Dan Osborn was a union pipefitter who led a strike before running for Senate. That is the model. Candidates raise from individual donors only and skip corporate PACs entirely. A competitive city council race can run on ten to thirty thousand dollars, and time tends to be the bigger constraint than money.
Most people don't wake up planning to run for office. They hit a wall. The school board cuts a program their kid depends on. The city approves a development deal that displaces their neighbors. The hospital closes its ER and the nearest alternative is forty minutes away. At some point frustration stops being something to live with and becomes something to act on.
If you're at that point, or close to it, this article explains how the Labor Party candidate process works and what it takes to run under the party's banner.
The party wants candidates whose biography matches the argument they're making, people with credibility that comes from lived experience rather than a résumé of political positions. The Dan Osborn model, a union pipefitter who led a strike before running for Senate, is the clearest version of what that looks like in practice. A candidate who talks about drug prices because they've rationed their own medication, or who talks about wages because they've organized workers to fight for them, is a different kind of candidate than one who's studied the issue from a policy office. The Labor Party is building the latter.
Candidates also need to be prepared to run clean. The party takes zero corporate donations, and so do its candidates. Running under the Labor Party banner means raising money from individuals, not from industry PACs, trade associations, or corporate bundlers. For some races that's a real constraint. For the races the party is targeting, where the opponent is a well-funded incumbent in a district that hasn't seen genuine competition in years, the funding gap is part of the argument.
The Labor Party has a formal candidate selection process that runs through the party's organizational structure. The broad outline works like this.
First, candidates need to be Labor Party members and should be connected to their state chapter if one exists. The chapter is where the initial conversations about candidacy happen, where local knowledge about race viability lives, and where volunteer infrastructure for a campaign gets built.
Second, candidates go through a vetting process run by the national party's candidacy committee. This includes a background check, a review of the candidate's background and public record, and an interview focused on platform alignment, campaign readiness, and fit for the specific race. The committee is looking for candidates who understand what they're signing up for, can articulate the Labor Party's economic argument clearly, and have the personal credibility to make it land.
Third, the party uses a ranked-choice primary process for contested nominations. If more than one candidate seeks the party's support for the same office, members vote using ranked-choice voting to select the nominee. This keeps the selection democratic rather than decided by committee.
The charter also requires candidates to have endorsement or membership from a union or worker cooperative that participates in the party's Labor Inclusion Organization. The reasoning is straightforward: the party's identity is rooted in the labor movement, and candidates should have genuine ties to that world, not just policy positions that sound labor-friendly.
The party's current focus is state and local races where the barriers to entry are lower and the opportunity to prove the model is real. City councils, county commissions, state legislative seats, and school boards are the target level right now.
Good races have a few characteristics in common. Look for districts where major party opposition is weak or absent, where the incumbent coasts without real challenge, or where voters have been written off by both parties. Rural and small-city districts hit hard by deindustrialization and healthcare consolidation fit this. So do suburban and exurban districts where Republicans win easily but the underlying economic frustrations are real and addressable.
The ballot access situation in your state matters too. Article 21 covers the basics of how ballot access works. Before committing to a race, check what your state requires for a Labor Party candidate or independent candidate to appear on the ballot, and make sure the chapter has the capacity to support a signature-gathering effort if one is needed.
Running for office takes more than most people expect going in, and it's more accessible than most people assume from the outside. The things people imagine will stop them, usually money and name recognition, are rarely what actually determines the outcome.
Money matters, but less at the local level than at higher offices. A competitive city council race in a mid-sized city can be run on $10,000 to $30,000. A state legislative race is more, but still a fraction of what federal races cost. The party's fundraising infrastructure and the goodwill of the Labor Party brand among people who are tired of both parties can close a significant portion of that gap.
Time is the harder constraint. Running a real campaign while holding a job and managing a family is genuinely difficult. The campaigns the party supports are built around volunteer infrastructure that reduces the load on the candidate, but the candidate still has to show up, knock doors, attend forums, and be willing to be a public figure for the duration of the race.
The thing that matters most, more than money and more than time, is having a clear reason to run that connects to something real in the district. Not a platform position, but a story. Why you, why this race, why now. Voters who haven't had a real choice in years can tell the difference between a candidate with a genuine stake in the outcome and one who's going through the motions. A candidate with a real story wins conversations the polished ones can't have.
If you're seriously considering running, the first step is connecting with your state chapter if one exists, or with the national organizing team if it doesn't. Get the conversation started early. Ballot access timelines, filing deadlines, and campaign planning all require more lead time than most first-time candidates expect.
The national party also runs candidate training, a boot camp designed specifically for people who are thinking about running and want to understand what they're getting into before committing. Details on upcoming sessions are available through the Discord and the national website.
Reach out at hello@votelabor.org or start at votelabor.org.
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