A free workshop. Open to anyone. We don’t ask what party you are, and we don’t want to know.
The first Monday in May through that Friday, in the year the office is up. The regular filing week does not move. In limited circumstances — for example when no one files for an office — state law provides for a short reopened filing period. Confirm the current dates with your county elections office.
Always confirm current dates, fees, and requirements with your county elections office and the Washington Secretary of State. Rules change, and this page is education, not legal advice.
The offices nobody explains: school boards, city and town councils, fire districts, port districts, park districts, cemetery districts, water and sewer districts, hospital districts. What each one controls, what it pays, how much time it really takes, and when the seats come up.
The declaration of candidacy, line by line. Filing online vs. in person. The fee, the petition alternative, and the deadline that does not move. What happens between filing and the primary.
Washington PDC reporting at the scale most local candidates actually run at. What you must report, what you don’t, and the mini-reporting option. Where volunteers get people in trouble without meaning to.
How to knock two hundred doors without quitting. What to say in fifteen seconds. Raising three thousand dollars from people who know you. Handling the first hostile question in public. What to do when someone tells you you’re too young.
Former local officeholders from different parties, on the same panel, disagreeing in front of you about tactics and agreeing about process. That’s deliberate. The panel is the point.
None of them will tell you what to believe. Several of them will tell you why they lost the first time.
Nothing. Members and non-members alike. There is no upsell at the end.
We’ll ask you to consider joining, once, at the close. If you don’t, you still get the workbook and you’re still welcome at the filing clinic in April.
We help with the process. The campaign is yours.
Almost nobody is, until they do it once.
The current officeholder in the seat you’re thinking about was, at some point, a person who had never run for anything. In many districts they ran unopposed, which means no voter has ever compared them to an alternative. You would be the first alternative in years.
That’s not arrogance. It’s arithmetic.