Soon after Zohran Mamdani secured the Democratic nomination for New York City mayor, Amanda Litman posted a video selfie on TikTok. “The dinosaurs of the past, the boomers, the hostile managers, the assholes—they are behind us,” she preached to the camera. If viewers felt inspired to “run to take on the status quo,” they should head to her organization’s website and register.
Though Mamdani is not affiliated with Litman’s eight-year-old nonprofit, Run for Something, his generational fight aligns with its purpose: to encourage young and underrepresented people to run for political office, including “hyperlocal” positions like city council and school boards.
Litman says that Mamdani’s win sparked the organization’s biggest-ever candidate recruitment surge, with 5,000 sign-ups in five days. That follows the previous record: 10,000 sign-ups within two weeks of Trump’s (second) election. A total of nearly 250,000 people have reached out to express interest in running for local races. About 10% of them have pursued office in 50 states and D.C. Litman believes that Run for Something has the largest candidate pipeline on either side of the political aisle.
If Litman’s nonprofit were a business, it would be booming. But when you depend entirely on donations, and you operate in the fickle realm of politics, income is always precarious. There are ebbs and flows.
In 2022, Run for Something raised $17 million; in 2023, after successful midterms, the figure dropped to $8 million; in 2024, it reached $12 million. This year, it is tracking slightly downward again. “Democratic donors are capricious,” Litman says. “Year over year you’re hoping that they haven’t changed their minds about everything they believe.”
As Alexandra Acker-Lyons, a Denver-based Democratic donor adviser and longtime Run for Something funder, puts it, “Republicans have a 40-year plan, and if we’re lucky, we have a four-year plan.” And backers often give nonprofits less leeway than they would businesses, even when the backers are wealthy enough to weather economic stressors. “If you were investing in a company, you would give them five years of runway, 40% of their budget, and would say, ‘Let’s talk in two years,’” Acker-Lyons says. “That is just not how it works in nonprofits.”
But today—with DEI in a tailspin, the cost of living causing anxiety, and democracy eroding—funding has felt a bit more stable. Litman says the most active donors right now are those disillusioned with the Democratic party and those more interested in building long-term power than merely scoring a cocktail party invitation and “a photo with a future senator to put on your fridge.”
Litman began her career as an email writer for Obama’s 2012 campaign; she then headed up Hillary Clinton’s email outreach in 2016. She cofounded Run for Something in 2017, on the day of Trump’s first inauguration. In each year of that presidential term, 15,000 prospective local candidates signed up, eager for the organization’s help with everything that newbies need, from collecting signatures to hiring staff. Run for Something has raised funds from major foundations and entities including George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund, and crypto investor Mike Novogratz, as well as many individuals giving $500 or less. In 2022, it had about 24 people employed, on its way to a planned total staff of 80.
But after Democrats exceeded expectations in the 2022 midterms and attention turned to 2024, donations began to fall. In November 2023, there were more than 60 people on payroll, but in January 2024 Litman and her cofounder, Ross Morales Rocketto, had to begin laying off staffers. “Every part of it sucked,” Litman says. “[But] it was the right thing to do, because if we had not, we would not exist in this moment.”
Among the 30 employees remaining are a trio of engineers who have built tools that are helping Run for Something handle its current growth. It’s a small group, but “very few organizations in our space have full-fledged tech teams” at all, says chief technology officer Jordan Haines, who joined in 2023 after building an edtech startup.
One tech platform they built looks for matches between the roughly 500,000 open elected positions in the country and the 250,000 potential candidates in the pipeline. Run for Something can score viable candidates dynamically based on various factors, including what Haines calls “some gnarly pieces of data” like age, issue leanings, renter status, and geography, which Litman says “can get really messy quickly” because elected-office districts don’t map easily onto zip codes.
Another tool—“a CRM where the ‘C’ stands for candidate,” Haines says—is a custom-built platform to manage the 1,000 or so candidates farther along the pipeline who have applied for Run for Something’s endorsement since 2024. Interested candidates typically sign up online, where they gain access to resources including conference calls, webinars, and an app for connecting with past candidates and mentors.
But once candidates file to be on a ballot, they may apply for Run for Something’s nod, and they have about a 50% chance of securing it. Criteria include running as a Democrat or an independent for the first, second, or third time; being born after 1984; and other subjective criteria, such as running a grassroots campaign with “heart and hustle” and being what it calls a “hell yeah!” candidate.
One reason that Run for Something’s pipeline is growing so fast is a new partnership with Bernie Sanders. As part of his ongoing “Fighting Oligarchy” tour with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Vermont senator is recruiting progressive candidates, particularly from working-class backgrounds, who are then filtered into one of three candidate-supporting organizations. “He’s said the whole time that the goal isn’t to just pop into a state and do a rally,” says Jeremy Slevin, Sanders’s senior adviser. So far, more than 7,000 prospective candidates have signed up with Sanders, with more than 3,000 onboarded with Run for Something.
The Sanders allyship may be surprising, given Litman’s association with the historically more moderate Clinton; the acrimony between the former rivals, particularly from Clinton’s side, is hardly a secret. Centrist Democrats argue that deferring to the party’s left resulted in Trump’s victories and that the Mamdani playbook is not widely translatable.
But progressives invert that narrative and are bent on challenging a lackadaisical establishment. “What I’m not seeing is a willingness to do deep reflection,” Acker-Lyons says of current Democratic leadership. “We lost to a monster twice, and we need to take a really hard look in the mirror as to why.” Nearly half of Sanders’s registrants are running as independents. “I am very much supportive of [that] in places where the Democratic brand is so dismal that they can’t win.”
Run for Something’s win rate stands somewhere around 54%, though Litman stresses that she doesn’t think victory is the best success metric. The organization wants to be competing in contested races in purple and even red districts. “If we had a 70% or 80% win rate, those are folks that probably didn’t need that much help to begin with,” she says.
For instance, former pastor Justin Douglas won his race for commissioner of Dauphin County, which includes Hershey, Pennsylvania, by 184 votes in 2023, flipping control of the commission for the first time in more than a century. Many successful Run for Something candidates are now seeking even higher office, such as Anna Eskamani, who flipped a Florida House seat in 2018 and is now running for mayor of Orlando.
Frankness from Litman is part of her brand. She’s outspoken on social media, where her praise for Mamdani was accompanied by scorn for Andrew Cuomo. She has proudly expressed support for divisive figures like David Hogg, who departed as DNC co-vice chair after planning to support primary challenges by younger leaders against older Democrats. She’s transparent in her Substack newsletter about being disappointed that her recent book, When We’re in Charge, was absent from the major bestsellers lists. (“Even though I said I didn’t care, obviously I cared. Sigh.”)
When asked if it’s smart for the head of an organization that represents a wide range of candidates to be so vocal about her own opinions, she says, “Ultimately, I speak for the organization. Also, I don’t know any other way to be.” She thinks it’s important for her to inspire others to be their own authentic selves.
Litman knows that her work will only get harder as expectations for Run for Something rise, particularly leading up to the midterms and 2028 presidential election. There’s a “perpetual tension,” she says. Even if nonprofits have substantial money, there’s always more they could be doing. But right now, she’s optimistic. “I know what it feels like when things are going bad,” Litman says. “I do not feel that way this year.”
