US electoral politics

Why work in US electoral politics?

Individuals really can make a difference

Politics can feel intractable. Many people doubt that they have any chance of individually influencing outcomes in a system this large. We think this is too pessimistic.
Fundamentally, while your odds of changing an election’s outcome will often be modest, the huge potential impact makes it worth trying. Attempting ambitious plans, even when the chances of success are low, can seriously pay off.

This is especially true for US politics, where control of Congress often comes down to narrow races in just a handful of districts. These races have unusually high leverage over a wide range of policy outcomes. If you dedicate your career to helping good candidates reach office (or doing it yourself), there’s a real chance that your work will improve millions of lives or nudge history in a more promising direction.

One concern we’ve heard: if elections are zero-sum, doesn’t adding talent or resources to one side just prompt the other side to react, canceling out your contribution?
There may be some truth to this in theory, but the reality is different:

• The market for campaign strategies is not perfectly efficient. Talent, competition, and ideas are scarce.
• Many elections are not contested, or seriously contested, at all, and the supply of skilled campaign professionals and funding falls short of demand.
• Moreover, if more thoughtful, impact-oriented people enter politics across the political spectrum, that could make the political system healthier regardless of who wins any particular race.

Why should you run for office?

You really could be better than the other candidates.

Perhaps surprisingly, elected office doesn’t attract enough talent. While serving in office presents the opportunity to influence policy and social outcomes, it’s not a great job by many standards: elected officials’ pay is relatively low,² while stress and travel demands are high.

Moreover, many capable people dislike fundraising or other elements of political work, and those drawn to it often prioritise personal ambition over making an impact, pandering to public opinion or interest groups’ priorities rather than focusing on the issues they value most. You could be an exception.

Moreover, certain professional backgrounds are much more represented than others. In recent years, less than 10% of US House members had a STEM background (most members of Congress are lawyers, businesspeople, or educators). If you have deep technical knowledge in an important domain, you would likely be the only one with that level of expertise in a given legislature. This could position you to steer science and technology policy in a more productive direction.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, if you’re reading this then we think you have a good chance of being a better elected official than whoever you’d replace. You came to 80,000 Hours because you want to help solve the world’s most pressing problems with your career, and likely have more context on global issues like catastrophic risks from AI and the possibility of engineered pandemics than most people. If you also develop the skills and knowledge needed to govern effectively, you could be a real force for good in politics. (Of course, people who disagree with us on what issues are most pressing might also disagree with this assessment!)

You really could have a decent chance of winning.

This path is surprisingly neglected. Many offices see little or no competition despite offering real influence or serving as stepping stones to higher office. In 2024, six California state assembly candidates faced no primary opposition, and one of them also ran unopposed in the general election.

While some incumbents face little opposition because they are popular or well-resourced, some are weaker candidates who hold office largely because they haven’t faced a strong opponent.

You could become that strong opponent.

Given the uncrowded environment and the choice of many different offices to run for, an enterprising first-time candidate has a good chance to win the election. This is particularly true for lower-level elections, such as state legislative seats, which offer both substantial opportunities for direct impact and a springboard to run for higher office.

Why should you work for a campaign?

Marginal efforts can swing elections. Because election results often track public opinion, it may seem like campaigns have little effect. However, evidence shows that stronger campaigns (e.g. those with more funding) tend to win more voters; in many narrow elections, campaign quality could make the difference. In 2017, control of the Virginia state house was decided by a random draw after a tie in one district. In 2000, the presidency came down to 537 votes in Florida. Modest improvements in campaign execution can change the outcome in close elections like these.

And marginal changes in election results can have profound consequences: in the current era, elections are competitive enough that control of Congress has changed hands twice since 2016 and the presidency has alternated in each of the last three elections. A swing of just a few percentage points in a few states could have changed any of these outcomes.

Not all tactics are equal — smart campaigning matters.

Research shows that many tactics can yield additional votes, but their effectiveness varies widely. Talented staff running optimized campaigns make resources go much further in registering, persuading, and mobilising voters, raising a candidate’s likelihood of winning.

Some campaign operatives make decisions for weak reasons, like conventional wisdom, advice from consultants who may be well meaning but have an interest in selling their products, personal aesthetic or ideological taste in political messaging, or intuition. Analytical, research-based approaches are growing in popularity but still undersupplied in this field.

Moreover, running a better campaign sometimes just means making a few good decisions. What’s the key message? Which groups of voters will decide the election and how can you reach them? When should a candidate bow out of a race or not, like Joe Biden in the 2024 election? Some of these decisions don’t require being in charge of everything to make a meaningful improvement. If you can influence these choices, you can make a real difference to election results.

You might worry that money dominates elections, so that a campaign’s decisions matter less than their ability to hire canvassers or buy billboards. But research suggests that in some ways, money matters less than commonly assumed.³ Candidate quality, so-called “ground game,” and campaign competence often matter more, especially in down-ballot races,⁴ in part because money is not always spent efficiently.

Plus, if money is the key lever for your campaign, you can be a fundraiser. Because of donation caps for campaigns, fundraising is often about appealing to lots of small-time donors, meaning ideas and hustle (and not just connections) pay off.

General competence (or lack thereof) can allow campaigns to seize unexpected opportunities (or sink an otherwise viable candidacy). Roy Moore, the Republican senate candidate in Alabama, a deeply Republican state, lost the 2017 election after incriminating information about his past came out during the race. Despite the challenging political environment, his opponent ran an effective campaign and persuaded many would-be Republican voters to vote Democrat or stay home. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris was among the leading choices for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination before the campaign, but eventually fell so low in polls that she dropped out before primary voting even began. Most observers concluded that her campaign strategy and staff were to blame, and her competitive 2024 run suggests her initial run may have performed better if it had been more capably executed.

You can take on a lot of responsibility within a campaign even without much experience. Many campaigns are like startups, with more work to be done than hands available to do it, and a meritocratic culture. If you show your competence and motivation, you will quickly earn more responsibility, be promoted, or find higher level positions on other campaigns.

This may be truer now than in the past. Many people believe that the field is facing an unusual talent shortage, and that campaign staffs have gotten weaker. In this context, if you bring a “scout mindset” and results-oriented approach, you may be able to improve a campaign’s decision-making.

That said, it is still essential to learn from senior staff with more experience; there’s a great deal of institutionalised knowledge in the field. The strongest performers combine a willingness to acquire this knowledge with the ability to improve upon it using innovative approaches (e.g. around new technology or analytical methods).

What’s more, you don’t necessarily need to ‘outcompete’ other staff to gain responsibility. In all but the largest elections, campaigns tend to be quite small, so you can easily make an effort in places other people aren’t covering.

And even the smallest campaigns can be a springboard for greater impact later. If you start working on campaigns for lower-level office and do a good job, you can quickly become more senior and may be able to get a role on a higher-leverage campaign in the next cycle, such as a gubernatorial or presidential campaign.

Campaigns can open doors to policy work and other careers. Many elected officials, including at the highest levels, hire former campaign staff for legislative or executive roles — which we think are often highly impactful. Campaign experience is also valuable for advocacy and organising in other careers, and is recognized as a respected path to careers in law, policy, communications, and the NGO sector by many people in those fields.

Elected leadership matters a great deal

Who controls the US government matters enormously for AI policy, pandemic preparedness, nuclear security, and more.

The US remains the single most influential actor on most of the problems we think are most pressing, and because of its federal system, both the national and state governments can have a big impact. The US federal government controls a budget of over $7 trillion, and large states like California spend hundreds of billions per year.⁵

Who holds power determines what is politically possible and affects the health of the democratic system itself. For example, changes in control of the US House, Senate, and presidency have made it possible to enact major legislation such as the CHIPS Act (a bill targeting semiconductor manufacturing passed by Democrats) and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (a set of changes to fiscal policy passed by Republicans). Even when no legislation passes, the institutional effects of political control can be large and long-lasting. When Senate Republicans declined to hold confirmation hearings for Democratic Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland in 2016, the seat remained vacant until the following administration filled it, reshaping the composition of the Supreme Court for decades. This episode demonstrates how electoral outcomes can enable the erosion of longstanding institutional norms and threaten the perceived legitimacy of the judiciary, with policy consequences that persist long after the election itself.

Government composition⁶ matters in two ways:

1) Individual politicians. Some politicians (regardless of party or ideological faction) will simply take pressing issues like AI risks, biosecurity, nuclear policy, or global health more seriously than others. There’s huge variation among individual politicians in competence, judgment, motivation to improve the lives of others, and openness to expert input.

In safe seats, where a district or state leans heavily toward one party, the primary determines who holds office. In these cases, the specific person who wins matters even among ideologically similar candidates. For example, California State Senator Scott Wiener represents a safely Democratic district. He authored SB 1047, an AI safety bill endorsed by leading AI researchers like Geoffrey Hinton. A different Democrat in that seat likely would have prioritized other issues, or might even have opposed such legislation. The bill was then vetoed by Democratic governor Gavin Newsom, highlighting that in practice, support for particular issues like AI safety legislation varies even within the same party.

On the Republican side, Rep. Jay Obernolte holds a safe Republican seat in California. But, unusually for Congress, he has a master’s degree in AI and founded a video game company. He now chairs the House’s bipartisan AI Task Force. A generic Republican primary winner almost certainly wouldn’t have filled that role or brought the same level of technical understanding to AI policy.

2) The partisan balance of power. Which party controls Congress or the presidency determines what policies are even on the table, because the majority party sets the agenda.

In competitive general election races, even when elections are decided by a few points, the policy gap between candidates is typically vast. The most widely used measure of congressional voting records shows zero ideological overlap between the parties: the most moderate Democrat is still more liberal than the most moderate Republican. Representatives answer in part to voters and organised interests within their own parties, so even those in relatively balanced districts vote very differently from their narrowly defeated opponents.

This means that, despite individual politicians varying widely in their views and competencies, it matters greatly which party controls various parts of government. Where parties disagree on the right approach to pressing issues like AI regulation, pandemic prevention, and geopolitical conflict, the partisan makeup of the US government can be the deciding factor in which policies are possible.

Lower-level offices shape higher-level outcomes.

States govern important aspects of federal elections. The choice of district maps in just a few states can change which party holds the majority in the US House. For example, redistricting decisions in Illinois and Ohio in recent cycles have shifted multiple House seats and influenced the overall partisan balance of the federal government.

Lower-level offices also serve as the talent pool from which politicians aspiring to higher office are drawn. Influencing who becomes an Illinois state senator can affect who wins the presidency 12 years later.

Politics is a good option if you expect transformative AI relatively soon.

Many people who are concerned about AI risk believe that AI systems could advance extremely quickly, and that action to reduce the risks in the near future is much more valuable than work that will take 10 or more years to pay off.

Some electoral politics work lets you make an impact very quickly. Elections happen on fixed schedules, so you can see results within a year or two. The work itself focuses on near-term goals, and if you’re happy to take an entry-level role or ready to run for office yourself, you can enter the field and start contributing within months.

This path is also relatively protected from AI-driven displacement. Even as AI capabilities grow, we’d guess that legal and institutional structures will keep humans at least partially in charge of political decisions for the foreseeable future. As long as this is the case, helping to elect good officials will matter. While AI systems may be able to automate many campaign tasks, candidates are likely to continue to rely on the counsel of human advisors, in part because the adaptable, generalist, face-to-face work required by campaigns may be among the slowest to be automated.

Downsides of working in electoral politics

Downsides to running for office

The political pressures of the job don’t end when you win. Elected officials face constant tension between their priorities and the demands of staying in office. Fundraising alone can consume hours each day, particularly for officials with brief terms (like US representatives). You’ll also be expected to attend events, respond to constituents, and take positions on issues far outside your areas of interest. When votes come to the floor, you’ll sometimes face pressure from leadership, colleagues, or donors to compromise — even on issues you care about — in exchange for support later on. These constraints can be managed, but not eliminated.

Junior legislators face additional structural limits on their influence. Committee assignments, floor time, and access to leadership are allocated based on seniority, loyalty, and perceived electoral vulnerability. While a driven and productive legislator can make progress faster, building influence takes years and depends partly on factors outside your control.

Even after winning, outcomes remain highly unpredictable. Your ability to advance your priorities depends on who else wins: which party controls the chamber, who chairs the relevant committees, and whether leadership sees your issues as worth spending political capital on. A ‘wave’ election in the next cycle could sweep your party out of power; a presidential administration could shift the policy landscape in ways that make your work irrelevant. Your colleagues may decline to cooperate, or events like economic crises or foreign conflicts may dominate the agenda. Success on this path often means positioning yourself to take advantage of opportunities and then staying patient until they arise. However, regardless of the political landscape, an elected position still gives you a platform you can use for effective advocacy, from informally lobbying colleagues to engaging the public.

Finally, there’s a high risk of expensive, time-consuming failure. Most campaigns lose, and even if your campaign is unusually well-run, there’s still a good chance you won’t be elected. Running requires months or years of full-time work, often without salary,⁷ and can easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars even in smaller races. Candidates typically put their careers on hold and expose themselves and their families to public scrutiny. Losing a race doesn’t mean the experience was worthless, as campaigns build skills and networks that can be valuable later, but candidates should enter with clear eyes about the odds.

Downsides to working on campaigns

Unstable working conditions. Campaigns are short-term, cyclical, often require relocation, and rarely offer competitive pay or benefits. Many people do this work early in their careers before moving on, though there are permanent campaign-adjacent organizations — including super PACs, 501(c)(4) nonprofits, and party committees — as well as research and analytics organisations that offer better conditions and longer-term career paths.

However, because few people are willing to make these sacrifices for the common good, this field is less competitive than others, strengthening the case for impact.

Difficulty in identifying great candidates. Politicians have competing motivations and must respond to public pressure. It can be hard to find candidates committed enough to your priorities to actually spend political capital on them. Before you commit to one campaign, ask your networks for advice.

Risk of value drift. Campaign work can pull you toward party loyalty over time. The longer you work within a political coalition, the easier it becomes to internalize its priorities as your own. As you build relationships and advance within a coalition, it becomes harder to step back and ask whether this is still the best use of your time, or whether the most promising path might now lie elsewhere. As a result, you may find yourself optimising for party success rather than seeking the highest-impact opportunities (like working across the aisle or leaving politics entirely).

High failure rate. Any given campaign may end in a loss for your candidate, though you will still gain career capital such as experience and connections that can pay off later.

Political work colours your public profile for life. If you work for a Republican, it’s harder to work for a Democrat later (and vice versa). Who you work with will also affect your ability to be hired for other politically inflected positions later (e.g. at some think tanks). If you think you’ll want to pursue other policy roles, consult someone knowledgeable about your preferred field to make sure campaign work won’t be a barrier later.

Would you be a good fit for working in electoral politics?

Skills that will help you succeed

Campaigns have different departments⁸ in which different skills are useful. The following skills are often valuable in campaign work, though you only need a couple of them to get started.

• Adaptability, flexibility, and self-motivated learning: Campaigns highly prize people who “just get things done,” regardless of the task and role.
• Critically understanding trends, polling, and data — and their pitfalls. Politics is saturated with ideologically flattering but misleading information. Many people want to hear that their side is winning or that their preferred policies are popular, and many others are willing to tell them so. The underlying data is often ambiguous enough that it’s hard to tell who’s right. Campaigns need people who can cut through this and deliver accurate assessments, even when the truth is unwelcome.
• Analysis, research, and data science are useful to produce the analyses mentioned above.
• Project management: The average campaign is essentially a startup, with few established procedures and lots of balls to juggle. It’s hard to find strong managers who can execute without much direction.
• Fundraising, including a willingness to directly ask people for money, is a useful skill.
• Communication and social skills, including public speaking and political organising, will help you succeed.
• For senior roles, strategic leadership (e.g. campaign management and people management) is helpful.
• Advertising and marketing is helpful, especially via digital ads and social media.

For running for office, the key skills are:

• Public speaking and comfort with public scrutiny
• People orientedness — liking people, wanting to talk to them all day, and understanding them well — towards both constituents and fellow officials
• Patience with the difficulties of leadership, being a public figure, and the often slow political process
• High risk tolerance, given the possibility of losing after investing substantial time and effort, plus typically only getting a few chances to run before being seen as an unviable candidate
• Personal likability to appeal to voters, donors, and other influential people
• Strong communication instincts for the relevant audiences and leaders
• A thorough understanding of the policy and politics of the issues you are most focused on, as well as those the public cares most about

What experience is useful?

No particular prior experience or educational background is essential.

What matters most is the ability to think strategically about winning. This sounds obvious, but it’s rarer than you might expect. Many politically engaged people struggle to separate strategy from advocacy: When asked what a campaign should say, they instinctively answer with what they personally find compelling rather than what would actually persuade undecided voters.⁹ Effective strategists can model how different audiences think, anticipate objections, and design messages that work even for people who don’t share their worldview. This is a skill that can be developed, but it requires genuine interest in understanding people who see things differently than you do.

That said, there are some backgrounds that are helpful in getting a job and succeeding in it. These include:

• Campaign work or political activism, e.g. campaign volunteering
  • Campaigns are almost always eager to bring in volunteers — it could take you just a few weeks to get started. (Though it’s important to pick a good candidate.)
• Data analysis
• Movement organising
• Business/entrepreneurship/strategy
• Communications/media
• Fundraising experience
• Marketing
• Retail/customer service
  • This might sound surprising, but in politics, it helps a lot to spend time interacting with the public!

What else is helpful?

Connections to other people working on campaigns, or, if it’s a small enough race, the candidate (or potential candidates) of interest. The easiest way to get these is often to show up in relevant places: volunteer for a campaign, go to events, or network through political groups (College Republicans or Democrats, local chapters of Indivisible or similar groups, etc.).

Top roles and where to work

By nature, this field changes very quickly, so it is difficult to recommend a stable set of organizations to work at. Please apply to speak with us if you would like more specific suggestions for your particular situation. However, there are some evergreen places to look and broad categories of roles to be aware of:

Common roles to look for

• Campaign manager
• Field director/regional field director
• Field organiser
• Finance director
• Communications director
• Communications assistant
• Digital director
• Social media manager
• Data director
• Analyst/data analyst (more for campaign-adjacent organisations)

Key places to work

• Presidential campaigns
• US House campaigns
• Statewide campaigns: US senate, gubernatorial, attorney general, ‘coordinated’ (these are organizations that work for all statewide candidates of a given party in one election)
• State legislative campaigns
• Local (county, municipal) campaigns
• Congressional committees: DCCC, NRCC, DSCC, NRSC (these are party organisations that coordinate strategically across races for the US House and Senate to try to win a national majority for their party in each chamber)
• National party committees: DNC and RNC (these primarily serve as fundraising arms of each party)
• Outside groups, e.g. independent expenditure groups and polling/data analysis/research firms and consultancies (talk to us for more guidance on these)

Our job board features opportunities in policy:

View all opportunities

Next steps

If you’re ready to apply for jobs:

• Research who is running for office, especially focusing on districts/states you think will have the highest leverage, and contact their campaigns to ask if they’re hiring.
• Attend political events to network with local candidates, politicians, current and former campaign staffers, and influential people.
• Check political job boards:
  • For Democrats, Jobs That Are Left, GAIN Power, Progressive Data Jobs
  • For Republicans, Republican Jobs, Conservative Jobs, GOP Jobs
  • Nonpartisan: Tom Manatos Jobs

If you need to build career capital:

• Volunteer on local campaigns.
• Join a campus political group, local political organisation, or chapter of a national group.
• Attend political trainings.
• Look for internships while in school.
• Develop the skills above.
• Build political knowledge by reading data-supported analyses.

Read next

If you’re interested in this career path, but aren’t sure it’s for you, you might want to check out out these related articles:

• 

  The US AI policy landscape: where to work to have the biggest impact

  The US government may be the single most important actor for shaping how AI develops.

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• 

  AI governance and policy

  Pursuing AI governance and policy could be many people’s highest-impact option.

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Learn more

• Coverage of AI-related election news, including tracking of lobbying spend
• Ballotpedia — a nonpartisan encyclopedia of US politics covering candidates, races, and offices at every level of government
• For tactical advice on running for office, we’ve seen Deciding to Win recommended for Democrats and Republican Toolbox recommended for Republicans