How To Become a Local Political Power Broker Using 15 Simple Strategies

Everyone
likes to be appreciated and sought after, and one way to make that happen is to wield political influence and
power. However, some folks in local politics go about seeking power and
influence in negative ways; by withholding information, excluding
others, playing head-games, and generally making life unpleasant for
everyone. All of us know some folks who behave like this if we’ve spent
any time participating in local politics. Frankly, folks like this are
one of the reasons lots of people don’t participate in local party
politics. But you can become a power unto yourself in local politics by
following a few simple and fun strategies that help everyone and have a
positive impact on your community and the electoral chances of your
party and your favored candidates – and few of them require a quorum or
a copy of Robert’s Rules of Order.

1) Be Present: Woody Allen
was spot-on when he said that 80% of success is just showing up. If you
never show your face at political events, people won’t have a chance to
know who you are. Don’t overdo it, though. You can suffer from
overexposure. Be there. Be excellent. Be gone. Don’t let people take
you for granted, let them court you a little. Show up at the
nitty-gritty working events such as neighborhood association meetings,
city counsel study sessions, or legislative district party meetings,
not just the glitzy fund-raisers where you get to take your picture
with famous people. Volunteer to do a few things that you are really
good at – and actually do them, and do them really well. Don’t take on
responsibilities you won’t, or can’t, follow though with. If you bite
off more than you can swallow, let people know and withdraw with grace,
don’t just pull a fade. Don’t let anyone waste your time. Don’t suffer
fools, but don’t make enemies who will want to sabotage you. Always be
on the look-out for people who are smart, capable, and realistic, and
cultivate those relationships assiduously.

2) Map People’s
Networks: The secret of political power is understanding and using
social networks. The connections of sympathy, obligation,
self-interest, allegiance, and affection that flow through the networks
of social connections between people is the key to persuading people to
help you and those you represent. Human social maps are a very complex
and ever-changing landscape requiring diligence, social adroitness, and
constant attention to maintain and use: dealing with the complexity of
human relationships is why we have such enormous brains in the first
place. Investigating and understanding people’s social networks is a
key asset for any political power broker. You must understand the
social networks to which your neighborhood is connected, who are the
key influencers in those networks, and what those influencers’ motives
and needs are. As to what you have to barter with in order to get those
influencers to utilize their networks on your behalf, keep reading…

3)
Deliver an Audience: There is nothing any politician loves more than an
audience. If you have a reputation for being able to create successful
events that people will spend their valuable time to attend, you become
a sought after commodity. Whether you can throw down a coffee-klatch in
your dining room for a dozen, or a party for fifty, the ability to
quickly motivate your social networks to shake out appropriate and,
hopefully, influential folks to listen to a political hopeful will make
you a treasured political asset. It’s not very hard to scare up folks
to hear a person who already has power and/or fame (and probably get
them to pay for the privilege), but it much more rare and useful to be
able to bring folks together to listen to someone who wants their help
getting formal political power and doesn’t yet have any.

4)
Learn to Ask People for Money: Having the combination of emotional
intelligence and bulldog-like determination to extract money from a
people who would rather spend it on another pair of shoes or a evening
out, without leaving anyone feeling rolled, is rare. Anyone can pass a
hat and collect a few bucks, it takes balls and brains to make an
appropriately-sized ask face to face and make it stick. If you can
learn to wield the velvet-wrapped, ball-bearing-filled cosh that is the
fund-raiser’s persona, you will not lack for political friends who owe
you favors: at least until America wises up and institutes public
financing of campaigns nationally. But, as we shall see, even then,
this skill will still have a place in the power broker’s arsenal.

5) Deliver Qualifying Donations: This one is specific to those
jurisdictions, like Arizona, that have a public campaign financing
system. Such systems generally require candidates to gather a minimum
number of token donations to demonstrate community support for their
campaign in order to qualify for public financing. Gathering hundreds,
or in state-wide races, thousands, of small donations can be quite
time-consuming and tedious. Those who have a political network ready to be
able to deliver many such small donations in short order are a valuable
asset to a campaign. Having Identified those in your networks who can’t
afford large donations or big commitments of time, but want to be able to
make a difference, you’ll be set to deliver large numbers of qualifying
donations in short order.

6)
Know the Terrain: Geography is queen of the battlefield – and political
warfare is no different than the real thing. You have to understand the
terrain of your domain in order to defend it, or to lay siege to some
else’s. In this modern world, mastery means understanding the use of
voter databases like the VAN/Vote Builder. If you are not trained in
use of such powerful programs for understanding the political terrain
and planning a campaign, you are a dinosaur and the big meteor just
hit. You have to know who is persuadable, and who will just sic their
dogs on you; if you are the one providing information to the VAN,
rather than just relying on the VAN to know who’s behind the next door,
you are the neighborhood general that would-be kings will seek out. If
you understand the lay of the land so well enough that you can marshal
your marching army of canvassers efficiently through enemy territory
while capturing all the available votes, you will be master of all you
survey.

7) Know Your Neighbors: People are much more amenable
to persuasion by people whom they already know, like, and trust. A deep
and wide personal social network in your neighborhood is a priceless
asset. The explosion of media choices means that the era of mass-market
campaigns is coming to a close and the micro-targeted persuasion
campaigns of tomorrow will be carried predominantly door-to-door,
face-to-face, and mailbox-by-mailbox (whether snail mail or email). In
such an environment, the person who already knows the people behind
those doors, can recognize their faces and be recognized, and doesn’t
get spam-filtered
or recycled immediately, is a new media kingpin. Familiarity doesn’t
breed contempt – it breeds votes for your chosen candidates.

8)
Become a Trusted Information Source: Just as folks are more amenable to
persuasion by people they already know, they are more likely to believe
and be moved by information from a source they already trust. Be a
trustworthy source of information – and take that trust seriously by
not abusing it – and you can move people and determine votes with the
information you provide. Whether you are dropping off campaign lit on a
regular basis, just chatting over the fence, or rolling your own
digital newsletter or blog, get people used to being able to rely on
you for political information and half the work of persuasion is done.
When you are the most politically informed and trustworthy person in
your social networks, people will look to you to bird-dog the
candidates and the issues for them. People aren’t lazy when it comes to
politics, they are efficient.

9) Cut Through the Gobbledygook:
Many people see the thicket of forms and deadlines that come at them at
election time and simply throw up their hands and walk away from the
process. You can be their fixer. Know the regulations, laws, deadlines,
polling-places, form layouts, and all that minutiae well enough to make
it easy and effortless to come to you and get answers and assistance.
Be proactive in helping people navigate the bureaucratic maze, and
endeavor to teach them so that they can rely on themselves and help
others. Knowledge closely held can be a source of power, but knowledge
of how to participate in the political process is not the sort that
should be ever be horded, to do so hurts your party and limits your
influence.

10) Deliver Petition Signatures: One of the most
tedious tasks, and the one which most new candidates get little help
with, is collecting signatures to get on the ballot. If you can utilize
your networks to generate a number of valid signatures quickly you are
big help to a budding campaign. Whether it is part of your canvassing
efforts, through tabling events, or an unusual willingness to stand
outside a library or supermarket, the petition signature is the coin of
the political realm. Even more valuable is the unusual ability to get
others to also gather signatures; that is like having your own mint for
coin of the political realm.

11) Deliver Seed Money and/or
Political Contributions: Having your own fund-raising network of even
small dollar contributors will quickly make you a sought-after
political commodity. If you can regularly bundle batches of smaller
contributions to direct substantial money to the candidates you
champion, you will find yourself on short-lists for campaign committees
and tapped to put your prowess to work for party and charitable
organizations in short order. Those additional links in your political
network will open new vistas in your social landscape and give you
further credibility as a political power broker in your locality.

12)
Deliver Volunteers: Money is wonderful, but especially in local races
the real currency of power is people’s time and effort. Most local
campaigns rely heavily on volunteers to man the phones, canvass the
neighborhoods, and keep the campaign moving. If local candidates can
come to you and walk away with a pledge of volunteer staff, you become
their most valued ally. Whether you provide this service through your
formal networks, such as your union, service organization, church, or
club, or by personal recruitment of your neighbors and friends, you
will be a welcome guest at any political function and people will
always be sure to take your calls and answer your emails.

13)
Learn Many Campaign Tasks: Nothing is worse than a volunteer that
wastes time and resources because they know nothing about campaigning.
To make yourself valuable, you have to know what you are doing. Take
the time to attend trainings with your local party or one of a number
of national political organizations that offer grassroots political
training. Learn how campaigns work and how to accomplish tasks like
organizing a phone bank, or a canvassing, how to organize a voter
registration drive, how to host a fund-raiser or rally, how to write a
competent press release, how to use campaign software or build a
campaign website, or how to host a debate or online chat. You needn’t
become a campaign manager, but if you understand many facets of the
fundamental work that campaigns engage in, you will be much more
valuable to your favored candidates.

14) Train and Lead
Volunteers: Warm bodies are always useful in a campaign, but a trained
and experienced volunteer is the best gift you can give a political
candidate. In addition to being competent yourself, being able to
transmit that experience to your recruits makes you a force-multiplier
that everyone will want on their team. During the down-time between
campaigns dedicate yourself to training up your volunteers, or get them
to formal trainings. During campaigns, hone your volunteers into
competent and seasoned campaigners. Build team esprit and cohesiveness
as you build a local political machine that is capable of simply
plugging in the name of a candidate and getting to work.

15) Get
Elected: Or at just try running for something. If you use even a few
of the strategies outlined here, you will have people begging you to
run for a leadership position: and rightly so, for you will, in fact,
be a leader. Whether it is a party leadership position, a stint on a
board of directors or committee, or public elective office, you can
make those positions enhance your position as a local power broker.
Don’t run simply in order to run, and don’t do it for the small amount
of discretionary power the position may provide; that is the surest way
to ruin the reputation you’ve built. Run to build your social network.
Run to meet and form working relationships with people. And always run
with an articulated and thoughtful goal firmly in mind – something that
you can accomplish using the position you seek – and make that goal,
not your personal aggrandizement, your rallying cry. Lay out what
you’ve accomplished in the past, the good qualities you bring to the
table, the recommendations from your social network, and what you would
like to accomplish for your constituents. It is vitally important that
you make your goals clear in being elected or selected; that is the
essence of a mandate, and having a clear mandate will make it easier to
succeed in office. Even if you aren’t successful being elected,
however, you can only improve your reputation and name-recognition by
playing the game fairly. That means no ad hominem attacks on
opponents, no dirty tricks, no questionably ethical practices, and no
lying about your plans once elected. By participating directly in the
electoral grinder, you will have a better appreciation of the pressures
on political candidates hoping to be elected. Veteran political reporter Jim Nintzel of the Tucson Weekly recently wrote a wonderfully concise guide to running a credible campaign with 10 simple rules – you would do well to memorize it before announcing your candidacy.