I lost a city council race in the April municipal election running as a conservative in a left-wing college town. Running for a local office for the first time was an experience and I have been reflecting on it for about a month. Our city has always been left of center, but until about 10 years ago, it was a lot more practical and balanced than it is now. I chose to get involved by running for city council in Columbia, Missouri, because, as a lobbyist once said to me, “There is no government that can screw up your life more quickly than your city council.”

The race for my ward ended up being a three-way race between me, a left-wing radical, and a retired city employee who had an idiosyncratic set of positions but who was also to the right of the radical. The leftist won with 52.25% of the vote. I came in second with 38.22%. The retired city employee earned 9.53% of the vote. The city council is officially a non-partisan, so no one ran with party labels -- but I was vocally conservative as my campaign website indicates. Had this been a two-way race, I would have gotten somewhere between the 38.22% of votes that I did and 47.75%, which is the combined total of my votes with those of the 3rd candidate. My best guess is that I would have received 46% of the vote in a two-way race.
A friend of mine also ran in the same election for a different city council seat. He is also generally conservative but ran a more ideologically muted campaign. He tried to gain broader support by running as a pragmatic problem-solver. His was also a three-way race between him, a center-left incumbent, and a libertarian. The leftist incumbent won that race with 51.97% of the vote, my friend came in second with 43.32% of the vote and the libertarian received 4.71% of the vote. In a two-way race, I suspect my friend would have won 48% of the vote.

There is plenty of financial support available for credible candidates on the right in local elections. I raised $18,998 in campaign donations which was more than twice my initial goal. All of my donations were from individuals except one $3,000 donation from the local police officer’s professional association. My median donation was $100.00. My right of center friend raised approximately $50,000 for his race. We both far exceeded our leftist opponents in fundraising. Their advantage was not in fundraising per se but in organization.

Missouri has open primaries, so voters don’t register by party making it difficult for a candidate to identify likely supporters. The leftist candidates had extensive support from like-minded, grassroots networks. There are local lefty consultants and politicos who have developed extensive voter databases and can easily identify left-leaning voters for their candidates to court. The right is far less organized at the local level. For example, I attempted several times to get voter data from the Missouri Republican party to target some of my campaign mailing efforts but was never even able to get a response to my inquiry. Conservatives and other non-leftists need to get smarter about how to build local organizations to support candidates conducting campaign activities and events.

I was pleasantly surprised when meeting local voters. Since I couldn’t target likely conservative voters, I chose to knock on the doors of the approximately 15% of registered voters who had a history of voting in municipal elections. No one was rude or abusive to me which was a pleasant surprise. Many people we non-committal and I could infer from body language that some were not supporters, but I expected more frequent negative reactions than I got when handing out a push-piece about Liberty, Limited Government, and the Rule of Law. I concluded from this experience that face-to-face interactions are more honest and immediate than virtual ones and are doable for local campaigns that only need to get in front of a few thousand voters.

I chose not to use social media at all. I am not on any of the major social media sites and I decided not to open accounts for this campaign. My friend running in the other ward had a very extensive and very professional social media presence. Although he won a higher share of votes in his ward than I did in mine, I had a higher raw vote total than he did. I have to wonder if social media is really that helpful for a conservative candidate who is not already a social media superstar. Even if it might be in theory, I think the leftists have such a large built-in advantage due to algorithmic promotion of their content, shadow banning, trolling, etc. that we are just playing into their hands when we engage on their media.

I also did not engage any campaign consultant. Perhaps this was a fateful choice since I did not win, but I have to wonder how much the consultant class really knows. I did speak with a few consultants and people who had run state and local campaigns and did buy some voter data late in the campaign. The general advice that I got was to have a strong social media campaign which I did not do as discussed above. I was also advised not to door-knock until the last 4-6 weeks of the campaign, but I could not follow that strategy as I have a day job and therefore only really had Saturdays to canvass. As a result, I knocked on doors nearly weekly for about 6 months. Based on my experiences speaking with voters and my final vote total, I don’t think this was disastrous.

Reflecting on it all, I think conservative candidates could be competitive in local races in blue enclaves if we could build better grassroots organizations. Local media seem more balanced when covering local candidates, at least outside of major metropolitan areas. Local candidates frequently don’t have widely known political reputations and are therefore not as polarizing to left-leaning audiences as state and national figures are. Face-to-face interactions on the local scale can provide a way to work around the built-in social media advantage that leftists have. Maybe one of you is thinking of running for local office if so I hope these reflections might be of benefit to you.