Run Through the Tape!
By Drew McKissick
When you’re just a few days out from an election, it can be tempting to slow down. Everyone is tired and getting burned out. And with early voting stretching out the final push, it can feel like the election will never end. This is when you need to find your second wind and keep up…
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Three Fundamentals of Political Campaigns
By Drew McKissick
It’s a fundamental truth of politics that if you don’t win, you can’t govern. You can’t implement policy if you aren’t elected to a position that allows you to do so, or if you don’t have sympathetic elected officials that are willing to help. With that being the case, it’s critical that conservatives know the…
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How to Leverage Campaign Contributions
By Drew McKissick
If you have been involved in politics or helped with campaigns for any length of time, then you have learned how important money is to the political process. The old saying that “money is the mother’s milk of politics” is true, but there’s a deeper truth there than just the importance of money, but rather…
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What’s Your WHY?
By Drew McKissick
Why are you involved? What do you care about and why? When you’re involved in politics, one of the most important things that you can do in order to be more successful and have a greater impact on the things that you care about is to know “why”. What’s important? What are you trying to…
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How to Create a Political Elevator Pitch
By Drew McKissick
Just as every business needs to “sell” something, politics and public policy is about sales too. And people respond (or not) to political messages in pretty much the same way that they do to any other sales pitch. Good messages that are relevant are more likely to cut through the clutter. Bad messages get tuned…
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Don’t Quit
By Drew McKissick
What happens when you quit? Nothing. Or at least not anything that you’d want to happen. It’s one of the few guarantees that we have in politics: if you quit, you’re usually guaranteed not to like the results. When you’re not involved, it’s more likely that things will not go your way. You’re giving up…
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How to Manage Political Volunteers
By Drew McKissick
American politics and public policy is moved by its citizens; specifically, ACTIVE citizens. It’s all about people. People work for candidates in their campaigns, cast ballots on Election Day, and then lobby those elected officials to help shape public policy once they get into office. But given that so few people actually do participate in…
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You Can’t Beat Somebody With Nobody
By Drew McKissick
It’s one thing to get engaged in public policy and shed light on what liberals are up to, but it’s another thing to beat them at the ballot box and take away their power to do what they do. Elections have consequences. And if nobody runs against them, the consequences are more years of them…
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Identifying Conservatives for Action
By Drew McKissick
Whether we like it or not, few things matter in politics quite as much as numbers. Fortunately for all of us non-math majors out there, it doesn’t involve higher order calculus, but rather the most basic varieties of arithmetic: addition, subtraction, division and multiplication. When it comes to organizing and being politically effective, the most…
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Tips for Running Meetings
By Drew McKissick
You can’t really have much of a political organization without meetings, which means that you need to make sure that the kind of meetings that you have serve the needs and purposes of your group or campaign. But when it comes to typical “meetings”, (whether official group meetings, or project meetings), take time to do…
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