 So with us today, we have three panelists. We have Jana Lynn Sanchez. She ran for Congress in the Texas Sixth Congressional District. She's actually run twice, once in 2018 and another time in 2021 in special election. Jana actually won a two-part Democratic primary in 2018 and received 45.6% of the vote in the general election which amounts to more than 113,000 votes. She ran again in 2021 in a special election in which 23 candidates, five-partisan special election, 23 candidates ran. The top two candidates in that race, both Republicans won a combined total of 30% of the vote. Jana got third place missing out on the runoff by less than 400 votes. We also have Christine Reeves with us. She ran for Congress in the Washington 10th District in the 2029 non-partisan primary in a field that included 19 candidates. Top two candidates in that race, both Democrats received a combined total of 35.5% of the vote and Christine got third place with 12.9% which amounted to over 29,000 votes. She missed the runoff by a little bit over 5,000 votes. And lastly, we have Dr. Tim Cain with us. He ran for Congress in the Ohio 12th District in 2018 in the Republican primary. He faced nine total candidates in congressmen which is now Congressman Balderson's district. He won that primary with just 28.7% of the vote. Dr. Cain got third place with 16.9% of the vote or just over 11,000 votes. Thank you all for being here. It's an honor to get an opportunity to hear about your experience. What it's like to run for Congress. Very few people have an idea of what this is. You are in a very unique fraternity. So because we're on a short amount of time, I just wanna dive right into the questions and to get us going, I'll ask the questions and I'll just ask it to one of you to begin sharing your thoughts and we'll go from there. After we do the questions that I have drawn up, we'll open it up for Q&A. So if you're in the chat, you can share your thoughts and we'll get to you. So the first question I had is for Janna actually and by extension everybody else. When you decided to run for Congress, were there some main factors that you considered before making the choice to get in? And by extension, did you consider the number of candidates that had already filed when you got it? Had that entered your thought pattern? So I'm gonna talk about the special election since that's the more relevant one here. I absolutely believed that I was the front runner as the election results proved among Democrats and I was not concerned about other candidates running. I felt that they didn't have my name ID or my experience and I didn't feel that any of them would come anywhere near me. I was always concerned about a shutout and I said to donors who were a big part of the problem that it would either be me or it would be two Republicans and people treated it like it was a Democratic primary oh, we don't wanna get involved. And it was very frustrating. You know, I'll go into detail as much detail as you want about the frustrations but no, I was not intimidated by any of the other candidates who were joining. I didn't think most of them should be in. There were candidates who no one even knows who they were who never even ran a campaign and who got 1,000 votes. And fundraising was extremely challenging because of all of the candidates but more than I expected, I did not expect that problem to be as severe as it was. And mainly I'm very frustrated at a couple of the candidates who ran but more than anything else at the party for not, the party had a mechanism to endorse a candidate to ask the precinct chairs to endorse the candidate and our party chair, our Texas Democratic Party Chair told me that he didn't even know that rule existed and he's the chair of the party. So I think that I have a lot of frustrations from running that race and it did not come out the way I expected. I expected to be in a runoff with Susan Wright and I think I probably would not have won that runoff given how special election voting turned out but I think I should have been in the runoff and had the Democratic Party been more on the ball I would have been in the runoff. Sure, Christine, Tim, same questions to you. We can start with Christine. I think you're Christine you're on, there you go. Yeah, so I would just say I think like Janna, absolutely a lot goes into thinking about running for Congress. At the time I was a sitting state representative knowing that I was the opportunity to run for Congress presented itself very rapidly. In a lot of instances, you know that the member is leaving and there's about a year timeframe to like ramp up to run. In this case, our representative, Denny Heck, just basically announced he was not coming back and we had a very short window to make that decision. So in December of 19, I decided to resign from the legislature to step up to run for Congress. We knew there were a couple other people thinking about it. There was one Democratic socialist in the race already who had announced because he was gonna run against Denny regardless but in terms of like serious Democratic candidates, I would say nobody else had was in the race yet when I made the decision to run. And so I stepped down from the legislature because I believe that like I was gonna lose that seat anyway or have to give up my house seat if I got through the August primary for Congress. So I just decided to do it early and just to put all of my time and energy into fundraising. But I think like Janna, when you have 19 candidates in the race, five of whom are Democrats who range the full spectrum from Democratic socialist to conservative to moderate, you know, Democrat it does create some challenges. And so happy to talk about that. I know there's some other questions on the lane but there's a lot that goes into deciding. I'm a mom of two young kids. I have a seven-year-old and a nine-year-old, my husband's a pilot. It was like all of these things. And it was calling other candidates and saying, I'm hearing you're gonna get in. What are you thinking? Like what are you doing? And you make the decision. And then guess what? People who told you they weren't gonna run decide they're gonna run anyway. And people who said that they were on your team decide they're not on your team anymore. So a lot goes into it but it all ends up having to be strategized just the same. So Tim, your thoughts, what was your experience? Yeah, you mentioned something there, Christine that, you know, a lot of this is reliving. What to me was a really rewarding experience but you get hit by, you know, wins from all different sides. And of course there's dishonesty, it's politics but we also had a situation in Columbus, Ohio where a sitting congressman in a, it's one of the wealthier districts in Ohio Leans conservative but it's conservative center right, I would say. And the incumbent not only said he was going to resign at the end of his term, he was going to resign almost immediately. So it was a special election but it was late enough that it was a double election where they were also doing the regular primary at the same time. So it just reminds me how different everyone's situation is but I had to decide very quickly if I wanted to move back. So my particular situation was I had worked in the government. I've been in think tanks, I'm a PhD economist and I've loved being part of the government in the ideas sense, but I hadn't, you know, paid my dues as I think the other two candidates here might have in local governance but there was this frustration on other people like who's this guy coming back thinking he just gets to run like this carpet bagger mentality, he hasn't paid his dues. I've been working for the McCain campaign, the Romney campaign, you know, fighting the democratic agenda in, but to them, to everyone who works in politics locally it seemed like I hadn't paid the local dues. And we did a little poll. So you asked Mike, what were the factors? We did a poll if people were going to think of a candidate who had served in the military and lived most of his life out of the district but had grown up there. I think I might have been the only candidate who went to kindergarten and high school locally. You know, I was literally from the district and it turned out people were 80% likely, more likely to vote for that person. So the notion of voting against somebody who'd served in the military, like God forbid you'd left your home neighborhood to go serve overseas. It was a non-starter. And so we knew if other candidates were gonna come after me with that attack it's like, wonderful, let's make the campaign about my biography, I'm pretty sure I'll win that. Well, it wasn't about my biography. So the real challenge was who can raise the most money, right? So the factors you've got to think about are who can raise the most money? I wish it was a world we lived in where money didn't matter in politics. And there was still a thing called journalism and they would get involved, right? But journalism kind of died. There's CNN and Fox News. And I think the irony is I was able to get on the desk in New York City on Fox News and talk about my race but not any of the three local TV elections because they were loose dogs and cats and car crashes. So it was frustrating that journalism and the newspaper that I used to deliver has become waffer thin and they didn't really cover the election. There was a mayoral election and gubernatorial election and Senate elections and Congress, 10 candidates. So it was all about who could raise the money and get their name out there. And the factor, Mike, is did I think I could raise the money and be competitive? And I thought I could. Got it. So, Janet, you mentioned a bit about the national party or in your case, the state party sort of failing in its... Yeah, and the national party. Yeah. So, let it into my next question was for everybody, were the state parties or national party apparatuses were they involved in any way or constructive way? Janet, if there's any more you want to add about it, you. Okay, yeah, I could talk about this all day. So they pretended like they were. So I had a lot of very concerned phone calls from people who worked for all parts of the party saying, oh, we don't understand why this person's in the race and why that person's in the race. And we all know that we know that you're gonna come out and be the nominee. So we're just gonna stay back because we think that, we can't look like we're favoring one candidate over another. And, but in reality, all they had to do was pick up the phone. There were a couple of candidates who they could have talked out. I mean, they literally could have talked out a couple of candidates. There was one who every single person who spoke to me said, oh, nobody takes her seriously at all. But what they hadn't considered is that donors took her seriously because they didn't understand the district and they didn't understand. And they didn't look at the polling that I knew that she would never gain any support because the donors were from outside of the district which doesn't have a strong history of Democratic donors. But the party really was talking out of both sides of its mouth, both nationally and statewide. In fact, I think some people might have seen that after the election, Mahoney said, oh, we never thought that district was winnable but that's not what they told us. So it was really frustrating to see the lack of honesty from the parties about what they thought was going to happen. And I think just a total lack of awareness of what was going on on the ground. Christine, Tim, you... Well, I'll jump in. I didn't really expect the party to be that involved. I think it could have been, certainly with Donald Trump in the White House if he'd wanted to pick a candidate. He's been more interested in doing that than presidents in the past for the GOP. But just the nature of fundraising in a primary, it's really entrepreneurial. It's on the candidate's shoulders. I think when you get to the general election, that's different. Like the National Party, the NRCC, may target your district. And if they do, and they start to put money in there and rally their national donor bases. But it's really up to you to try to create that energy. And some candidates are able to do that. If SNL would have made a skit about me and my iPad, sure, that would have helped. But you have to really expect you're in this on your own and your donors are gonna be there to support you to help you leverage those things. I'll tell you, the factor that's interesting when it comes to money, though, is if you were in Congress and you raised $2 million and you only spend a million and a half, you get to keep that for the next election, right? So you essentially build up a war chest. So almost all of these incumbents who drop out, they might be sitting on a war chest of $3 million, $5 million, $10 million. They can't take it. And the one thing they can do is get involved in congressional elections. So the incumbent can put their thumb on the scale. And I was promised that wouldn't happen by the incumbent, but seems pretty clearly that there was some super PAC money very heavily that weighed at the end. And that's on me. I wasn't aware how important it was not to go to the party nationally or state, but that incumbent was gonna be able to weigh in with super PAC donations. And so those are just the factors that go into the race. And I think you have to assume it's all on you. Parties can be feckless or they can weigh in and surprise you, but you can't count on it. Christine, what are your thoughts? Yeah, so I would say I really struggled with the party both at the local level, the state level and the federal level. And not because I'm not a good Democrat, but because what I found very quickly is, so when I ran, it was the first time a black woman had ever run for Congress in our state. And I ended up running in a five-way, like top tier dem five-way primary just among the Democrats with another black woman, a hyper-progressive to the left white woman, and then a gentleman, as I mentioned, who was a Democratic socialist. And the narrative that got started was like, well, Christine's not even really from here. So the local party folks just kind of start their little whisper campaigns and they've got their favorites, right? I mean, that's just the way it is. People have human nature. They pick and choose their favorites. I would say the state party very quickly was like, we are not getting in the middle of this. Y'all just dupe it out. It's gonna be a Democrat. We're not worried about it. Because in Washington, as you guys know, we have outs in the three county area around Seattle, it's pretty much Democratic leaning. Just depends on the variation of Democrat. And then at the federal level, I think to Tim's point, what you learn very, very quickly is the DNC is not getting in the middle of it. When you have a bunch of women running, like Emily's list isn't gonna get in the middle of it. And so very quickly it became about who could leverage access to the caucuses, the super PACs, you know, all of these other groups who were willing to get into it because you had a niche that the other candidates didn't. And so in my case, I'm Afro-Latina. And so a lot of our support came in conversation from the Congressional Black Caucus, from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. We, because I was the only Latinx candidate running, CHC's PAC got very engaged in the conversation. And then it became a question of like, are you part of the Progressive Caucus? Or are you part of like the New Dems Caucus? And so you learn very quickly that there's state politics and you gotta play all of those, but then there's also kind of those federal politics. You gotta play like Tim said. And there's no guidebook. Nobody hands you a book and says, hey bestie, like let's figure out how to make this happen for you. You just gotta navigate the waters and figure it out on your own. And I was really, really lucky to have an amazing campaign team that like fought tooth and nail with me to give me a fair shot. So can I follow up on that a little bit because I'm seeing that obviously and everybody on this call who knows me can understand fundraising is very difficult. I'm seeing that that's a huge problem and a challenge. What I am curious about is from a candidate perspective, how do you go about, was differentiating yourself among like-minded candidates? Was that something that was a real challenge that you had to consider? And do you think that the fact that everybody has to choose just one, do you think that plays into the way you have to try to generate some kind of split between yourself and the other candidates who ran? Well, I'll jump in. So there are a couple of factors to think about. One is my district was, you know, the geography of every district matters. So we had a handful of small towns and counties. Franklin County was the biggest, but there was only a sliver of the northern part of Franklin County and Dublin, Ohio that were in the district. And we had a candidate from, you know, an eastern town and another candidate from a northern county. So that played a factor. One of the small towns, and I think the candidate who eventually won that county to the east and the town he was from very heavily came out in his favor that probably wasn't going to be broken. What got interesting was there were some super PAC money dropped on of the 10 candidates, one of the worst performing. But he was in this, he was from the same area that I was from, which was northern Franklin County. His name was Kevin Bacon. And there was an ad that just had sizzling bacon. I think a hundred thousand of super PAC money was dropped on this ad. And it was like the dumbest ad ever, but it's all name ID, right? And so sure enough, it siphoned off votes from me in my area and it's a mystery to this day. Where did that money come from? I raised at one point the most money in the race, but the super PAC money was like double or triple what we all raised in hard dollars. So that really was a factor and somebody took my legs out on that. And there's a part of me that loves the strategy of this. It's like playing football or basketball or whatever, there's a strategy to it. And that was a fascinating strategy. So there's a regional side to it that I think I would add to our discussion. Janelle, what do you think? Do you think that in order to articulate some differentiation between you and the other folks that are running is that how did you go about this? So in terms of issues, I don't think there was much separating the three, there were three candidates who were considered real candidates and then of the Democrats. And then there were a bunch of people no one had ever heard of and had no chance. And there were a couple of the other ones who people sometimes mentioned, but there were three women and we all got all of the media attention. I got the most and I was seen as the front runner by pretty much everyone. I didn't feel the need to differentiate between the candidates because I think we were pretty much all mostly on the same page. Although one of the candidates who came in fourth behind the lady whose only endorsement was from her local male salon, she actually ran a hit piece on me, or a digital hit ad saying basically that I didn't support president Biden's plan which I had been on record of supporting. So I think that if you're a front runner, you don't need to do that. I think when you're kind of losing you're grasping at straws. I think the only issue for donors was who is going to be the nominee because people can't distinguish between a primary, a normal primary where there's clearly one winner and you're the nominee and then you can get on board and a special which is a completely different animal. And nobody believed me when I kept saying it's gonna be me or it's gonna be Jake Elsie. And I said that a million times and donors kept saying, oh, I'm gonna wait till the primary's over. So that was very frustrating. I mean, for me, I don't think there, it was only about like who's going to come in second. So in a way, I was always running against Jake Elsie who ultimately won the race. I was never really running against the other Democratic candidates. And again, there were only really two real ones. The rest were like just, I mean, and actually there were only really two candidates, me and the lady who came in. I think she came in fourth or fifth. Among the three legitimate candidates that you saw also in the siphoning off votes in the Democratic party were there subtle differences that you had to emphasize or were you just plowing ahead? No, I think the one, the person who hurt me the most in fundraising was the one who came in way back. I think she got a total of 3,000 votes and was like very, very low. She's the one again who I said came in behind the lady whose only endorsement came from her local mail salon. And I, and that's really true. Like there was a lady who nobody took seriously who came in of the Democrats. She came in third. And then this other woman who raised a lot of money, not as much as I did, but she kept a lot of donors from giving money to me by arguing that she and I would make the runoff, which was a ridiculous argument. So she was, the problem was fundraising with that candidate who should have not been in the race. Sure. Christine, when we chatted before the panel you had told me about some of the conflict that having the multiple candidates can cause and how you had to navigate that. Can you give us just some of your experience? Yeah. So I'll just talk about the two other female candidates that were in the race. One was an African-American woman who literally the year before had run like the Seattle Chamber of Commerce had tried to dump a million dollars of Amazon money into upending the Seattle city council because she saw it as being too progressive. So she was very much labeled like the anti-democratic candidate and the party behind scenes was like, we don't want her. We don't want her. We don't want her, right? So part of the calculus was like, okay, they want a Democrat like who's shown that they're attuned to democratic values while she announced that she was running as a Democrat. And then my colleague in the legislature who had run we'd both joined the legislature at the same time, she was like hyper to the left. She was a progressive. And if you know anything about the district it's got the largest army installation west of the Mississippi. It's a fairly conservative democratic leaning district. So from all like pretense, I was the perfect candidate. I had worked in the district for 15 years. I had been doing veterans affairs for like five years for the US Senator in our state, all of these things. But very quickly what it became was you have to differentiate yourself. And so even though I had raised the most money first quarter it became I'm not black enough. She's more black than I am, right? It became I'm not progressive enough. This person who literally had the exact same voting record as me in the legislature minus maybe one or two votes all of a sudden I wasn't a good progressive. And it was just, it just very much became infighting among us, among who was a better Democrat who was more black, who was less conservative all of these things. And it's frustrating. It can be very, quite frankly it can be very soul crushing when you feel like I'm running because I wanna be a good leader for my community. I feel like I know the voice of my community and I'm ready to fight for that only to get into a race where people on the same team as you are literally just torpedoing every possible thing they can about you. And so it was a very contentious race. I will say one of the things we talked about as well that I found really interesting is actually the black woman and I, we don't agree necessarily on politics all the time but she was definitely one of the only black women elected in the state. And so she and I would have coffee every once in a while talking about being a black elected official. And so when she decided to run, she called me like give her mad props. She called me and said, look Reeves, I'm gonna run. I don't wanna run against you, but I think I can win. And I said, well, I appreciate that. I also think I can win. And what we agreed was that we were not gonna tear each other down as black women. We were gonna be respectful and polite about the fact, where did we agree on policy? Where did we disagree on policy? And to her credit, and I'll say to my credit the only other person who got in the race who just decided to torpedo us all the time to talk about how she was a better champion of black issues than the two black women running was the white progressive woman. And so I say this lovingly, but I'll tell you when you are a black female candidate, I don't necessarily worry about people that look like Tim Kaine. I'm worrying about folks that quite frankly will argue that they are better advocate for black people than black people can be an advocate for black people. So it was an interesting race for sure. So if I can jump in again, Mike, just one thing I didn't mention before, the comments here are interesting. It reminds me, there was outside money, right? The super PACs weren't coming from thin air. They were coming from, in the Republican primary that I was in, there was a freedom caucus interest in this. And Jim Jordan's from Ohio, and this is a neighboring district. Jim wanted to find a candidate to back. And ultimately he did, but it wasn't me. And I tried to, you know, Jim, I'm gonna align with you on so many issues. He really wanted somebody to essentially bend the knee, commit to the freedom caucus. And the incumbent was sort of an anti-freedom caucus establishment Republican. So I tried to navigate those waters of, look, I'm so impressive and I'm gonna be able to raise money and, you know, I'll be the unity candidate. It was a good gamble, didn't pay off. But, you know, there was super PAC money on both sides of that Republican civil war. And it's something to be aware of and figure out your strategy and then go for it. So obviously at CES, our focus is voting method reform and this idea that by giving, particularly approval voting, this idea that by giving voters more choice that you change some of the incentives for the way voters approach the election. In your experience chatting with voters and engaging with them, do you think the fact that they were forced to make that decision had a huge impact on voters? Had a huge impact on how they approached you and then vice versa, how you approached your outreach strategy. I mean, I'll direct that one first at Christine. Absolutely, and I just posted this in the chat because Tim asked this question. I think we are very much trained up that campaigns are competitions. Doesn't matter which party you're in, it's a competition. It's an us versus them, you versus me, I'm the better candidate. And that's a really easy narrative when you're running against the opposition party, right? And I think Tim will tell you like, John, I will tell you, it's great when it's a Democrat versus a Republican because you assume that there's a vast difference in ideology. So nobody balks at the us versus them mentality in that kind of way. It's when you get into these multiple primaries where people have the same party affiliation instead of realizing that quite frankly, me tearing down another Democrat, regardless of whether we agree on policy or not, doesn't actually help my party. It doesn't help my community. It really just drives us into that us versus them mentality. And that's really what we saw happen in my campaign was just five Democrats along the course of the spectrum all fighting with each other, except me and the other black woman who were like, what's up, like let's not kill each other. Basically fighting with each other. And what people don't recognize is what that does is irreparable damage to those candidates, especially for somebody like me. I was 39, 39 I think at the time. I'm young in politics years, right? But when you go and you spend all this time and this money attacking me when in reality, I'm actually a good Democrat. I'm a woman of color. Somebody you want to be running in Democratic Party politics, I just happen to be running in the wrong seat from some people's perspective. But what it does is irreparable damage to those candidates because then it either demotivates them from running again. It makes them super angry and bitter when they leave or they lose. And then what happens is you spend all of this time churning to build a new bench of people when in reality, you've got these people, to Tim's credit, it's like, you've got these political players who know how to do the work, who know how to get elected saying, F this, I am done. My team didn't support me, et cetera. So long story short, I think what approval voting could do is create more of a collaborative mindset of, especially for those voters in my district who were like, I just want a Democrat. Kind of don't care which Democrat. I just want a Democrat to say, great. All of these people are great. Any one of you along the spectrum would be great. And to be able to kind of put it out there, I think it creates different motivations for how people tackle campaigns. So I don't know if that answers your question, but that's kind of where my brain lands. That's perfect. Jana, same question to you. Do you think that among, I know for you it was, came down to sort of a truncated competition between a few Democrats. Do you think that having to choose just one kind of changes that narrative a bit and changes your approach? You know, I honestly hadn't really thought before you invited me to be on this panel, I hadn't thought about this as an option. I'd heard about weighted voting or ranked choice voting, I should say. And I liked that idea a lot. I agree that primaries should not be negative. And I have never once been negative in a primary. I've had two now and I never would do and I'd rather lose than attack another Democrat. I have been attacked pretty mercilessly. And I still think it's the right approach. I do not believe in attacking other Democrats. I really feel strongly that you just say what's positive about yourself and you let voters choose and you raise a lot of money so that you can communicate with voters. So I feel very strongly about that. And I also don't support candidates, I don't support candidates who do, who are negative to other candidates. If they do that, I'm out. Like that for me is just very negative. So if it would reduce the negativity in primaries or in also municipal elections, which are nonpartisan, but clearly are partisan, then I think it could do a lot because it would help, as Christine said, help build our bench strength, which is a big issue here in Texas. So I mean, I'm just, I'm not 100% sure what happens. Like, do people just vote for everyone? Do people pick two or three? And then what happens in the end, you know? There's many different ways in which approval voting can be implemented, but in its purest form, it's up to the voter to decide how many candidates they can. I mean, I guess it would have reduced the impact that a lot of these like nothing candidates whose name might have sounded like Kevin Bacon or whatever, you know, it reduced their impact. But it still seems like at the end of the day, voters are going to have to make a decision about who represents them best. So I don't know how you get there from that. Tim, what are your thoughts on that? Do you think that the choose one aspect of things? Yeah, well, I think it's possibly a great reform and it would probably affect different races differently. I would guess that I was a lot of people's second choice because there was that regional aspect. It's just, when I think of an election and it's a battle for hearts and minds essentially, but the battle's all about how can you get your name and then you, Mike, you'd hinted earlier, well, what's the identity that goes with your name? And it was so fun, Christine, to hear your comments about, you know, the racial identity mattering. I think in a Republican race, it was like, oh, are you really Trumpy? And I was, I had signed to the never Trump letter. Even so, I was glad he won in the general election and was president instead of Hillary. So I'm a conservative. The reason I didn't like Trump is I didn't think he was conservative enough. I'm pro free trade, pro immigration. Like I'm in an old school. I used to say I was the Republican, I'm from the Republican wing of the Republican party, you know, the Reagan wing. And so people do kind of care about those things, but you raise a quarter million dollars, you know, you're gonna have some expenses. You got time to put one ad out and it's gonna be an ad on local TV that's gonna be competing against the governor's race's ad in the Senate race. So, you know, if you raise half a million dollars, maybe you can put two ads out. That means you can use that money to attack somebody, which is kind of dumb in a multi-person race, or you can promote your identity. And so we had to struggle. Do we promote me as a guy who's created businesses? I've done that, served in the military. That's what we went with. Or, hey, I've written these books. We actually had these big posters of the books I'd written that were gonna be in the back. I've been thinking about policy. I'm a serious guy. And you have limited resources to get that message out. I think we did a pretty good job with the mailers that we sent and with the TV ad that we ran. And I do think I would have been number two. So it would have helped. It would have helped. I'm not sure though, if it wouldn't also add to some more negative campaigning, Mike, because if you see there's clearly a number one of there and you don't want them to be somebody's number two, number three, you knew him or her a little bit. That's a possibility. But the same beanbag, as they say, I still think you might get to people's strongest preference if you went with multi-candidate voting. So I'm actually a fan, or at least I think we should get more information and more conversation because our democracy is in trouble right now. The system we've gotten place, once the newspapers collapsed throughout the 90s and 2000s, we're really in trouble. And it is dominated by money, but it's hard for some bad choices not to be made when it's sort of a money-only system. Sure. Well, and can I just throw in there though, we're talking a lot about the money, but and everybody assumes like you raised the most money you win. Let's be clear. I raised over a million dollars was the most prolific fundraiser in this congressional campaign and I still came into it. So I just want to be clear, like, yes, money out the gate, first to post, but to Tim, I think to your point, there's a lot of variables that go into what defines first out of the gate, first primary or first to post in the primary. And I think money plays a huge part of that, but I do think there are variables, I think to your point, Mike, that do influence voters and how they have to pick between you. And so while internal politics is about how much money you've raised and your capacity to communicate with voters, I think ultimately voters are still feeling like, well, if it's any Democrat and I don't really care, then you end up in a situation where you can still lose. So I want to do one more question before I open it up to Q&A. I hope, I don't know if you all have a real hard stop at four, but last question is this sort of how you, when you envisioned your strategy to win, did it come down to a win number? Were you thinking like, okay, I need to convince X percentage of voters or get this number of voters? And did that kind of drive your strategy? And then number two, I'm just curious, would you be interested in running again knowing what you know now? And Christine, you can open that up if you want. Thanks, Mike. Short answer is yes, it absolutely came down to a win number. I want to be clear though, like what changed that dynamic very quickly for us was I announced in January, like January 6th of 2020, our state went into lockdown, like March something of 2020. So very quickly that win number dynamic became very different of like, how do you get to that win number? But absolutely, the calculation behind the scenes was like how much had the incumbent been able, how many votes had the incumbent been able to garner over the last like, you know, 10 years that he had been there, what was his best number, what was his lowest number of that number, knowing that there were five major Democrats in the race? Like what portion did I have to get to get through the primary? All of that stuff went into consideration, but I'll be honest, like the pandemic threw a lot of that out because you just, Washington is very much like a doorbelling state. Democrats do very well if you can doorbell and it just did not translate well in this election. And we just, I'll own it, we just didn't have the right field strategy to be able to get to that win number at the front end of a pandemic. So, and to answer your second part of your question, would I ever run a gun? Well, surprise, surprise in the last 24 hours, my state representative, we just finished legislative session here in Washington, Sineadai happened last night at midnight. My state representative who took my seat when I resigned announced that he is not seeking reelection. And so I will be announcing that I'm running for the state legislature next week. Excellent, that's fantastic. Well, you heard it here folks, that's amazing. You heard it before I even announced it. I would. Same question to you, Tim, what, what did you have a, were you considered, were you driven by data and win numbers and did that sort of color your approach? And then also, would you ever consider running again? So I don't really think about running again, certainly not planning for it, but I'm not against it either. I think it might, where I am in my career, I'm a lot closer to helping someone get into the White House and I'd like to get the right person in the White House and work for them. And, you know, if a president never asked me to come in and he or she says, gee, Tim, we really need a good candidate to run for Senate. You know, yeah, with that sort of backing, that's probably the only scenario where the governor would recruit me to do it. I don't know if I would be as entrepreneurial as I was this last time. My win strategy did not come down to a number as much it came down to trying to have a regional strategy to be within striking distance and number two, right, in a lot of places. And it was really a little bit more focused on getting the coalitions to line up. I really was concerned about keeping the White House either out of the race and not endorsing or endorsing me, which is a possibility because I had a lot of friends who went into work for President Trump and I was very sympathetic of some of the things he was trying to do. Even though I'm a pro-immigration Republican, I think my strategy really, Mike, was not so much that as focused on media. I really thought if we could get the media to weigh in and endorse, because I didn't think the other candidates were as strong, you know, the academic background, the military background, the business background, and that just wasn't a factor. So there was a lot of the, as Christine and Janet pointed out, there was a lot of internal backbiting in the, I would call it the lesser party, right? Local state senators and congressmen and chiefs of staff. And they wanted, that was an inside game that I had no skin in at all. So I would have been happier if there had been more of a national entry, which I didn't count on, but at least, you know, I failed in trying to get the local TV and the local newspapers to endorse or give the race any serious attention. And you guys can probably endorse, there was some media coverage. It was about two or three paragraphs long and it was fundraising. It was all horse race sort of reporting. So that was disappointing. And I would definitely approach it differently going in next time. And then, Jana, you've tried twice and done quite well, what are your thoughts and how did you approach? So I wanted to say that I'm very much a numbers person, but nobody on my team could figure out what number we would need to win because it was so short of a campaign. And it was, you know, 21 candidates and it was unprecedented. It was held on the same day as the municipal elections, which pulled in a lot of Republican voters and a lot fewer Democratic voters. The district is almost 50-50 Democrat-Republican. You know, Trump only won it by three points. So, you know, we just kept thinking, you know, we just have to be the first among the Democrats and we have to hope that we do better than Jake Elsie. And so we didn't really have, there was no way for us to calculate a win number. What the number that I was very focused on was fundraising and that is where having so, having candidates who should not have been in the race, being in there really created a problem. Right now I'm very active in fundraising for other candidates and in doing, I'm a professional PR person. So I lend my skills there as well for candidates. But I probably would run again. I would not run again for a district that is as red as this one. I would definitely hopefully find an easier district. And I would like to find a race where I don't have to run in a primary because I hate running against other Democrats. The fun part of my first race was after I got out of a primary, I actually loved running against a Republican. That was just all fun. But running against Democrats is really, really hard and I don't like it because we're supposed to be all on the same team. So I would run if it's not an ugly primary and it's not such a red district. I understood. Well, that, so those are my standard questions or my pre-planned questions, but I'd love to open it up to our audience here for some Q and A. Does anybody have a question that they wanna ask? Yeah, Mike, someone asked a question earlier. Someone asked earlier on the chat that did you ever walk up to a door and knock on it and they said, oh, I'd vote for you, but, and I didn't get that so much. People ask, are you supporting President Trump? Because we would only go to Republican houses and knock or they'd say, I hate President Trump, do you? And so you learn how to engage with both types. But the funniest anecdote was one of my staffers was out knocking on doors, dropping off literature and somebody said, oh, yeah, Tim Cain and went to high school with him. And my staffer was like, oh, that's great. And this guy said, I loved him. That's cool that he's running. And they said, well, do you wanna help, you know, pass out the stuff to your neighbors? And the guy goes, not really. You know, so you have to realize the level of disengagement that there can be among voters, even those that love you. Does anybody else have a thought about that question? Yeah, I would just say like, I didn't get that, I'd vote for you, but in that framing, I got, oh my God, I love you, but like, who's gonna take care of your kids? Like, I love you, but like, does your husband know you're doing this? Like that kind of stuff. And so it was always really fascinating to me that there was a lot of like, love your personality, love what you're running for, blah, blah, blah. But then there was very much these kind of subliminal traditional family values, things that people would just hone in on, like, yeah, I just don't know, are you sure your husband's okay with this? Yeah, my husband's the one that basically told me before I knew I wanted to do it that I should do it. So it's always interesting when you run into voters who are like, I love you all for, but this one thing. Sure. I didn't really ever face that. In my first race, I was the first candidate, probably ever, that Democrat candidate, ever to walk my precinct. And I mean, my district, and I was very religious about it and I loved it. I loved the contact with voters. It was absolutely the best thing about running for office. In the second election, because it was so short and we had really bad weather. I don't know if y'all remember the ice storm here. There wasn't, we didn't get to do enough door knocking as I would like, but the feedback at the door is always super positive. And you can kind of tell when they're supporting your opponent that they won't say, but for the most part, I had 100%, oh, we're definitely voting for you because they knew me because I'd knocked on their door a year and a half or two years earlier. So door knocking, I'm a huge proponent of door knocking and I think you get a lot of important information at the door. So Eric Carter, you have your hand up. You wanna ask your question? Yeah, so my question is, if approval voting favors candidates that might be like most people's second choice, but may not win as enough people's first choice, do you see that as better than a candidate that say that really excites a plurality of the voters enough to win, but then the rest of the voters really dislike that candidate? In other words, a more polarized candidate. Because I do think that's probably one of the effects of approval voting. And you mean that in a crowded race like these folks? Exactly. So Eric, I would love to jump in, friends. Thank you to my colleagues. So an example I would use where I think people maybe would have felt that way on the front end, but then realized on the back end that it would be better to have somebody from the party of their preference than the opposition. We had a state treasurer's race here a couple of years ago, and there was definitely like a candidate that came out front that people were like really excited about on the Democratic ticket. And then two more Democrats got into the race, and then there were two Republicans. And essentially what happened is because you have to pick between those candidates, the Democrats basically all edged each other out and they ended up for the first time in this statewide race in Washington, ended up having a Republican had been like the first time in like 60 some years that a Republican had taken that seat. And I can guarantee that there are people who are saying, man, as much as I didn't like that second choice candidate, at least they were from my party, right? At least they were somebody who at least aligned with my values for the most part. And so I would say that I think if people had enough education around what approval voting could do for them in instances like that, I think you would find more people saying, I'm willing to give up the second choice being my favorite to make sure that I'm voting for people who aligned with my values versus splitting the ticket and then ending up with somebody who's now in the seat for four years, doing stuff that people really disagree with. Does that make sense? Does that answer your question? It does. My sense is that it would be really influential as a counter to gerrymandered, so very partisan districts. And I think a little bit of the second choice voting, we've seen some evidence of this in the California system when they call these jungle primaries, where the top two candidates overall, not just the top Republican and the top Democrat, right? But the top two candidates overall are the ones that go to the general, which becomes like a runoff. And that really gives some power. Let's say there's a district where it's only 20% Democrats, it's 80% Republicans. The two Republican candidates are gonna win, but those 20% Democratic voters are going to go to the more centrist Republican candidate. So we've already seen some evidence that second, or this multi-candidate balloting that CES is here to study can help moderate some of the extremism in our society. That's a huge plus. Fantastic. Kaelin, do you wanna ask a question from the chat? Sure, someone asked, what are the candidate's thoughts on polling? Did they have any polling in their races? And did the poll ask about approval head-to-head or just if you had to choose only one? Yeah, Janet, go ahead. We relied on polling to help us figure out who our main opponents were going to be because we asked questions we'd found out. If you know this about the candidate, i.e. what they're saying about themselves, how does it make you feel? So we could see that one of the ladies who was polling at like 5% because no one knew her, but we knew that she was a very appealing candidate and she is an appealing candidate and I do hope she runs again for something else. She came in after, she was the second Democratic candidate in the row and she was very good. So it helped shape how we, and also it helped shape what voters thought was important about me. Like we found out that voters really liked my story about my grandparents being immigrants and living in this district. So we learned it to help shape our messages and also to know like, okay, we didn't need to worry about that candidate who we didn't take her seriously and we could see that voters didn't like her from our polling. So that was important. Unfortunately, the polling could only do so much because donors didn't have the polling and didn't have the ability to decipher the polling even if they had it. Anybody else have feelings about polling they wanna share? I'll just say really quickly, yeah, we did polling. I was a little bit reluctant. I didn't think it was smart money to be spent, but I have a lot of ideas. Like I'm for the flat tax. I supported the engagement that we were doing in Afghanistan. I thought it was good for the Afghani people and in Iraq. So I was stationed overseas myself. Well, which of those two issues should I emphasize? So that was really clarifying. It wasn't that the district even disagreed with me or I was gonna change as a candidate. Which I think some people understand polling does and maybe some bad politicians do waffle in the wind. It was really, you've got a very limited resource to get your message out and to establish your identity. Do you want it to be the economist, Tim Cain or the soldier, Tim Cain? Because they're both part of who I am, but people weren't gonna sit down for a half hour, TV commercial and listen to me. So polling turned out to be useful. What we also found out was we polled if people would be hostile to a veteran who hadn't lived in the district since he was 18 years old because we thought there would be an attack at and it turned out it would have been very supportive if somebody would have attacked me and said, look at that veteran, right? So the polling really helped us not worry about the negative advertising and focus on our game. And I know we're at time, but I just throw in polling was super helpful for us in the sense that by the time we were able to do polling, it was just a little bit before the primary, we learned very quickly that the current Congresswoman who ended up winning had the highest name recognition in the district. And so it really came down to, I think within like a hundredth of a percent like name recognition difference between me and the other top tier Democrat. And I would say that's again, where the approval voting kind of could have come in because what we ended up doing as the second tier candidates was splitting the vote. And so then what happened is everybody in the party was like, well, we don't want the current, I mean, I don't think I'm telling you anything I shouldn't be, but like even the current Congresswoman would tell you like the party was against her because she was a conservative. She just spent all this money with Amazon to like try to overturn democratic seats. So people were like not excited about her. And what happened then is the two candidates they were excited about ended up, like basically killing each other. And so then the other, the hyper progressive who was not the right fit for the district ended up beating me out by just a couple of points. And so of course she was not going to win. Like there was no way she could beat the current Congresswoman. And so, and look, I endorsed the current Congresswoman everybody was really pissed off at me in the democratic party when I lost the primary and then turned around and endorsed the conservative. And I said, look, at the end of the day it is an opportunity to elect a black woman to Congress who best represents this district. She's got higher name ID, she's, you know, et cetera. So polling was super helpful, but oh man, is it expensive? It was probably like one of the largest expenses in our budget was to do polling. So we got to figure that out too. Awesome. Well, this was fantastic. I want to thank all three of you for joining us. And hopefully we can have you back again for another chat. If anybody's interested in following these three folks I can follow up with social media information and whatnot. But thank you everybody for coming and we'll leave it there. Thanks guys. Have a great day, happy weekends. Thank you for organizing this. Yeah, thanks for having us, Mike. Thanks, Caitlin. Yep. Thanks, Pam. Thanks, Jana. Bye guys. Mike's meeting you. All the best. Bye bye.