campaigns are typically highly competitive, requiring substantial resources and professionally-staffed operations, especially in competitive races for seats in the legislative branch of government where margins of victory and shifts in party control frequently determine policy outcomes.
Staffers on a political campaign organize, persuade, and mobilize the support of voters to elect candidates to public office or pass ballot initiatives such as constitutional amendments, state laws, local ordinances, and referendums. These campaigns are primarily volunteer-driven, but they also require paid consultants to handle project and budget management, finance, and volunteer and staff recruitment.
Candidates’ campaigns comprise the majority of electoral opportunities during any given election cycle. The campaigns of 535 members of Congress, hundreds of state legislators and elected governors, mayors, and councilmembers, and thousands of city and county executive offices and legislative referenda are largely candidate-driven. In addition, there are numerous candidate-driven gubernatorial and presidential campaigns, which typically operate under the supervision of partisan campaign committees.
While there are exceptions, most candidate-driven campaigns do not include much space for substantive policy work. Instead, voters typically form general impressions about a candidate’s positions on a particular issue based on media coverage of the candidate, partisan affiliation, paid advertising, and viral moments during a campaign. For this reason, if you’re interested in working on a policy-oriented campaign, you are more likely to find an opening with a losing candidate than a winning one.