How to Flip the New 14th LD: A Playbook by DTC

Welcome to March of 2024. The Presidential Primary is upon us, the legislative session is wrapping up, and we are two months out from filing deadline.

At DTC, we believe your consultants should help you work smarter, ask better questions, and consistently return to the reasons you’re running and the people and issues that motivate you. And that’s all before you pay them.

Introducing our first-ever campaign playbook. This playbook is meant to be paired with the first-time candidate checklist we released last year—because we believe that having the right ideas out in the world is always a net benefit.

In August of 2023, Latino voters in the 15th Legislative District won their suit from January 2022 over the district’s boundaries, ruling that the boundaries violated the federal Voting Rights Act. To remedy the violation, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington is considering five proposed maps that would move the Latino-majority district south from the 15th to the 14th Legislative District.

The new 14th LD (the LD I grew up in) will almost certainly be a majority-minority district. However, demographics aren’t destiny, so we’ve built a plan for a Democratic victory in the new 14th Legislative District.

The playbook outlines a campaign plan across:

• Overview – Political context, campaign infrastructure, and a generic timeline of priorities, deliverables, and activities
• Field – A path to victory, win number, and approach to endorsements
• Communications – Top of mind issues, economic justice and freedoms framing, and elements of a successful communications infrastructure
• Fundraising – Dollar amounts from comparable races, minimum viability, and a sample budget

The playbook includes not just how to talk about your candidacy, but how to reach voters, volunteers, donors, and other supporters. We know that economic justice is a framework that moves people—especially Latinos, especially when paired with freedoms framing.

Often, the hardest part of a campaign—especially at this scale—is fundraising. How much should you fundraise? Where should it come from? Where does it go? Of all the elements of a campaign, the specific answers to these questions are the most dependent on the candidate and the networks they bring along. That said, we offer a few starting points.

Don’t hire a consultant because they tell you things you don’t know; hire them because they’ll actually build a campaign that reflects your values and keeps you grounded in the reasons you decided to run in the first place.