En pocas palabras

• El 24 de septiembre, NDTC organizará por primera vez una sesión de preguntas y respuestas en español, Cada votante, en su idioma, con motivo del Mes de la Herencia Hispana.

• Millones de personas con derecho a votar y el personal encargado de movilizarlas trabajan principalmente en español. Esta capacitación responde a sus necesidades actuales.

• Esta sesión forma parte de un compromiso más amplio: NDTC está desarrollando capacitaciones que se ajustan a la realidad de quienes trabajan hoy en las campañas.

El 24 de septiembre, NDTC organizará por primera vez una sesión de preguntas y respuestas en español, Cada votante, en su idioma, con motivo del Mes de la Herencia Hispana. Es un panel en vivo, en español, diseñado para el personal de campaña, voluntarios y candidatos que organizan a sus comunidades todos los días.

Por qué esto es importante

El Mes de la Herencia Hispana nos pareció el momento indicado para lanzar esta iniciativa, pero su importancia va más allá del calendario. Todo se resume en tres factores: un electorado que crece con rapidez, una confianza que depende de hablar el mismo idioma y una desinformación en español que avanza más rápido que los esfuerzos por contrarrestarla.

El electorado está creciendo. Más de 36 millones de personas latinas tienen derecho a votar en este ciclo electoral, y esa cifra sigue creciendo más rápido que la de casi cualquier otro sector del electorado. Muchas de las personas que movilizan al electorado, hacen campaña puerta a puerta o coordinan voluntariado en favor de candidaturas locales y medidas sometidas a votación realizan esa labor en español todos los días. Ofrecer capacitación en el idioma en el que ya trabajan garantiza que nuestras lecciones se comprendan, puedan aplicarse y contribuyan a movilizar, proteger y defender el voto hispano y latino.

La confianza se transmite a través del lenguaje. En una encuesta reciente realizada en Texas, cuatro de cada diez personas hispanas con derecho a votar afirmaron que tienen más probabilidades de apoyar a una persona candidata que se comunique con ellas en español. El idioma forma parte de la manera en que las campañas generan confianza y ganan elecciones, por lo que debe integrarse plenamente en sus estrategias. Más sobre eso en un minuto.

La desinformación avanza más rápido que los esfuerzos por contrarrestarla. La desinformación en español que circula por internet se ha convertido en un problema persistente para las comunidades latinas. Los estudios indican que las principales empresas de redes sociales no identifican hasta el 70 % de la información errónea en español, frente a menos del 30 % en inglés. Además, se difunde rápidamente, en parte porque hay muy poco contenido en español que la contrarreste. Quienes se dedican a la organización política y la detectan primero suelen ser quienes tienen menos recursos para combatirla. Uno de los principales objetivos de esta sesión es que estas personas cuenten con herramientas concretas, en lugar de tener que improvisar.

El idioma es la base de la organización relacional

El verdadero motor de la mayoría de las campañas ganadoras no está en los materiales enviados por correo ni en los anuncios (a pesar de todo el dinero que se invierte en ellos). Está en las personas que conversan con sus vecinos, compañeros de trabajo y familiares, en intercambios que no se parecen en nada a un discurso formal. Eso es la organización relacional, y funciona por completo gracias a la confianza entre personas que ya se conocen.

Esa confianza depende de hablar el mismo idioma que la otra persona. Cuando ambas hablan el mismo idioma, la conversación fluye con naturalidad. Cuando no es así, la conexión debe cargar además con el peso de la traducción. Una persona voluntaria que realiza labores de organización en español en su comunidad no debería tener que traducir mentalmente un material de capacitación antes de poder usarlo. Mucho menos debería tener que traducir sobre la marcha el mensaje de la campaña mientras habla con alguien en la puerta de su casa.

En esta sesión, el panel hablará de cómo mantener las conversaciones de las que depende la organización relacional, en el idioma en el que realmente tienen lugar.

La visión de NDTC para el Mes de la Herencia Hispana: sesión de preguntas y respuestas

Una sesión de preguntas y respuestas no es una conferencia. Es una conversación.

Manuel Espitia moderará la conversación. Manny realiza labores de organización política en español e inglés desde 2012. Comenzó trabajando sobre el terreno en Nuevo México durante la campaña de reelección del presidente Obama. Actualmente trabaja como director de la Región Norte de Run For Something y también ocupa el cargo de representante estatal en Nuevo Hampshire. Conoce esta labor desde ambas perspectivas: como integrante del personal de campaña y como candidato.

La conversación abordará las preguntas que más suelen plantearnos quienes realizan labores de organización en español:

• Cómo generar confianza en una comunidad a la que, con demasiada frecuencia, las campañas solo se han acercado durante los años electorales

• Cómo hablar con el electorado sobre los asuntos que más le importan en este momento

• Cómo hacer todo lo anterior con apenas una fracción del presupuesto que recibe un programa en inglés

También responderemos preguntas del público en vivo durante toda la sesión. Si usted enfrenta un problema concreto en su trabajo diario, este es el lugar para plantearlo.

Esta sesión está pensada para quienes ya realizan esta labor, ya sea una persona que coordina al voluntariado por primera vez o una persona candidata que dirige su propia campaña bilingüe.

Detalles

Cada votante, en su idioma tendrá lugar el jueves 24 de septiembre, de 1:00 a 2:00 p. m., hora del este (ET), y de 10:00 a 11:00 a. m., hora del Pacífico (PT). Será un evento en vivo y en español, abierto (¡y gratuito!) para el personal de campaña, las personas voluntarias, quienes se postulan a cargos públicos y quienes lideran sus comunidades.

Habrá tiempo para sus preguntas, así que venga con todas las que tenga.

Este es solo un evento, pero marca el inicio de una nueva etapa para NDTC. Las campañas demócratas ganan cuando llegan al electorado allí donde se encuentra y en su idioma. Eso comienza por capacitar a todas las personas que organizan campañas en el idioma en el que ya trabajan. Inscríbase a continuación y comparta esta información con las personas de su red que realizan labores de organización en español.

REGÍSTRESE AQUÍ

• How you talk about your experience matters even more than the experience itself, so practice connecting what you’ve done to why it should matter to managers.

• Don’t wait for permission to be independent. Confidence to try something on your own is noticed and appreciated, even if you don’t nail it the first time.

• Come in with an idea of what you want to get out of it. Nobody else can steer that for you!

Hi y’all, Kelly S. here today. After a brief stint writing BTS for NDTC’s Substack, I’m coming out once again from behind the orange curtain! (If you missed my introductions, check out What I Wish I’d Known Before Starting a Career in Digital Politics and What I Wish I’d Known Before Applying for Political Internships. They’re getting lonely in the archive!)

Now that I’ve had three experiences managing interns in the political world, I’ve read a lot of early career resumes and sat down for countless daily check-in meetings. And with summer turning into fall, and graduating interns ‘round the nation passing the torch to the next, it felt like the right time to chat with you again.

I know that applying for political internships can truly feel like a game of chance (or connections), while actually doing them can leave you guessing if you’re doing anything of value or just causing headaches. But I’ve been #blessed to have managed three of the most stellar interns I could hope for, and I’ve found a few commonalities that made them stand out from their applications all the way through their last day on the job.

Here’s what they are.

Communicating What You’ve Done > What You’ve Actually Done

Something hiring managers should admit to more: as a candidate, your ability to communicate your experience in a way that thoughtfully connects it to the job you're interviewing for is just as important -- if not more important -- than your actual experience.

You don’t need to have simultaneously juggled a White House internship while leading an academic society and working on a research project (this would probably scare me TBH). But if you’ve worked a fast-paced job in the service industry, you have something valuable to say about your ability to keep up with competing demands and how you’d contribute that skill to a marketing team. Or if you’ve run a fan account on Instagram for your favorite Bravo show, you have something to tell me about your approach to content planning and calendar management.

And on the contrary, some impressive resumes fall flat when a candidate doesn't communicate past the page. I’d rather hire an expert on Real Housewives who has intentionally thought about how they’d plug in their skills to our team than a political science grad who can’t do the same.

Independence Is a Skill!

Now for some advice for when you’ve actually started the job: New interns are often more capable than they think, and more hesitant than they need to be.

I get it! As an intern, you only have so many opportunities to make a strong impression, and it feels high-stakes to mess up or need correcting.

But don’t let perfectionism be the enemy of your independence. As a manager, it is *so much less work* for me to edit your first swing at something than it is to walk you through every step of the way. If you intend to contribute to the team’s productivity, be less afraid of getting it wrong than you are of asking for an extra level of supervision you don’t need. You’re probably more on the right track than you think anyway!

You’ll still get plenty of instruction, training, and support along the way, don’t worry. I’m just saying that if you’re often deciding between asking first or trying first, lean toward trying.

(Critical caveat: This doesn’t apply when it comes to hitting publish or posting anything publicly. Take the swing on drafting an email, not on hitting send to thousands of people.)

Figure Out What You Want to Walk Away With

With all of that said, remember that your internship should be working for you too.

Before you start (or if you already have right now), think through a few questions to help you stay goal-oriented throughout the term.

• What projects do you actually want exposure to?

• Whose job do you want to learn more about?

• What’s something you want to have made or done by the time this ends, something you could put in a portfolio or talk about in future interviews?

Good managers will ask you these things, but you don’t have to wait for us to ask. Come to your first full check-in with rough answers already in mind, and revisit them along the way. We want your internship to be valuable to you, not just useful to us, but we can’t do that without knowing what you want to leave us with. This is the part that you have to steer, and we’ll provide the charge.

Well, them’s my thoughts! Interns and managers can and should have a symbiotic working relationship, and these are the three things my interns have done to crush their semesters (and hopefully enjoy their time!)

If you’re looking for more early career resources for the political world, NDTC is full of them. As always, they’re completely free.

EXPLORE NDTC CAREER COURSES

To keep an eye out for future internships at NDTC, bookmark our careers page and follow us on LinkedIn!

CAREERS AT NDTC

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• The final days of a campaign are the highest-risk window for security threats, and the moment you can least afford to get hit.

• Those risks range from disinformation aimed at your campaign, to misinformation your team has to correct in real time, to harassment aimed at you and your staff.

• We just released a new slate of security courses built to help you get through Election Day, intact.

NDTC CEO Kelly Dietrich goes deep on the cybersecurity practices he wants every campaign to follow

You may have heard that NDTC is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. Over the last decade, we’ve trained over 130,000 Democrats to win elections, watched our alumni flip seats across the country, and built the infrastructure that generates massive Democratic talent. Now, we’re sharing all those insights with you.

This is the sixth installment of “10 Lessons in 10 Years,” a monthly series where we break down one insight we’ve seen proven true time and again, across thousands of campaigns.

Some of these lessons we’ve had to learn the hard way. Now you don’t have to. Notebooks out, pencils ready.

If you’re a candidate or staffer reading this in August 2026, you’ve spent recent months building a real, viable campaign. Long nights researching your voter universe, hours in call time fielding donations, the whole shebang. The next 10 weeks and change are when all of that work either pays off or gets unraveled, and the risk of the latter is not always by voters or even your opponent.

The final stretch is when your opponent is most desperate, your visibility peaks, and your team is stretched thinnest. That also means it’s the time when campaigns are most likely to get hit with a hack, a coordinated disinformation push, or a harassment campaign aimed at rattling you off your game.

We’ve watched this play out across countless campaigns over the last decade. So we compiled the info you need to know in three free courses. Here’s what to lock down before you cross the finish.

Cybersecurity Doesn’t Get a GOTV Break

Your team is moving fast in these final days. Volunteers are on shared devices, staff are texting and calling from personal phones, your voter file is getting pulled up in coffee shops and church basements. Every one of those could be a point of entry for someone who wants to disrupt your operation for all the wrong reasons.

A few things to check before you’re too busy to catch them:

• Every campaign account, email, social, and your voter database should have a strong, unique password and two-factor authentication turned on.

• Volunteers and staff using personal devices for campaign work should know the basics: no campaign passwords saved in a group text, no logging into shared accounts on public WiFi.

• Have a plan with designated staffers on what to do if an account gets locked out or compromised, and know it before 6 a.m. on Election Day, not after.

If you’re looking at this and going, “Okay but how exactly?” our course, Campaign Security 101, walks through this in more depth, built for campaigns who don’t have a dedicated IT staffer and need the basics done right.

Campaign Security 101

Disinformation Speeds Up as Election Day Gets Closer

Hacks are far from the only threat you’ll face in the final stretch. Disinformation – false or misleading claims spread to confuse voters or damage your campaign – tends to spike in the last days of a race, when there’s less time to catch voters up to speed on fact checks before they cast their ballots.

It shows up in familiar shapes: a fake quote attributed to your candidate, a doctored image, a rumor about your polling location or voting deadline that’s built to suppress turnout rather than inform it.

The campaigns that handle these curveballs well are the ones that had a plan for spotting disinformation and responding before it spread. That’s the gap our new course, Combating Disinformation for Democratic Campaigns, is built to close. And, this is key, you’ll leave with an actionable companion worksheet for practicing how to spot and respond to it before you’re doing it live, under pressure.

NEW: Disinformation Course

Misinformation Is a Different Problem, and Needs a Different Response

Disinformation is deliberate, while misinformation is often just confusion, like an old news story getting recirculated, a voter repeating something they heard wrong, a volunteer accidentally sharing outdated information about a polling location. But if you’re not careful, you might be disseminating information started by bad actors, even if your own intention is good.

Our course, An Individual’s Guide to Combating Disinformation, also covers how to monitor for misinformation, quickly correct information, and keep your team’s messaging consistent when the pressure to respond fast is highest. Correcting misinformation starts with combating disinformation, because that’s how the spread of false news usually starts. Alongside it, we’re releasing a monitoring spreadsheet template your comms or digital team can use to track what’s circulating and how you responded.

NEW: Misinformation Course

When It Gets Personal

Sometimes what you’re dealing with isn’t about your platform at all. It’s harassment, aimed at you, at your staff, or at your volunteers. It escalates in the final stretch for the same reason everything else does: more visibility, more buzz, more to throw you off your game when you don’t have the time to set the record straight.

If it happens, document it with screenshots, timestamps, and the platform it came from. You might not need it right away, but a pattern is harder to act on after the fact than while you’re building the record. We’re also releasing a guide and spreadsheet template for documenting online harassment and abuse, so your team has a system in place before it’s needed.

Get Ahead of It, While You Can

To be clear, these precautions aren’t meant to make you feel like the worst is coming. They’re about not being caught off guard if it does. Our new courses are like insurance, the rare resources we hope every campaign implements, but never needs to act on. You’ve put too much into this campaign to lose ground in the final weeks to something you could have prepared for.

Take an afternoon this week to check your accounts, brief your team, and get familiar with the resources below. Ten years of watching campaigns win and lose has taught us that the ones who protect themselves early are the ones still standing on Election Night. And like we said, if you never have to use these resources, that’s a win!

Misinformation for Individuals

Disinformation for Democratic Campaigns

Campaign Security 101

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• Our Founding Fathers were shockingly young: Jefferson was 33 when he wrote the Declaration, while Hamilton was just 21.

• Somewhere along the way, we started assigning “experience and qualifications” based on age, yet this Congress – arguably not doing the best job – is one of the oldest in U.S. history.

• Increasing age diversity in politics can change the current attitude of the 70% of Americans who are dissatisfied with our government.

• You don’t need gray hair or a law degree to run for office, and local offices are a great place to start. Check out our free course, So You Think You Want To Run?

Hi! I’m Delara, an NDTC intern here!

For most of my life, I’ve assumed that running for office was something you do later in life. After you get a political science degree, go to law school, grind through a career for a while, and finally have enough gray hair that people assume you know what you were talking about. That was what I envisioned a “politician” looked like. A politician, to me, meant power and cameras everywhere, far from what I assumed would ever be in my reach or age range.

But one night I was scrolling on Instagram, as you do at 9 pm, and I landed on a carousel about how young our Founding Fathers in 1776 actually were. As I swiped through, I was astonished to see that these were young adults not that much older than me.

Thomas Jefferson was 33 and considered young for leadership when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Alexander Hamilton was around 30 when he helped shape the Constitution just over a decade later. Thirty-three. Thirty. But they drafted the documents to found a country. Turns out the white wigs deceived me. Turns out I pictured the founders the exact same way I pictured politicians in general: older, wiser, more experienced, and thus more “qualified” for the power they reached.

This got me thinking: The 119th Congress is the third oldest in U.S. history. And somewhere along the way, we started assigning “experience and qualifications” based on age, to the point where it altered our perception of our founders. But if some of them were in their late 20s and 30s doing the most important political work of their lives, then many of our assumptions are wrong. Which means we don’t have to be a certain age to be political either.

When 70% of Americans are dissatisfied with our government, it’s well past time to reexamine our assumptions. And the moment to aim for diversity has never been more important. Increasing the age ranges of our representatives would certainly change the status quo. And Millennials and Gen Z-ers have already accumulated some real-world wisdom and political cache of our own. Together, they already represent more than half of NDTC’s learners.

I’m thinking of the college kid who did virtual school through COVID and is now a young nurse who would develop thoughtful healthcare policy. The millennial that just moved out of their family home and would champion rent control or builder incentives for more apartments. The laid-off economic journalist turned content creator who could usher in support for a new-er deal. Aren’t these lived experiences the qualifications to deal with the very problems we’re now left with?

While running for office may seem way beyond one’s reach or imply a constitutional age requirement, local office is a lot more accessible, faster to implement change, and doesn’t come with an age barrier. And it’s definitely less intimidating than writing the fate of our nation in Independence Hall, Philadelphia.

It might also be a lot closer to home than you think. Mine certainly was.

Confession Time

So I have something embarrassing to admit…

I did not realize that my own father was on our local school board for basically my entire early childhood from elementary school through middle school. And even being actively involved in politics from a young age, it still didn’t click for me until much later that what he was doing was holding elected office. At the time, I thought of "elected office" as a job in DC with a television and a podium.

But a school board seat is an elected office. So is a city council seat, a county commission seat, a water board seat, a precinct captain role. They’re all key roles in which we experience daily democracy at the grassroots level. And they don’t require a law degree, three decades of experience, a single gray hair, or a white powdered wig.

They require someone who shows up, the same way a 33-year-old wrote the Declaration of Independence and a 30-year-old helped shape the Constitution, because nobody told them they had to wait to get older.

If any part of you has ever wondered what it would actually take to run, check out our free course So You Think You Want To Run? No age minimums or gray hair required.

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• “Organizing” in politics means connecting people to build power. Campaigns run on it through canvassing, phone banking, and text banking.

• Those tactics only become a winning machine when they’re data-informed: a clean voter file, honest district history, and a plan that connects the two.

• Skipping this step costs campaigns money and volunteer hours. Building the habit early is what lets small campaigns beat bigger ones.

NDTC is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, and over the last decade, we’ve trained thousands of Democrats to run for office and win elections. Our learners have flipped seats across the country and built critical state and local party infrastructure to power Democratic wins at every level.

But it hasn’t always been easy, and we’ve learned our fair share of lessons along the way. Now, we’re sharing all those insights with you.

This is the fifth installment of “10 Lessons in 10 Years,” our monthly(-ish) series reflecting on what a decade of Democratic training has taught us. Each one breaks down an insight we’ve seen proven true again and again, across thousands of campaigns.

Some of these lessons we’ve had to learn the hard way. Now you don’t have to. Notebooks out, pencils up.

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This month’s lesson gets to the core of what campaigns run and win on: data and organized information. You’ve more likely heard the general term “organizing” in politics to reference uniting people around a shared purpose. It goes beyond issue awareness or message spreading, and focuses on actually connecting people to each other to build power. Think of a union, like our partner SEIU. They organize through worker membership to fight for higher wages and better contracts.

Campaigns rely on a lot of the most common people-organizing tactics, like door-to-door canvassing and phone or text banking. But they only become well-oiled, winning machines when they’re data-informed.

What Being “Data-Informed” Actually Means

When we say building power through being “data-informed,” we’re not necessarily talking about a mysterious algorithm or an expensive black box. It can be as simple as three key things done well.

First, the voter file. This is the list of every registered voter in your district, along with what the state records about them: their address, their party registration where applicable, and, most importantly, whether they voted in past elections – not who they voted for, which is private, but whether they showed up. A clean, current voter file is the single most valuable asset a campaign should have access to. Too many first-time campaigns treat it as an afterthought, something the field director downloads in week two, instead of the document that should shape the campaign plan from week one.

Second, past election history. Every district has a record. How did similar candidates perform in the last three or four cycles? Which precincts overperformed or underperformed the district average? Did turnout spike or collapse in certain areas, and why? A district that split 55-45 in a presidential year might look completely different in a midterm or an off-year or special election. Campaigns that ignore this history end up rediscovering it the hard way, usually around 9 p.m. on election night.

Third, a plan that connects the two. Data without a plan to use it is just another spreadsheet lost in a million other files. The point of organizing your voter file and your district’s history is to answer a simple question: who, specifically, do you need to talk to to win votes, and in what order? Platforms like VoteBuilder help automate the process of organizing and segmenting lists of voters to reach out to, based on data points like voter propensity and support likelihood. A campaign with limited volunteers and a limited budget cannot knock on every door or call every number. It has to choose. Being data-informed is what makes that choice deliberate and strategic, so you don’t have to be the biggest, highest-funded campaign to win.

The Cost of Skipping This Step

Instinctual knowledge of your district is an asset to your campaign, but it’s not a targeting plan.

Every cycle, candidates lose because they think that “knowing their district” will be enough. They’ve lived there twenty years, and they know their neighbors well. But often, they’re more familiar with the loudest voices there, rather than the folks who actually show up to vote in a primary. (The two are not always the same.) Or worse, they spend their valuable volunteer hours talking to voters who were already voting for them, without thanking or mobilizing them to reach or persuade more voters still on the fence.

But we’ve also seen underdog campaigns out-organize their opponents. A statehouse candidate with a small budget, a couple of part-time field organizers, and a well-managed voter file that showed exactly which few thousand voters would decide the race.

The candidates who win pair their local knowledge with voter files, actual turnout history, and a good look at what happened in their district in the last several elections.

NDTC is Your Data Partner

If you’re a first-time candidate or a staffer new to this work, the good news is that this is a learnable skill, and one that you are perfectly capable of. It’s less about being organized by nature and more about getting comfortable with a few key tools, like your state’s voter file system or a tool like VAN, which most state parties and committees provide access to.

If you’re just getting started, we’re here to point you in the right direction. Platforms like VoteBuilder (“VAN”), RunningMate, and ActBlue offer tools to help you manage voter files and other data.

• If you’re ready to dive all the way in, our How to Use VoteBuilder Effectively learning plan is a comprehensive guide to all things data management on your campaign.

• If you’re looking for a quicker entry point, our VoteBuiler for Field Directors free course will help you use the tool to target the right voters and implement best practices for managing data across your entire campaign.

• And our Voter Contact Toolkit will help you organize information across every major voter contact method.

The campaigns that build these habits early (and with proper training) waste less money on the wrong mailers, less volunteer hours on the wrong doors, less time chasing voters who were never in play or always were.

If you’re gearing up for a run of your own, head to TrainDems.org. We’ll teach you how to read a voter file, how to pull your district’s history, and how to turn both into a plan that wins.

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• Staying informed matters, doing something about it is empowering.

• You don’t need experience to canvass, phone bank, or text bank. You need ten minutes of training, and a plan.

• NDTC just released 5 free courses that turn “I should volunteer” into “I know how.”

Let’s talk about a feeling every one of us knows intimately.

You open your phone, see a political headline that makes your stomach drop, and then another news story unfolding across the world, and then a list of things to buy on Amazon from the influencer who you unfollowed but keeps showing up in your feed.

The whiplash leaves you feeling hopped up on anger, and no idea what to do with it or where to channel it. You feel bad, but you continue to subject yourself to it, because you’re worried if you don’t see every headline… well, how will you know if Trump turns the reflecting pool green again?!? Or, frankly, worse.

Staying informed matters. But we can only take in so much information a day, and most of us are maxing out our capacity for it before the workday even begins. It’s taking away from our capacity to actually do anything about it. A lot of us have quietly let the first one replace the second. But campaigns, the on-the-ground machinery that decides who wins in November, don’t run on our information intake. They run on the people who actually show up.

If you are anxious about the state of politics right now and you have not found an outlet for it yet, the anxiety is not going anywhere, and it’s not helping your cause. It sits in your chest and gets heavier with every headline. The people who feel most grounded right now, even when things are capital-B Bad, are not the ones who’ve read the most breaking news from this administration. They’re the ones who found something to do with their care. They knock on doors on Saturday mornings. They make calls during their lunch break. They’ve traded some of their doomscrolling hours for two hours a week of a measurable contribution to something. But there’s a bit of IYKYK.

“Go volunteer for a campaign” is easier said than done. Which campaign? Doing what, exactly? Do you need experience? What if you’re bad at talking to strangers? What if they don’t want to talk to you? These are real questions, and the reason many people don’t make the jump from Instagram news headlines to volunteer shifts and door knocks. Quite simply, they don’t know where to start.

NDTC has the answer to all of these questions so that you you don’t need to figure this out alone.

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We just put out a course package called Volunteer Like You Mean It to bridge the gap between wanting to help and actually knowing how.

If you want the “why” before the “how,” there’s Understanding the Why of Campaign Volunteering. We pull back the curtain on how campaigns build their vote goals and why you might get handed different types of lists at different points in the cycle. It’ll show you the difference between doing a task and understanding your role in a strategy, and it’s the one that turns the obligation of volunteering into something that feels (and is!) impactful.

If you’ve never volunteered before, start with Finding a Campaign to Volunteer For. It’s five minutes, and it answers the most basic question for those ready to jump in: where do you start? It walks through what volunteers actually do (canvassing, phone banking, text banking, and more) and how to find an opportunity near you, whether that’s through your state party, a platform like Mobilize, or your union if you belong to one. No prior knowledge required. Just five minutes and a decision to stop scrolling and start doing.

Once you know where you’re headed, the next question is usually “but what do I actually say?” That’s where How to Talk to Voters 101 comes in. It teaches the “Introduce, Ask, Thank” framework campaigns use, how to match your ask to where the campaign is in its cycle, and how to actually listen when a conversation goes off-script. Ten minutes, and you’ll walk into your first shift without that stomach-drop fear of freezing up at the door.

For people ready to go deeper, there are two full-length courses. Canvassing for Volunteers covers everything from navigating MiniVAN — a leading tool right at your fingertips to help you knock every door — to reading a voter’s support level to closing a conversation with a real ask, plus a full toolkit of scripts and checklists to take with you. Phone Banking for Volunteers does the same for calls, covering tools like OpenVPB, ThruTalk, and CallHub, along with how to log voter sentiments and handle objections without losing your nerve.

Outrage without action, or intense emotion without an outlet, is a recipe for frustration and despair. It doesn’t have to be that way. If anything, we need your outrage and your hands on the doors, or dialing phones, or shaking hands with actual voters. That’s actual currency in politics, and it will do far more for us (and you) than reading another five-star review about how bad things are.

If volunteering isn’t your thing, maybe donating is. Maybe encouraging your natural leader friend to run for office is. Maybe sharing NDTC’s free resources with them is.

Whatever it is, we challenge you to do one thing this week beyond reading, watching, or listening. If it’s part of your daily scroll, it’s consumption, not action. Even better if you pick something one of our new volunteer courses teaches. Start one of them and see where our training takes you at traindems.org.

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• Your first fundraising calls should go to the people who already love you. Get some early yeses under your belt before you go wider.

• Nobody is going to donate just because they heard you’re running. You still have to ask. Every single time.

• Boring, one-size-fits-all messaging is not working, and until Democrats get serious about issue-based, community-specific communication, we’re leaving voters on the table.

At NDTC, our trainers aren’t just instructors. They’re organizers, strategists, and advocates who bring hard-won experience into every session. In this series, we’re introducing you to the people behind our trainings.

Today: Stacey Chavis, a political strategist and trainer based in Atlanta, Georgia, with over 20 years of campaign experience. Stacey has served as finance director and deputy finance director for the Georgia Democratic Party, worked for several members of Congress, and spent years as a regional director training candidates across the South. She also volunteers with the League of Women Voters, where she works on voter engagement and voting rights. We sat down with her to talk about the most common fundraising mistakes, what the party needs to do differently in red states, and what she’d tackle first if she had unlimited resources and a magic wand.

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NDTC: You work in Georgia, which means you’re running Democrats in tough terrain. If you could wave a magic wand and change how the party approaches red states, what would you do?

Stacey: Throw out the boring messaging. The tried-and-true, we’ve-always-done-it-this-way message is not working. It is not working. You need different messaging to reach your 18-to-35 voters. You need different messaging for people in the middle. You need different messaging for senior citizens. One size does not fit all, and pretending otherwise is costing us elections.

I’m an older millennial. My boomer parents took me to vote. They taught me about the history of how Black people in the Deep South fought for and won the right to vote, and those stories matter to me deeply. But those stories do not automatically resonate with every voter in every community. We have to do the work of figuring out what actually moves people where they are.

And for me, that means issue-based messaging that’s specific to the community you’re actually in. I’ll give you an example that might sound small but isn’t: in the city where I live, there was a debate about whether trash pickup should happen once a week or twice a week. For some people, once a week is fine. For families with a lot of people in the house (kids, extended family, lots of activity), twice a week is a real quality of life issue. People want green spaces. They want a park they can actually get to, not one that’s 25 miles away. They want safe transportation. They want good public schools. They want to know someone is paying attention to the texture of their actual daily lives.

We have to get back in the lab. Come up with new, creative ways to talk about these issues. And stop making it about how bad the other side is. Tell people what you’re going to do when you get elected. How are you going to vote on their behalf? What changes when you win? That’s the message that breaks through.

NDTC: How would you describe your training style?

Stacey: Direct, and fun. I’m here to give information and to listen. I want to make sure that questions get answered and concepts get broken down. I live by the four agreements, and I don’t make assumptions about what people already know. There is no stupid question in my room. I want people to have a good time with whatever time we have together.

I always bring stories from the field. Over the course of a 20-year career, you accumulate a lot of them: things that worked, things that didn’t, things that you definitely do not want to repeat. That’s what I’m there to share.

NDTC: What’s the most common mistake you see first-time candidates make with fundraising?

Stacey: Not setting aside enough time. So many candidates think they’ll do an hour a day and then move on to other things. In the beginning, you may want to reconsider that.

One of the things I love to do in fundraising trainings is walk through what I call circles of influence. Picture a series of circles expanding outward. The one in the very center is your family and your close friends. That’s where you start. Those are your first calls, the people who already know you, already believe in you, already want you to succeed. You get some yeses under your belt. You raise some real money. You build momentum.

I always tell people: if I ever run for office, the first three calls I’m making are to my mother, my father, and my brother. They all happen to live in the same house, so it’s really one call, but my point stands. Start with the people who love you. Work your way out from there.

And here’s the other thing nobody tells you enough: a “no” is not an indictment of you or your campaign. People have limited dollars. They have other races they’re supporting. I actually had a colleague call me earlier this year asking for a contribution, and I had to say no. Not because I didn’t want to support him, but because I live in Georgia, where we have elections all day, every day, and I was simply tapped out. When someone can’t give financially, they might still be able to volunteer, make calls, or help in other ways. Move on quickly, and keep the relationship.

NDTC: What’s something about fundraising that surprised you when you learned it?

Stacey: People will give if you ask them. That sounds obvious, but candidates get this wrong constantly. They put their candidate hat on, they get the word out that they’re running, and then they just... wait. They assume people will show up with a check.

You still have to ask. You still have to call your mother and ask. You still have to call your grandmother and ask. The assumption that people will give because they heard you’re running is one of the most costly mistakes a first-time candidate can make.

And when it comes to higher-dollar donors, that ask needs to be personal. I know it’s 2026 and people think they can handle everything digitally. But there is something to picking up the phone and making direct contact, or better yet, sitting across the table from someone over a cup of coffee and making your ask in person. Those small personal touches make a real difference, and they pay off later. The donors who gave to you once are the most likely to give again if you need them. But you need to thank them first, genuinely, specifically, before you go back to ask again. A handwritten thank you note. A postcard. Something that says: I noticed your contribution, and it mattered to me. Whether someone gave you $5 or $500, they deserve that acknowledgment.

NDTC: Last one: if you had every resource you needed and could achieve any “first,” what would it be?

Stacey: I would be the first person to eradicate homelessness in the state of Georgia — for men, women, children, families, and veterans. I would work to make sure everyone had affordable housing, access to the resources and benefits they’re owed, and the workforce skills to build a stable life and never experience homelessness again. That’s what I’d do. Make sure that everybody, especially in the summer heat we have here in Georgia, has a home with air conditioning, a roof over their head, and a door that closes and locks.

Stacey Chavis trains Democrats across the country through NDTC and is based in Atlanta, Georgia. She also volunteers with the League of Women Voters; if you want to get involved in voting rights and voter engagement work, find your local chapter at lwv.org. Her next NDTC training, Tech Time: Setting Up a Virtual Phone Bank, is coming up on July 27th.

Everything Stacey teaches – the circles of influence, the personal ask, the thank-you note, the messaging strategy – is available to any candidate or organizer who shows up. As always, NDTC trainings are completely free. No cost, no gatekeeping, no strings attached. Just the tools you need to run and win.

Sign up for Stacey’s July 27th training, and all upcoming NDTC trainings, at TrainDems.org.

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• Podcasts give candidates a rare chance to have real, unfiltered conversations with voters, but only if you treat them that way.

• Tega Orhorhoro, host of “Continue the Conversation,” breaks down what separates candidates who connect from candidates who flop.

• Podcasts are just one piece of a larger digital strategy puzzle that NDTC trains you for. Check out our full course, Planning Your Digital Strategy.

There’s a moment in every bad podcast interview. You can feel it. The host asks something, maybe a natural follow-up question that goes off-script, and the candidate retreats. They don’t know how to attack the question, so they go back to reciting talking points. The energy drains out of the conversation, and so does the listener.

Tega Orhorhoro has felt that moment too. As the host of Continue the Conversation — a podcast built on the belief that we need “space for real, honest discussions about what’s happening in our world, from politics to pop culture and everything in between” — she’s seen candidates walk through her virtual door both ways: fully present and totally checked out.

We sat down with Tega to find out what she actually wants from candidate guests, and what campaigns keep getting wrong about podcast appearances.

Why Podcasts Should Be on Every Candidate’s Radar

Too many campaigns still treat podcast appearances as a nice-to-have rather than a strategic asset. So before we get into the how, let’s talk about the why.

Podcasts are where many voters go to actually think. Not to scroll, skim, like, or comment, but to listen for thirty minutes or an hour, to a voice they’ve likely built trust in over time, in the privacy of their own headphones.

That is an extraordinary opportunity for a candidate. You’re not condensed down to 15 second soundbites… yet. You’re not competing with an algorithm. You have extended time to explain who you are, what you believe, and why it matters.

For political candidates, that means podcasts are a direct line to an engaged, self-selected audience that reliably show up to listen because they care. That’s gold.

What Hosts Like Tega Actually Want From You

Let’s flip the script for a second. What does a podcast host need from a candidate guest to make the episode work?

Tega’s experience hosting Continue the Conversation puts her in these conversations often. Her show explores the space between politics and culture, which means she regularly talks to guests who are open to engaging deeply, and those who come to perform. Candidates who thrive in podcast environments are the ones who come comfortable in their platform and are genuinely curious. That will beat extensive preparation every time.

Three Things That Separate Good Interviews From Great Ones:

1. Know the show before you walk in the door.

Every podcast has a personality, a point of view, and an audience. A candidate who clearly hasn’t listened to a single episode and treats the podcast like a generic media appearance will get found out fast. Before any podcast interview, listen to at least two or three recent episodes. What kinds of questions does the host ask? What’s the tone and vibe of the show? What do the guests who do well actually talk about?

For a show like Continue the Conversation, that means being ready to go beyond the policy sheet. Hosts aren’t looking for a press release in audio form. Remember that you’ll build comfort with time and practice.

2. Be honest about what you don’t know.

Nothing builds credibility like intellectual honesty. Candidates are often trained out of ever showing uncertainty, but podcast audiences will sense your deflections from a mile away. If a host asks you something you’re still working through, say so. “That’s something I’m still learning about” or “I don’t have a perfect answer on that yet” lands far better than a non-answer masquerading behind confident language.

Tega’s show is explicitly built for real, honest discussions. If you show up projecting certainty that you don’t actually have, you’re working against the whole ethos of the room.

3. Talk to the listener, not just the host.

This is the one most candidates miss. In a podcast interview, the host is your conduit, but the audience is your real target. The best podcast guests have an awareness that there are people on the other end of this conversation, driving to work or washing dishes, who are listening and forming an opinion. Speak to them. Make them feel like this conversation exists for their benefit, because it does.

The Bigger Picture

Campaigns that figure out how to do long-form audio well have an advantage right now. Voters are exhausted by the endless supply of bite-sized content fighting for their attention. They’re looking for substance, and the rising popularity of podcasts are a direct response to that desire.

And podcasts are just one piece of a larger digital strategy puzzle. We have a full length, free course on Planning Your Digital Strategy to help you build the rest. If podcast media readiness is one part of showing up well online, everything else we cover there is the foundation underneath it. Whether you’re a first-time candidate or a seasoned officeholder, these are learnable skills, and we have live trainings coming up to help you build them.

Planning Your Digital Strategy

The mic is open. The audience is listening. Get out there and have some real conversations.

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Want to check out Tega’s work? Find Continue the Conversation wherever you listen to podcasts.

Ready to sharpen your media skills? NDTC has training for candidates and staff at every level. Check out what’s available.

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• Trump turned the 250th anniversary of the Declaration into a celebration of himself, but the actual founders were a group of people challenging the most powerful man in their world.

• Patriotism was never about deference to whoever holds office. It belongs to everyone who still believes in our ability to reinvent ourselves, and to be the inventors.

• The most patriotic thing you can do this year is filing to run, or helping someone else do it, against the leadership that’s failing your community. Learn how at traindems.org.

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America isn’t the only one with a big birthday this year! NDTC is celebrating its 10th anniversary. In the last decade, we’ve trained over 128,000 Democrats to win elections, watched our alumni flip seats across the country, and built the infrastructure that generates Democratic talent at every level of government.

But it hasn’t always been easy, and we’ve learned our fair share of lessons along the way. Now, we’re sharing all those insights with you.

This is the fourth installment of “10 Lessons in 10 Years,” a monthly(-ish) series where we’re reflecting on and reporting out our most important lessons from a decade of Democratic training. In each one, we break down an insight we’ve seen proven true time and again, across thousands of campaigns.

Some of these lessons we’ve had to learn the hard way. Now you don’t have to. Notebooks out, pencils up.

This weekend, America turned 250. It should have been a moment for the whole country to look back together at what we got right, what we got wrong, and what we still owe each other. Instead, Donald Trump did what he does with everything he touches: turning a shared anniversary into a paean no one asked for, dressed up as a celebration of the country.

So this month’s lesson is about reclaiming patriotism through the one act that, more than any flag or fireworks display, actually earns it: running against power.

Our Founders Were Insurgents

It’s worth remembering what actually happened 250 years ago. Our founding includes a dark and often contradictory history. A group of colonists looked at one of the most powerful empires on Earth and decided its leadership no longer had their consent. They organized, built coalitions across colonies that didn’t always agree with each other, and challenged power directly, at enormous personal risk. And we’ve repeated this cycle multiple times as we’ve learned, grown, and reflected on that fraught founding.

The idea that authority has to be earned, and can be revoked is at the foundation of this country. It’s our entire premise for existing as one nation, together, in all our disagreements.

But somewhere in the last 250 years (2016, anyone?) patriotism’s brand became the opposite of that: loyalty to whoever holds office, no matter what they do with their enormous power. Trump’s version of July 4th leans hard into that conflation because it benefits him personally. If patriotism is loyalty, then questioning him feels unpatriotic by definition. It’s a betrayal of what our country and the holiday that celebrates it, is actually about.

What We Train People to Do Instead

At NDTC, we’re backing the people who do the work that’s actually patriotic: running for school board against the entrenched incumbent who hasn’t delivered for public school kids. Running for state legislature in a district that’s supposedly unwinnable. Running for county commissioner because nobody else will.

Most of these candidates will never get a cable news hit, but every one of them is putting our founding principle into practice more than anyone on X or Substack. They’re looking at who holds power in their community, paying attention to where they’re underdelivering, and putting their own name forward to drive the change their communities need. The local races we support every day are a more faithful expression of this country’s guiding vision than any American paraphernalia that Trump can plaster his own face over.

That’s the muscle we exist to exercise. We believe that you don’t have to wait for permission to challenge the people in charge, and we train the skills to actually do it, do it well, and win.

This Isn’t About One Office

Like all of our 10 Lessons in 10 Years installments, this one isn’t about any single race. It’s about a larger perspective.

A country where citizens default to challenging power, generation after generation, is a fundamentally different country than one where they default to passive spectatorship, indifference, or straight-up unquestioning loyalty. Only the former builds a nation that’s durable, and that can outlast the latest dictator-in-chief and swiftly replace him.

But we know it’s a decades-long project, because we’re already a decade into this work. We’re celebrating ten years of NDTC this year, the same year the country is celebrating 250.

This country’s future belongs to everyone who still believes we can reinvent ourselves time and again, and who are willing to be the inventors. If this year’s anniversary stirs up a sense that your city council, your school board, or your state house could use someone who actually shows up, don’t let that feeling be ignored. Traindems.org is waiting for you with the skills to run, or to help someone else run.

Happy 250th. Our work continues. We hope you’ll join us.

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• Someone approved a $15 million no-bid contract to paint the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool “American Flag blue” and now it’s swampy algae green.

• Bad decisions about public money aren’t just a Washington problem; they happen at every level of government.

• The officials and local leadership who can stop it, county commissions, water boards, city councils, are elected by you, and NDTC can help you run against them. For free.

We (taxpayers) just paid $15 million to paint the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool dark blue. Then it turned green anyway. What was supposed to be a two-week renovation with a fresh coat of “American flag blue” on the pool floor is not so simple anymore as the project has now been extended to two months. National Park Service workers have been dumping hydrogen peroxide into the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in a futile attempt to kill the algae. And this whole meme-worthy financial fiasco is, of course, funded by us, the taxpayers.

Leave aside all the obvious ways in which this was a terrible idea, like, say, how painting the pool a dark color in a climate known for hot weather is maybe not how you stop algae, for starters: Where is the accountability?

Someone had to approve that project. Someone signed off on the timeline, the budget, and the no-bid contract. The choices to ignore any ethical considerations and all common sense that turned the pool green came from the people in the room calling the shots. The Green Eggs and Ham-ification of a major monument might be playing out on the national stage, but the same decisions that landed us here are happening all over the country.

In most states, soil and water conservation district supervisors are elected officials. This is the office that should be consulted before dumping hydrogen peroxide into a national landmark. County commissioners have the power to control and approve contracts. This would be helpful in ensuring that a backdoor deal to your “pool guy” with an exorbitant bill doesn’t dent your hometown’s finances. City Council members set the policies that govern public infrastructure. They’re the ones who should be asking whether a highly expensive renovation actually makes sense before the contract is signed. Water board members, elected in many communities, oversee the systems that keep water clean and functional. They are supposed to be that check.

It’s easy to assume these offices are held by distant bureaucrats. They are not. They are filled by your neighbors, and those neighbors are on your ballot. If you want to stop the spectacle, start there. Find out who holds these seats, what their values are, and whether they align with yours. If they don’t match, if you can do better, run for office. NDTC is here to give you the campaign training and tools to actually make that happen, for free.

NDTC has trained over 128,000 Democrats since 2016. Our free courses, live training, and guided programs exist to get you ready to run and win at every level of government. We’ll walk you through every step of launching a campaign from scratch. Whether you’re figuring out which office to run for or ready to start, we are here. Because the Reflecting Pool is a $15 million reminder of why every elected office is worth running for.

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• NDTC Founder and CEO, Kelly Dietrich published a must-read op-ed in The Hill, arguing that the DNC was never designed to solve Democrats’ infrastructure problem and laying out what actually will.

• Kelly has been making the rounds on national podcasts and radio, delivering a consistent message: this is Democrats’ moment, if we’re prepared to take it.

• Want to be part of our long-term power building? Start at our website and make a free account in 2 minutes.

Democrats are in a strong position heading into November. The energy is real, the enthusiasm is real, and the opportunities up and down the ballot are real. But if history has taught us anything, it’s that energy without infrastructure is just noise.

That’s the argument NDTC CEO Kelly Dietrich has been making this past month across op-ed pages, podcasts, and national radio. Here’s where you may have seen him.

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In The Atlantic: The Democratic Base Is Angry

If you read one piece of political journalism this month, make it this one.

The Atlantic‘s Elaine Godfrey spent time with Democratic activists across the country to capture what anyone paying attention already feels: the base is energized, angrier than 2018, and growing impatient with a party that keeps winning the enthusiasm contest while losing the infrastructure one.

Kelly was one of the voices Godfrey turned to to frame the stakes. He told her plainly what NDTC has been saying all cycle (but really, since 2016) — yes, Democrats are going to win seats in November, and yes, the enthusiasm is real. But enthusiasm and infrastructure are two different things. Without building something durable between cycles, Democrats risk waking up in 2027 with the same structural gaps we had going into 2025.

This is the ethos Kelly founded NDTC with ten years ago. We’ve been building the work to back it up for a decade, and we’re still just getting started.

Read Kelly’s full quote here.

In The Hill: The DNC can’t fix Democrats’ infrastructure problem

This is the one to read, share, and send to every Democratic donor and strategist in your orbit.

Kelly’s op-ed in The Hill takes on a belief that has quietly held the party back for years: the idea that if the DNC could just get its act together, everything else would fall into place. He argues that the DNC was never designed to build permanent, year-round infrastructure for state parties and down-ballot campaigns. Its job, as Jen Psaki recently put it, is “to raise money and attack the other party.” Expecting strategic, long-term organizing on top of that is a recipe for disappointment, cycle after cycle.

The underlying problem is that Democrats have neglected to uplift the kind of organizations designed to outlast any single election, candidate, or party chair. Until Democrats invest in that, we’ll keep celebrating individual victories and showing up no more prepared for the next fight.

Kelly’s proposed solution is a Democratic Innovation Fund focused exclusively on what keeps getting deprioritized: down-ballot capacity, year-round organizing, and long-term strategy. And he points to NDTC as proof that this kind of work is already happening and working. As he writes: “Winning elections is not the same thing as building power. Democrats need to start doing both.”

Read the full op-ed here.

On On Democracy with FP Wellman: MAGA Is Fighting Itself...Let’s Fight for Americans

With MAGA fracturing under the weight of its own contradictions, Fred Wellman invited Kelly on to talk about what Democrats should be doing with this moment.

Their conversation works through an urgent and practical question: how do we actually help working Americans right now, in this election, and translate that into political power come November? Kelly walks through how NDTC’s work training candidates and campaign staff at every level is how the party builds the capacity to deliver on that promise. It’s a grounded, honest conversation for anyone asking what comes next.

Listen here.

On The Left Hook with Wajahat Ali: It’s Top vs. Bottom: That’s the Message To Win Over the Masses and Take Back Power

Wajahat Ali has been one of the sharpest voices in progressive media on how Democrats actually communicate and connect with the voters they need to win.

In this conversation, Kelly and Wajahat dig into the message frame that cuts through: it’s not left vs. right, it’s top vs. bottom. The few in power vs. everyone else. That framing, grounded in the economic anxiety that animated so many races this cycle, is the clarity that trained candidates and staffers can take directly to voters.

This is exactly the work NDTC’s training programs are built around — helping people running for office and working on campaigns understand how to meet voters where they are.

Listen and subscribe here.

On Tell Me Everything with John Fugelsang (SiriusXM): The People vs. Ken Paxton

Kelly is back on SiriusXM’s Tell Me Everything, this time with the Texas Senate race as the backdrop.

Kelly uses the conversation to connect the dots between what’s happening at the top of the ballot in Texas and the need for trained, prepared campaign staff across every race in the country. You can’t field a team you haven’t built.

Listen here.

Why This Matters

The through-line across everything Kelly has been saying this month is the idea that has driven NDTC from the beginning: the Democratic Party’s future doesn’t get built inside the Beltway. It gets built through thousands of candidates, field directors, fundraisers, and volunteers showing up in communities across the country, ready to do the work, and getting trained on the skills to do it.

The infrastructure problem is real, but the solution is already underway. NDTC’s training programs are always running, candidates are stepping up, and the moment is ripe for Democrats.

If you’re ready to be part of what comes next, don’t wait. Head to our website and start your campaign training today.

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• White supremacy didn’t end with a proclamation. It adapted, institutionalized itself, and is still kicking back hard today.

• The window for democratic participation is still getting narrower. The question is what you’ll do about it.

• NDTC’s answer is to train more candidates, run more races, and leave no seat unchallenged — because sustained political power is how change cements.

On June 19, 1865 — two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation — Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, and told the enslaved people there that the war was over. That they were free.

Two and a half years.

The end of chattel slavery is a monumental win in our country’s history. The people who lived to hear that news in Galveston, who had survived something that should not have been survivable, deserved all the joy we celebrate it with today. But Juneteenth is a holiday born from delay.

That gap is what makes Juneteenth a lesson about how freedom works in this country: it is proclaimed, then fought for, delayed, undermined, and fought for again. The proclamation is always just the beginning.

What Came After

The decade that followed the Civil War: Reconstruction. Black men voted, ran for office, and won. They served in Congress, in state legislatures, in local government. For a brief window, the South looked like it could become something closer to a multiracial democracy.

And then it was dismantled. Systematically, violently, legally. Through terrorism and poll taxes and grandfather clauses and literacy tests. Through redlining, gerrymandering, and mass incarceration. Through every mechanism a political system could invent to ensure that Black people couldn’t accumulate power.

That is the story from the other side of Juneteenth. Freedom came, and so did a counter-movement to take it back that lasted much longer.

Where We Are Now

It would be more comfortable to frame all of this as history and leave it there, but that isn’t our reality.

Voting rights protections have been gutted. Legislatures continue to redraw maps to dilute Black political power. Polling places close in communities of color. The window for democratic participation keeps getting narrowed by people who understand exactly what they’re doing.

White supremacy lives on through updated channels. It’s been worked into institutions: courts, legislative procedures, school boards and county commissions, and the thousands of small levers of government that most people never think about until those levers are pointed at them.

This is just honest accounting. The question is what you’ll do about it.

What NDTC Has to Do With It

NDTC exists because we believe the response to that kind of organized, sustained suppression has to be organized and sustained itself. Not just in presidential years, or the districts we’re “supposed” to win. We need infrastructure everywhere.

Every time a seat goes uncontested, the people who want to consolidate power win by default. Every state legislative district written off as unwinnable, every school board race where no Democrat even files, are places where oppression festers.

We train Democrats to run in those places because you don’t build lasting political power by showing up in swing districts once every four years. You build it by developing candidates who know their communities, who are willing to lose once and run again, and who understand the implications of their race are only fully realized way down the line.

Building power is generational work, and the people who’ve done it most faithfully in this country have been Black Americans who have faced deep, violent resistance. Working alongside them requires the people who benefit from expanded democracy (that probably means you, too!) to show up in places where it’s inconvenient. It requires running the race in the district that’s gone 70-30 for the other side, because someone has to, and because next cycle the numbers might be 68-32, and the cycle after that something might shift. It requires playing the long game.

NDTC will keep training these candidates. In red districts, rural counties, and everywhere in between. It’s not always glamorous, and it doesn’t always win immediately, but it’s the only path toward the kind of durable, distributed power that makes rights stick.

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• Ground LGBTQ+ rights in broad American values — freedom, fairness, and equality belong to everyone.

• Refuse to let the GOP define the conversation; steer back to what actually matters for families.

• Stand firm and with conviction on what Democrats are actually fighting for — no apologizing.

Kelly S. here. A little over a year ago, I wrote my first Substack for NDTC1.

I’d just started the job, Pride Month was underway, and anti-LGBTQ+ attacks weren’t slowing down, so I wanted to give our candidates something they could actually use to meaningfully refute the bigotry that was only ramping up. A year later, with more legislation on the books and the 2026 midterms cycle in full swing, the framework holds. The core of the message remains, and as we continue to grow our reach, we need your support to share this guide to defeat the rhetoric.

We’ve all seen how the GOP has turned LGBTQ+ Americans into a recurring villain in their political playbook, pigeonholing the entire conversation into wedge issues and culture war powder kegs. They’ve manufactured outrage as a substitute for governing.

If Democrats want to win and stay true to our values, we must push back.

We’ve talked about representation before2, but it’s worth revisiting right now. The ACLU is currently tracking 530 anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced in state legislatures in 2026 alone. Lawmakers in at least nine states have introduced measures aimed at challenging or reversing Obergefell v. Hodges (the Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide). And at the federal level, Trump illegally banned transgender people from serving in the military. All these moves, and more, represent a coordinated campaign against the LGBTQ+ community that demands a clear, unapologetic, and confident Democratic response.

Here’s a framework for when the GOP’s talking points try to lead you into their trap.

1. Anchor LGBTQ+ rights in broader American values.

At a No Kings rally this year, my parents and their friends touted anti-Trump signs in one hand and American flags in the other. Another protester only saw the flags and assumed they were there in resistance to the No Kings movement. Protesting the protest. That’s how backwards our messaging has landed as Democrats.

We’re reclaiming the American identity that the GOP has tried to hijack and drain. The one built on the idea that everyone has a place here.

When LGBTQ+ Americans become the GOP’s exiles of the month, remind voters what Republicans are really trying to do: drive wedges between us. But freedom, equality, and fairness are not privileges afforded to the few who fit the far-right’s mold — they’re rights that belong to all Americans.

Supporting LGBTQ+ rights is not fringe. It’s not niche. It’s patriotic. The more we shy away from saying that plainly, the more ground we cede to the GOP and their hollow, meaningless claims of “liberty and justice for all.”

2. Refuse to let the GOP define the conversation.

The far-right churns out outrageous headlines about LGBTQ+ folks and dares us to defend them. They paint caricatures of a select few and frame those caricatures as the issue, all so they don’t have to answer for their failures on healthcare or the economy.

It’s a strategy. I’ll say it again: It’s. A. Strategy.

They’re uniting their base around a manufactured opponent. Engaging with those arguments validates their stance and pours fuel straight into the fire that lets them come to the rescue of the outraged.

The rage-baiting bigots making the most headlines don’t care what sports team your kid is “allowed” to play on. (Although on the bright side, it seems that they’ve fear mongered themselves into caring about women’s sports???) It’s all talking heads and pointing fingers to stage a scene where they can look like they’ve actually gotten something done.

Progress on LGBTQ+ rights isn’t about getting baited into “rebutting” the latest bad-faith distraction making the rounds on right-wing media. It’s about building a nation where every person has the right to exist without fear. Yet too often, that’s not what we find ourselves talking about, because we let the GOP steer the way.

Don’t be cornered. Don’t take their bait. Be clear: this is about families living freely and safely, free from discrimination and government overreach. Come back to that every single time MAGA closes in with a new distraction meant to keep them from facing accountability.

3. Stand firm on what you’re for.

Republicans have gone on the offensive on an issue they have no leg to stand on. They’re banning service members, bullying children, and trying to legislate people out of existence. The path forward is putting them back on defense — and that starts with Democratic candidates saying plainly what we’re actually fighting for.

That LGBTQ+ kids deserve to be safe in school.

That LGBTQ+ workers deserve full protection from discrimination.

That LGBTQ+ patients and their doctors deserve to pursue healthcare that meets their needs.

Have conviction and moral clarity. Don’t belittle your own beliefs. And don’t apologize for them.

Pride Month is a reminder that the fight for equality has never been handed to us. It’s been won through organizing, showing up, and refusing to back down. That’s as resonant in June 2026 as it has ever been.

But Pride is also about joy, community, and celebration. NDTC staff shared the songs that move us, energize us, and feel like Pride to us. Here’s our playlist, a soundtrack to drown out the bigotry after you’ve mic-dropped on the GOP’s blatant rhetoric, one banger at a time!

And if you want to channel that energy into action, join us for our upcoming Pride event.

Pride Panel: Resistance, Resilience & the Road Ahead on Thursday, June 18th | 1 PM ET | Virtual

We’re bringing together LGBTQ+ advocates, organizers, and leaders for an honest, open conversation about building the resilience we need for the long fights ahead. We’ll explore what resistance looks like right now, how LGBTQ+ people are navigating today’s political climate, and how to channel Pride into political power and lasting change.

This event is for LGBTQ+ community members, allies, advocates, and anyone committed to showing up when the road is hard.

Register here.

Subscribe to see how we’re running winning Democratic campaigns all year long.

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• No silver bullet talking point wins an election. What wins is a personal story that voters can’t push back on, delivered by someone actually willing to be vulnerable.

• The best field training is about showing, not telling: modeling every type of voter reaction, over and over, until organizers feel ready to walk out the door.

• If someone leaves a training feeling ready to try, that’s a win. Building confidence starts with every single door after. Everybody gets better the more they do it.

At NDTC, our trainers are organizers, strategists, and advocates who bring hard-won experience into every session they lead.

In this series, we’re introducing you to the people behind our trainings. This month, we’re spotlighting Alyse Maye Quade. She’s a field organizer, trainer, and Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL) coordinated campaign staffer based in Minnesota who has spent over a decade having the kinds of conversations most people try to avoid. Alyse trains with NDTC on field organizing and power mapping, the component of a campaign that involves talking to voters one-on-one, persuading undecided voters, and getting voters to the polls on Election Day. She brings to every session what she learned the hard way: that the doors are where elections are actually won, and the only script that works is your own story.

NDTC: You’ve spent your career in field. What makes it the work you keep coming back to?

AMQ: At the end of the day, field is the side where we’re actually talking directly to voters — having that back-and-forth conversation, hearing what matters to people, building relationships that last beyond a single knock. If you’re a local state house candidate and you come back a year later and talk to the same person, you’re building trust. That’s how we win elections. It’s also just the most rewarding work I can do. Everything else on a campaign is building bricks. Field is where you put them together.

NDTC: What’s the biggest mistake you see candidates and organizers make when they’re getting ready to talk to voters?

AMQ: People want talking points. They’ll say, ‘But where’s my script? What are the things you want me to say?’ And then they get completely stuck when they don’t have one, as though without a script they can’t do the work.

But there’s no silver bullet message that just wins an election. What actually works is stepping back and learning to talk about what you care about from your own personal perspective. A talking point is a prompt — here’s the issue, here’s what this candidate believes. But instead of reading it word for word, you ask: what is the impact of this on real people? What’s my story that connects to this?

When you’re at someone’s door and you start spouting facts and figures, the person you’re talking to isn’t necessarily going to believe you. They’ll push back on the stat. They’ll question the source. But they cannot push back on your own personal experience. That’s where the real conversation starts.

NDTC: Can you walk us through what that looks like in practice?

AMQ: I worked at Everytown for Gun Safety — Moms Demand Action — and while I was there, something happened that became very personal to me. A volunteer I worked with had a husband with a law office. Someone came in and shot and killed the clerk working at the front desk. And when I found out the clerk’s name, I realized I knew him — his name was Chase, and I’d worked with him on a campaign when I was in college.

So there I was, knocking doors for a gun violence prevention organization, and the conversation steered exactly where you’d expect: don’t take my guns away, I believe in the Second Amendment. And instead of shutting down, I said: I hear you. I grew up on a farm. My dad taught me safe gun handling. I know how to shoot. And then I told him about Chase, and about how a background check on all gun sales could have prevented what happened, because the man who killed Chase should never have had access to a gun.

I don’t know how that voter ended up casting his ballot. But he was empathetic. He was listening. Maybe I didn’t change his mind that day — but I gave him a kernel. And kernels are how we change hearts and minds over time.

NDTC: Is there a voter conversation that’s stayed with you or surprised you?

AMQ: I think about one all the time. I knocked on a door and asked what issue mattered most to the person, and she said abortion — and then said she was anti-abortion. And my immediate instinct was, oh no, this is going to go badly.

But I didn’t walk away. Instead of shutting down the conversation, I kept asking questions. Why? How does that make you feel? What does that mean to you? And we ended up in this long, genuine back-and-forth. By the end, she said: I would never force anybody else to make my same decision. I just don’t like this. And from there we got all the way to: would you be able to vote for a candidate who supports having that choice? And she said yes.

I could have walked away the moment she said anti-abortion. I’ve probably done that other times, honestly. But because I stayed in it and kept asking real questions, we found common ground. That’s the beginning of the battle.

NDTC: How do you train people to do that — to stay in the hard conversation instead of walking away?

AMQ: You can talk at people all day about how it’s going to go. Or you can show them.

We added a layer to our field organizer onboarding where we do a full hour of live modeling. Ten people stand in a row; the organizers come up one by one, and each person acts out a different type of voter — every reaction, every response, every curveball. They practice it over and over. We’re all great actors, obviously, but the scenarios are rooted in reality. How do you react when someone slams the door? How do you keep the conversation alive when someone goes cold? What do you do when the issue gets uncomfortable?

Being able to see it modeled and then practice it yourself — that’s what builds confidence. And then every single door after that is more practice. Everybody gets better the more they do it.

NDTC: One last thing: if you were walking into a presidential debate or a WWE match, what’s your entrance song?

AMQ: I’m going with Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” Everybody loves that song; everybody’s going to be on your side. Wider appeal. You can’t go wrong.

(For the record, her first instinct was EDM, specifically a song she loves going to dance to with her wife. But for maximum crowd appeal, Whitney wins.)

Alyse Maye Quade leads field organizing and power mapping trainings for NDTC and has spent nearly a decade at the Minnesota DFL. You can catch her next training — on using power mapping to target key community stakeholders — coming up soon.

Alyse put it plainly in this conversation: there’s no silver bullet message that wins an election. What wins is real people with real stories, equipped with real skills, willing to stay in the hard conversation. NDTC exists to give those people the training they need, completely for free. No cost, no gatekeeping, no prerequisites. Just show up.

Sign up for your first NDTC training at traindems.org.

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• Don’t underestimate the smaller steps into political work. It often lands you where you wanted to go in the first place.

• “I don’t have experience” and “I don’t have anything to show” are two very different problems, and we can work with the first one!

• Your NDTC courses can double as resume builders, interview talking points, and portfolio work before you’ve gotten “real” experience

Hi y’all, Kelly S. again, still out from behind the Substack curtain, apparently!

Last week, I talked about how I stumbled into digital political work and why I think it’s one of the best career paths for new grads right now. Today I want to back up even further: before the 63 job applications, before NDTC and the DSCC, before I knew how expansive digital work really is. Let’s talk about how I got political internships and demystify them a little, because that path wasn’t as clear-cut as it looks on a resume.

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The Internships in Question 🔍

I had three political internships in college: the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus (MWPC), the office of Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, and the office of Congresswoman Lori Trahan. On paper, that looks like a tidy progression, but in reality, it was a combination of luck, a willingness to start small and work hard, and a couple of connections I didn’t know I was making.

MWPC came first, a Boston-based organization focused on getting women elected to office in Massachusetts. It’s exactly the kind of smaller, mission-driven org that flies under the radar for most students fixated on landing a big-name congressional office right out of the gate. I applied for their marketing and communications internship, got it, and showed up ready to work and learn.

I didn’t know that Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley was a former board member of MWPC. So when I applied to intern in her office (past the deadline, with zero connections!!) I had something on my resume and an MWPC reference that must’ve caught someone’s eye. I didn’t reverse engineer it, but I definitely think more college students should lay some bricks that way. (More on that in a minute!)

While interning for Congresswoman Pressley, one of my main assignments was to answer constituent phone calls and track policy stances they shared. I found out this really is one way Congressional offices take the temperature of their district and try to represent what their constituents want with their votes, so when a vote came around that I felt strongly about, I called my own rep’s office.

“Hi! I’m a constituent of Lori Trahan, my address is ABC. I just wanted to call to say I’m against the ZYX bill, H.R. ###. Thanks for the work you’re doing!” (I knew the hell that was often on the other end of those phone calls.)

Maybe five minutes later, I got a DM: “Hey, did you just call Lori Trahan’s office? I think I answered your phone call”. My hometown neighbor, whom I hadn’t talked to in years and had no idea was interning in her office, had just answered my phone call. Thank God I was polite.

That call and DM led to reconnecting over coffee, a suggestion that I apply to the internship, and a personal recommendation from the person already in the role.

Don’t Underestimate Small Starts

Lots of political science students are gunning for a marquee internship. A congressional office, a major campaign, a national committee. And they’re absolutely worth pursuing! But smaller organizations like caucuses, advocacy groups, state-level committees, and political nonprofits are where a lot of the people you admire got their start, stayed involved, or even held leadership.

Before you apply to your dream role, spend twenty minutes looking into the professional history of the people there. Where did they volunteer? What boards have they sat on? What orgs did they come up through? You might find a smaller entry point with a direct thread to where you actually want to go, plus the advantage of a much smaller applicant pool. Political networks are smaller and more interconnected than they look from the outside.

Here’s my disclaimer that I had several things working in my favor, not the least of which was family support. The Congressional offices were paid, but MWPC, where I got my start, was unpaid. My dad told me not to worry about it, that the money would come later. And he was right, but that advice was only applicable to me because I was living in my parents’ house for the summer with their support. Getting paid would’ve funded my coffee stops and nights out, but I still had a place to sleep and food in the fridge. So I worked the unpaid internship virtually from 10-2 every day, then worked a service job at night to save up for my senior year.

While unpaid internships are often an easier access point into politics, their feasibility depends on your situation and what other work you may be able to pick up along the way. I’d encourage everyone who can to finesse it, but there’s just no one-size-fits-all advice here.

Where to Start

When you’re applying for your first internship, you probably feel like you don’t have much to show yet. But “I don’t have experience” and “I don’t have anything to show” are two very different problems, and we can work with the first one!

First, don’t be afraid to use your coursework and big school projects as your first display of experience. Here are a couple of snippets from the resume I applied to MWPC with that made use of my “unofficial” experience (i.e., what I did in school that related to the organization and role.)

“Relevant courses: Women in Leadership, Women and Public Memory, The Language of Political Persuasion, Scope and Methods for Political Science Research, Leading and Investing in Social Change”

“iGive Carillon Community Student

• Studied social change as a member of a year-long, living-learning community

• Developed and awarded a $7,500 grant for a local mental health nonprofit

• Created my own social action project on building body confidence in UMD women”

Not a single internship or political job. But these pieces showed that I was interested in social change and women’s issues, which I could then expand on in my cover letter.

And then there’s NDTC’s courses and trainings that can help you build solid items to point to. If you complete a digital organizing training and walk away with an audience engagement plan you built yourself, that’s something you can talk about in an interview. If you work through the fundraising course and develop a sample email campaign strategy, put it in your portfolio. Bring it to the conversation.

As a reminder, NDTC is closing out Digital Strategy Month this May, and there are still opportunities for you to learn the digital skills that could be your jumping-off point. Join us live before the month’s out!

PLANNING YOUR DIGITAL STRATEGY

Hiring managers for entry-level roles and internships aren’t expecting a decade of experience. They’re looking for people who are curious, teachable, and have already started doing the work. Showing up with an NDTC course and a project you’re proud of tells them exactly that.

The way you get in is rarely the path you thought it’d be. But my path still landed me in a lot of the same roles as folks with Ivy League degrees and those big-name internships.

So welcome to the field. I’m glad you’re here!

EXPLORE NDTC CAREER COURSES

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• Working in digital is less like being Ava from Abbott Elementary and more like being a gardener. With the right tending, your platforms will grow.

• The skills that matter most aren’t the ones you learned in class, but you can learn them now.

• NDTC’s Digital Strategy Month trainings are your shortcut to breaking into digital (for free).

Hi y’all, it’s Kelly S. (NDTC’s Content Creation and Production Manager) coming out from behind the Substack orange curtain today! We’re in the middle of Digital Strategy Month at NDTC, and with a slew of new college grads sending out their resumes en masse, I wanted to talk to you directly today.

When I graduated from the University of Maryland with an English degree and no intentions of becoming a teacher, I had some serious work to do to find a job. I applied to 63 jobs that summer (three a day, every day) and tracked them all on Google Sheets. I wrote and rewrote cover letters. I hit the “easy apply” LinkedIn button an ungodly amount of times. And I got an offer: Digital Associate with the DSCC, the committee that works to get Democrats elected in the Senate.

I had one interview for the job where I expressed excitement to write emails for their fundraising list (trying to put that English degree to work) and was gently told, “Well, this job doesn’t do a ton of writing.” …crickets. So, what does it do then?

A month later, I was figuring out how to code HTML and segment audiences, not realizing that the industry I fell into was one of the most strategically important corners of political work.

What does “digital” actually mean?

Most people think working in digital = professional tweeting. Here’s what else it can mean (and more often does):

• Executing social media strategy across platforms

• Coding and segmenting emails and texts

• Tracking analytics and A/B test results

• Designing graphics and sourcing photographs

• Producing video content

• Managing paid digital advertising

• Building and maintaining websites

• And, of course, writing. Fundraising messages. Substacks. Website blogs. Recruitment emails. Surveys. Social media content. Event descriptions. Video scripts. Press pitches. Press releases.

Digital is all about having good foundational communications + technical know-how of the platforms these communications live on and how best to leverage them.

And the legs of its impact are long. One good email can outraise a small fundraising event. Yes, even those spammy ones you never signed up for are helping to save our democracy. Good website content can land you on the first page of Google search results instead of the eleventh. (“I’ve never scrolled to page eleven before.” Exactly!) Behind this are tried and tested digital strategies.

Lots of folks outside digital assume being good at it means having a natural inclination for writing or a certain savvy, curative eye for social media. But it’s less like being Ava from Abbott Elementary and more like being a gardener. Your digital channels are seeds to tend, and if you know how much light and water to give them, they’ll grow!

That’s actually what makes digital work so much better than people expect. Viral moments are rare, and lucky strikes with online audiences are random. But these are learnable skills.

Where to actually learn it

I built most of my skillset on the job, through Googling and YouTube videos, and a couple of formal, expensive courses. But lucky you, you don’t have to do it that way. NDTC is running Digital Strategy Month this May, with courses you can take at your own pace year-round — all free, and there are still plenty of opportunities left to get that free training on your digital skills. Here are just a few of them:

1. Digital Organizing: How to Engage and Activate Your Audience — The niche political skill that every entry-level campaign staffer or hopeful should start with. This training gets into how to build an engaged audience with intention.

2. Raising Money Online — The training I needed most when I started. Digital fundraising has its own logic: the ask, the timing, the copy, the architecture of a campaign. This training breaks the strategy down into pieces you can wrap your head around.

3. Planning Your Approach to Digital Strategy — The big-picture one. Individual tactics only get you so far. This is about building a coherent strategy underneath everything so you’re not just reacting, you’re actually planning.

DIGITAL STRATEGY MONTH

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I really recommend starting with one of these entry points to fight off any overwhelm. But if you’re really hungry for more, you can explore the gamut of digital skills with our Digital Staff Prep learning plan, or any of the individual courses within it.

To all new grads

If you’re staring down a spreadsheet of job applications right now, I see you. I was you. And if a digital role lands in front of you, even if it’s not what you pictured, even if the interview includes a gentle “this isn’t really a writing job,” take it seriously.

Digital political work is one of the most versatile, high-impact skillsets you can build in this industry, and the best part is that none of it is out of reach. You just need to be willing to walk through the doors that open, and learn on the job. That’s exactly what NDTC is here for. The job market is tough, and we’re providing these resources for free to put qualifying and competing for these roles closer to your reach. Take advantage of them. Check out what’s on our Digital Strategy Month calendar, sign up below.

FULL CALENDAR

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• NDTC didn’t train 128,000 Democrats in year one. It took a decade of showing up consistently, even in “off-years” and unglamorous moments.

• Real power comes from playing the long game: training people before you need them, building systems that outlast election cycles, and trusting that small, consistent actions compound over time.

• We celebrated our 10th anniversary in DC this week with a community of donors and supporters who’ve backed us since the beginning. We’re going to need you to join us to reach new heights by our 20th year.

You may have heard that NDTC is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. Over the last decade, we’ve trained over 128,000 Democrats to win elections, watched our alumni flip seats across the country, and built the infrastructure that churns out massive Democratic talent.

But it hasn’t always been easy, and we’ve learned our fair share of lessons along the way. Now, we’re sharing all those insights with you.

This is the third installment of “10 Lessons in 10 Years,” a monthly(-ish) series where we’re reflecting on and reporting out our most important lessons from a decade of Democratic training. In each one, we’ll break down one insight we’ve seen proven true time and again, across thousands of campaigns.

Some of these lessons we’ve had to learn the hard way. Now you don’t have to. Notebooks out, pencils ready.

Last night, we threw a party.

Not just any party, but our 10th anniversary celebration! The room was full of people who’ve been part of this journey: candidates we trained who went on to win, donors who believed in this work before it was proven, and partners who’ve been in the trenches with us.

There’s only one way the faces around us culminated in that event, and it was through years of committed work. None of it happened overnight.

And that’s the lesson we’re bringing to you today.

The First Year Nobody Remembers

In 2016, we had a CEO who realized that if Democrats were going to run and win everywhere, someone had to train them to do it. He decided to take matters into his own hands.

He was our first trainer. Before we had powerhouse trainers Jordan Berg-Powers or Salim Shariff on board, we had posting videos online of campaign strategies for Democrats.

And he kept showing up. From his dining table in Chicago to hotel conference rooms in small towns in red states. And slowly, something started to build.

The Work Nobody Sees

Building a movement looks like showing up in “off-years” when nobody’s paying attention to politics. It looks like hosting a school board training in February when everyone else is waiting for the presidential race to heat up. It looks like teaching people how to file for office who have never run in a race before.

Most of the time, it looks like unglamorous, unsexy, invisible work that rarely makes headlines.

Most of the work NDTC has done over the past decade falls into this category. We’ve trained thousands of candidates who you’ve never heard of. We’ve run hundreds of trainings that didn’t result in immediate wins. We’ve built systems and tools and curriculum that nobody outside of campaign work will ever see.

But that infrastructure is only invisible until you need it.

Those trainings in “off-years” built the bench of candidates who flipped seats in 2018, 2020, 2022, 2024, and every odd-year local election in between. The very first candidates and staffers we trained (including some who lost their first races) went on to run campaigns again and win.

Each of these small steps was building the future and the hope we see today. Democrats outpacing Republicans in 2026 electoral wins didn’t happen overnight. It started with our partners and us a decade ago. That’s how you build power through sustained commitment that compounds over time.

What Ten Years Actually Build

When people ask us for proof of concept, we point to the names everyone knows now but didn’t ten years ago.

Maxwell Frost, the first Gen Z member of Congress, came through NDTC training before his historic win. Lauren Underwood trained with us before flipping a House seat that had been red for 32 years. Jasmine Crockett went through our programs before becoming one of the most recognized voices in Congress today.

They’re what happens when you invest in training people before they’re household names, before they’re “ready,” before anyone thinks they can win.

But what matters even more to us is that for every Maxwell Frost, there are hundreds of NDTC alumni working behind the scenes. They’re managing campaigns. They’re running field operations. They’re serving on school boards and city councils.

That’s what ten years of sustained commitment build. Individual wins in small towns across America, compounded by an entire ecosystem of talented and trained people who know how to organize, how to win, and how to spread their know-how to others.

Our 10th anniversary party was full of people who’ve been part of this long game. Donors who’ve been backing us since year one, even when we were small and unproven. Staff who’ve dedicated years of their lives to this work. Learners and alumni who stayed in the fight.

These are the people who understand that big movements don’t happen overnight. They happen because people show up, year after year, even when it’s not glamorous. Especially when it’s not glamorous.

The Lesson for Your Campaign

If you’re running for office, or thinking about it, or working on someone else’s campaign, here’s what we want you to take from this:

Don’t wait for the perfect moment. We could have waited until we had more funding, more staff, more proof of concept. We didn’t. Kelly Dietrich started as a team of one, and now we have over 30 people on board to power this work. We started with what we had, and your campaign should too.

Play the long game. You might lose your first race. But that doesn’t mean you failed if you’re still building toward something bigger. Stay involved. Run again. Chip away at change.

Invest in infrastructure before you need it. Don’t wait until October to build your volunteer program. Don’t wait until you’re losing to think about training. Set the systems in place early, when you have time to do it right.

Show up in the off-years. The work that matters most happens when nobody’s watching. The school board races, the party organizing in non-presidential years, and the training sessions in February. That’s where power gets built.

Trust the compound effect. Every volunteer you train, every door you knock, every small action you take all add up. You won’t see it immediately. But over months and years, it compounds into something substantial.

Ten More Years

10 years in, we’re so grateful. Not just for what we’ve built, but for everyone who believed in the long game with us.

Because we truly believe that NDTC at year ten is still just the beginning. The infrastructure we’ve built, the people we’ve trained, and the learning ecosystems we’ve created are going to keep compounding. The movement keeps building if we keep showing up.

That’s been true for NDTC’s first ten years, it’ll be true for the next ten, and it’s true for your campaign too.

So start now, show up consistently, and play the long game.

That’s how we’ll build something that lasts.

Subscribe now

Kelly Dietrich is the founder and CEO of the National Democratic Training Committee (NDTC), which has trained more than 128,000 Democrats to run for office and work on campaigns since 2016.

Want to be part of the next ten years? Check out our upcoming trainings at traindems.org.

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• The Supreme Court effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act, ruling that plaintiffs must now prove intentional racial discrimination to challenge a gerrymandered map, a near-impossible standard.

• Democrats are fighting back in Congress, state courts, and at the ballot box, but the legal ground has fundamentally shifted.

• The 2030 Census is four years away, but the candidates training and running right now will determine who draws the next maps.

What’s Happening With Redistricting?

The past couple years have seen an aggressive wave of Republican-drawn maps designed to lock in structural advantages for the right before voters even show up. After the 2020 Census, GOP-controlled legislatures in states like Georgia, Texas, North Carolina, and Ohio pushed through congressional and state legislative maps that independent analysts flagged as extreme partisan gerrymanders. That means the maps were engineered to convert relatively even partisan landscapes into near-guaranteed Republican supermajorities.

Their tactics aren’t subtle. “Packing“ concentrates Democratic voters (particularly from Black and Latino communities) into a small number of overwhelmingly blue districts, diminishing the impact of their votes. “Cracking“ splits up those same communities across multiple Republican-leaning districts, diluting their power. The result is a map where a party can lose the majority of total votes and still win a comfortable majority of seats.

The Supreme Court’s 2019 ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause effectively took federal courts out of the partisan gerrymandering business, ruling that such claims present “political questions beyond the reach of federal courts.” That decision handed the fight back to state courts, state constitutions, and state-level organizing that have become the primary arenas for this battle.

The Ruling That Just Changed Everything

Last week, the Supreme Court dealt a serious blow to what remained of the Voting Rights Act, and Democrats need to understand what happened to fight back.

In Louisiana v. Callais, the Court’s six-justice conservative majority ruled that anyone challenging a legislative map as racially discriminatory must now prove that mapmakers intentionally set out to disadvantage a racial group. Writing in dissent, Justice Elena Kagan called this what it is: a standard that makes it “well-nigh impossible” to win a voting rights case. You can show statistical proof that a map systematically dilutes Black voting power. You can show the outcome. But without a smoking gun (a map drawer admitting racist intent on record, and where does such a thing exist?) the Court says that’s not enough.

The immediate casualty is a majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana. States across the South are already signaling they may redraw their maps in light of the ruling. And not only will this work the deepest against Black and Brown communities trying to elect candidates who represent them, but it will undermine our entire democracy.

This is the same court that, in 2019, ruled that federal judges can’t hear partisan gerrymandering cases at all. And in 2023, ended affirmative action in college admissions. Their pattern isn’t subtle. The architecture of legal protection for minority voters, built brick by brick since 1965, is being dismantled.

Democrats are pushing back on three fronts. First, in Congress, where members are calling for legislative action to restore the VRA’s teeth (though the path is narrow with the current makeup of the Senate). Second, in state courts, where state constitutional protections can still apply independently of what the federal courts allow. Third, at the ballot box, where voters in several states have approved independent redistricting commissions that remove map-drawing from the hands of partisan legislatures entirely.

Why Redistricting Matters for Candidates

State legislators are usually the ones who draw maps or who sit on the redistricting commissions that do. When Democrats fail to compete in down-ballot state races, they forfeit their seat at the table where those decisions get made.

This was a core lesson of 2010: Republicans invested heavily in state legislative races in a Census year, swept dozens of chambers, and spent the following decade governing from maps of their own design. The REDMAP strategy was explicit and disciplined. Democrats have been working to catch up ever since, despite investments made through organizations focused on state legislative infrastructure.

The 2030 Census is four years away. That sounds like a long time … until you realize that candidates who will serve in the state legislatures drawing those maps are running in 2026 and 2028. The organizing infrastructure, the candidate pipelines, the voter contact programs that will determine those outcomes are being learned and built right now. And the six-month-clock to the November 2026 midterms began on May 4.

Explore a Run for Office

What You Can Do

Fighting redistricting starts with understanding that every level of the ballot is connected. Here’s how to actually fight back:

Run for state legislature. The candidates elected in 2026 and 2028 will be in the rooms where 2030 redistricting maps get drawn. If Democrats aren’t in those rooms, Republicans will draw the maps alone. Again.

Support candidates running for state supreme court. Federal courts have largely abandoned voting rights. State courts (and the justices who sit on them) are now the primary check on gerrymandered maps. Depending on your state, those races could be on your ballot this year.

Demand independent redistricting commissions. Several states have already passed ballot measures removing map-drawing from partisan legislatures entirely. Find out if your state has a commission. If it doesn’t, find out who’s working to change that.

Talk about this. Most voters have never heard of Rucho v. Common Cause or Louisiana v. Callais. You have now. That makes you someone who can talk with your neighbors, your union, your congregation, your book club about why the maps on their ballot matter as much as the names.

Get trained. If you’re considering a run, whether it’s for state house, state senate, school board, or anything else, NDTC will train you for free. Because the single biggest factor in whether Democrats hold the line on redistricting is whether we have enough candidates with both talent and preparation showing up to compete everywhere.

The fight over redistricting is about whether voters choose their representatives or representatives choose their voters. We have tools to fight back. We just need enough people to pick them up.

Explore a Run for Office

The National Democratic Training Committee provides free training to Democratic candidates and activists across the country. Learn more and get started at traindemocrats.org.

At NDTC, our trainers are field organizers, campaign strategists, and longtime advocates who bring hard-earned expertise into every session they lead.

In this series, we’re introducing you to the people behind our trainings. Today: Salim Shariff, a digital strategist, longtime campaign operative, and NDTC trainer of six years based in Oakland, California. Salim got his start on the 2012 Obama campaign, has worked as a digital director on Senate and presidential races, and founded his own firm, Radicle Digital. He’s also a co-founder of Contest Every Race, a candidate recruitment organization that partners with NDTC. Our Senior Digital Strategist Bibek Gurung sat down with Salim to talk digital strategy, the candidate pipeline, and why the Democratic Party needs to get off its ass and stand for something.

NDTC: You’ve been doing this for 15 years. What actually moves people to run?

Salim: Most people have already made the choice before they walk into a training. They’re primarily motivated by challenges they see in their own community — or by being asked. That’s the whole premise behind Contest Every Race: not enough people are asked. There are so many races where Democrats don’t run because they think the district is too red, or there isn’t enough infrastructure to support them. But there’s real merit in just running.

What the trainings actually do is clarify the steps — how to research the race, file, collect signatures, get on the ballot, and build a plan. People come in knowing they want to do it. They just don’t know how, or they’ve done half the things they should and are missing the other half. Fundraising strategy. A messaging plan. A digital plan. They are motivated by their community. We just give them the tools to turn that into a campaign.

NDTC: Who’s doing the asking — and why aren’t enough people being asked?

Salim: Usually, it’s the local Democratic Party, state parties, and organizations like Contest Every Race, Run for Something, and Emerge. But there are still way too many uncontested races across the country. And one of the strongest correlations to an uncontested race is how rural the district is.

Twenty years ago, that wasn’t necessarily true. But the rightward swing of rural America doesn’t mean those voters are gone — there are still 35 to 40 percent of people in those places who identify as Democrats. The party has largely unilaterally disarmed in those communities. They’re not getting money, attention, or resources from national donors. At Contest Every Race, we were granting money to local county parties for the bare minimum essentials — food, software, and hosting events. And what they did with it was remarkable. Taillight fix-it workshops, food drives, and things that built real trust in the community. We didn’t come up with any of those ideas. They did. We just helped them amplify it.

NDTC: What are the biggest digital mistakes you see campaigns make?

Salim: Two big ones. First: chasing the playbook of a candidate you can’t possibly emulate. After Obama, everyone wanted that magic. After AOC, after Bernie, after Beto — campaigns keep trying to ride the wave of whoever just broke through. Right now it’s Zohran. And look, I’m not trying to dismiss what he did — the investment in vertical video, the fluency with younger audiences, that work matters. But most candidates are not as talented as Zohran Mamdani. What you can borrow is his laser focus on a core message. Affordability. Real, specific, consistent. Every candidate can do that. Bopping around your city doing TikTok-style videos when that’s not authentic to who you are — that’s the mistake.

Second: being content-driven instead of data-driven. So many digital programs are just about getting the next post out, the next email out. But we’re in the business of winning elections. We have to know: are our emails recruiting volunteers? Is our social engagement actually building our list? Typically, social media is not great at converting followers into donors or volunteers. There are exceptions, but most down-ballot candidates shouldn’t even be on Bluesky. Know what’s working for your specific campaign, have the infrastructure to measure it, and let the data tell you where to put your energy.

NDTC: You’ve led trainings specifically for Asian American and Pacific Islander candidates. What are the unique barriers to getting more AANHPI candidates to run?

Salim: Groups that explicitly recruit Asian candidates — like the AAPI Victory Fund — are underfunded relative to other organizations in the space. That’s the first thing. Allies should throw money their way.

But it’s also changing. There are more Asian candidates running than I’ve seen in my career, and that matters because representation compounds. When people see someone who looks like them running and winning, the permission structure shifts. I didn’t personally identify with a political candidate until Barack Obama — and I’m not Black. But he grew up without a dad, like I did. He’s mixed race, like I am. Seeing even a small part of your life reflected in a national leader changes what you think is possible. When he won in 2008, the cameras cut to people dancing in the streets in Nairobi, and I was able to say to my mom — that’s where you were born. That moment matters.

The pipeline problem is also structural. When I was coming up, internships weren’t paid. That means only certain people can afford to break in. If we want a more diverse candidate and staff pipeline, we have to make entry easier — and we have to keep asking people who haven’t been asked before.

NDTC: How do we get Democrats to run everywhere?

Salim: Groups like NDTC are a big part of the answer — because if more Democrats knew NDTC existed, more Democrats would run. People just don’t know what infrastructure is out there for them. They don’t know there are free trainings, free resources, copyable templates for fundraising plans, field plans, call time plans — things you can walk in, grab, and use. Even after 15 years in this work, I go back into the NDTC online resources regularly. They’re genuinely good.

But the bigger answer is that the party has to paint a clearer picture of what we stand for. Zohran didn’t talk about Trump all that much. He talked about building the most affordable New York he could — where people could raise a family, afford their rent, and get where they needed to go. That resonated because it was specific, and it was positive, and it was about people’s actual lives. At the national level, we have to go further. We have all the solutions to the problems we face. We just need to tell the story, stand for something clearly and consistently, and fight like hell. We haven’t been doing enough of that — and it’s hurting us everywhere.

Salim Shariff trains Democrats across the country through NDTC and is the founder of Radicle Digital, a full-service digital firm. Learn more at radicle.digital.

Salim put it directly in this conversation: if more Democrats knew NDTC existed, more Democrats would run. That’s exactly why everything we do is free — every training, every course, every resource, every template. No fee, no gatekeeping. The tools Salim has spent 15 years developing and refining are sitting in our resource library right now, ready for any candidate or organizer who needs them.

Sign up for an upcoming NDTC training at TrainDems.org.

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• NDTC’s Fundraising Staff Cohort, a 7-week fundraising training program, just wrapped with 200+ enrollees and real results for learners.

• We’re bringing that same energy to the field starting with the Campaign Field Bootcamp on Saturday, May 2nd at 11 AM ET.

• Register now. Space is limited to 100 people, and this is the training your campaign needs before the season heats up.

Seven weeks ago, we launched something big.

NDTC’s Fundraising Cohort, Fund the Win, brought together candidates and campaign staff for a structured, seven-week deep dive into the fundamentals of fundraising. And we mean it when we say cohort: weekly live sessions, a consistent community, and a commitment to building skills that stick.

Now that it’s wrapped, we want to share how it went and give you a preview of what’s coming next.

Why Fund the Win Worked

More than 200 people enrolled in our Fund the Win cohort when we opened the doors. Week after week, they showed up on Wednesday evenings to dig into the mechanics and mindset of fundraising from making the ask to refining their messaging to actually picking up the phone.

We’ve offered this curriculum for years, but what made the cohort different was the community.

Participants (what we call our “learners” at NDTC) came back every week ready to learn, ask questions, and apply what they were gaining in real time to their own campaigns. By the end of the seven weeks, something had shifted in the conversations, in the questions being asked, in the way people were talking about call time.

Fundraising can feel intimidating. It can feel like you’re asking someone for a favor, or worse, like you’re bothering people. One of the core goals of Fund the Win was to reframe all of that to help learners see fundraising not as a burden, but as a skill. One they could own, practice, and grow into.

Mission accomplished.

What Learners Are Saying

The feedback from Fund the Win learners says it better than we can:

“Re-framing call time and asking for money as an opportunity for the donor rather than an inconvenience has been really helpful.”

“The templates make it much easier to apply what’s being learned — they help overcome the initial anxiety of doing things correctly.”

“I love the community. The live training is especially useful because trainers share their experiences, and we can ask questions in the chat.”

That last one gets at something we heard again and again: the live format matters. There’s a different energy when you’re in a room (even a virtual one) with people who are in the same boat as you — asking the same questions, facing the same fears, and cheering each other on. We offer this format along with our on-demand courses to meet learners where they’re at and best serve their needs.

What’s Next: A Field Game Focus

Fund the Win showed us what happens when Democratic infrastructure invests in campaign staff and their development. Learners come in shaky on their confidence, and they leave with solid skills, tools, and a community. Ready to execute a winning campaign.

If fundraising is the fuel of a campaign, the field is the engine. Door-knocking, voter contact, volunteer recruitment, and organizing infrastructure is where campaigns are won or lost. So we’re dedicating the same structured training to it that we brought to fundraising, and it’s right around the corner.

Our Campaign Field Bootcamp: Laying the Groundwork to Win is a single Saturday morning session designed to send you back to your campaign ready to work, and it’s happening on Saturday, May 2nd at 11:00 AM ET.

This bootcamp is designed to give field staff and candidates the foundational skills they need to build a winning field operation, from turf cutting to volunteer management to the metrics that actually matter. Whether you’re new to field work or looking to sharpen what you already know, these are high-value, focused sessions you won’t want to miss.

Register now

Space fills up fast, so we’re giving you advance notice to save your seat today.

Why This All Matters

We’re building something at NDTC that the Democratic Party has needed for a long time: a real infrastructure to support the people who do the work and succeed.

Candidates, staffers, organizers. These are the people who knock on doors, make the calls, and keep campaigns running. They are the real face of the party in their communities. They deserve professional-grade support and training. Not just when they’ve already made it to a high-profile race, but early, when they’re just getting started, when the skills they build now will compound over an entire career in politics.

Fund the Win was proof of concept. And the Campaign Field Bootcamp on May 2nd is your on-ramp. Register today.

We’ll see you there.

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Connect with us everywhere!

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