Thread by @ezraklein

"If your goal is to win and build sustainable power, throwing $90 million at Amy McGrath for Senate just because she’s taking on Mitch McConnell is not the way to do that," @amandalitman told me. "It just isn’t." nytimes.com/2022/02/01/opi…

A weakness for Democrats, both at the level of funding and at the level of attention, is they're obsessed with national power and have ceded a huge amount of state and local power to the right.

But that's not, at any level sustainable.

It's not sustainable nationally: Elections are administered by states. Congressional districts are drawn by states. The House and Senate bench is built of local and state officials.

It's also just a disaster for governance generally. The president has less power than Americans thinks. Governors and state legislatures and boards of supervisors have more.

Covid policy, education policy, housing, criminal justice -- that's state and local power.

But I wanted to have a conversation that was about building power, not lamenting its absence. And so I asked @amandalitman to come on the podcast and talk about what it takes to win state and local elections — and to run in them.

Running for office can sound like this opaque, crazy impossible thing that only other people do. It's not! There are so many more elected offices than people realize (literally hundreds of thousands of them!). And you -- yes, you! -- can absolutely run for one.

We talk about the mechanics of how — fundraising and message crafting and ballots and so on. The 3 questions every candidate who wants to run should ask themselves.

And more importantly: Just what it feels like to stand up and be part of politics at its fundamental level.

So this is the rare conversation about democracy is America that left me feeling inspired, not gutted. I think it'll do the same for you. nytimes.com/2022/02/01/opi…

Gah. In America. In! In!