Experts say the first step to success in politics is ‘get engaged’
Amanda Litman described Hillary Clinton’s loss in the 2016 presidential election as “gut-wrenching.”
Literally.
“When we heard that she had called Trump to concede, I took a cab home to my apartment and I was crying so much, I puked outside of the cab in some random Brooklyn neighborhood,” Litman, the Clinton campaign’s email director, told students at Northeastern University on Thursday.
But Litman said within weeks of the election, acquaintances and friends reached out, asking how they could get involved in politics. On the day of Donald Trump’s first inauguration, the website of the organization she co-founded went live.
“We had 1,000 people sign up in the first week,” Litman said.
Litman is now president of Run for Something, an organization that helps new progressive leaders run for office. She has also written books offering a blueprint for the next generation of leaders.
Litman visited Northeastern as part of The Civic Experience series, which connects students with public leaders to explore how young people can shape policy, drive innovation in governance, and create meaningful impact early in their careers.
The event, titled “From the Classroom to the Campaign Trail,” included a question-and-answer session with Dan Urman, director of online and hybrid programs at Northeastern University School of Law and Littman, as well as a panel discussion with four members of the Massachusetts Legislature: Reps. Aaron Michlewitz, Tram Nguyen and Manny Cruz – who all graduated from Northeastern – and Sam Montaño. Robert DeLeo, University Fellow for Public Life and a former speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, introduced the participants.
Litman described how she rallied and door-knocked for Democratic candidates in Virginia as a teen, attended Northwestern University so she could volunteer and work on Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, jetted to Florida for the Charlie Crist gubernatorial campaign, then went presidential again with the Clinton campaign — where her team of 30 ended up raising $330 million.
“It was the thing that I had been working towards my entire adult life,” Litman said. “We’re going to elect the first woman president in history and, if we win, imagine what it will mean to little girls across the country.”
It was not to be.
But Litman quickly realized there was demand for a pipeline of progressive candidates, particularly at the local level.
“The bench felt weak, so I wanted to build a better bench,” Litman told Urman. “That meant building and finding better city council members, school board members, state legislators, such that when they’re ready to run for Congress, they’ve got some experience, they’ve got the time. They’ve got local expertise. They know how to do this.”
Today, Run for Something has helped more than 230,000 people run for office, and has helped elect more than 1,500 people across 49 states (Idaho will come soon, Litman vowed) and Washington, D.C. The group’s success stories are all millennials and Gen Z, primarily women and people of color, and about a quarter identify as LGBTQ+.
“It has been such a gift, and such a joy, and so hard to have done this work over the last 10 years,” Litman said. “I’ve learned so much about what it means to lead, both personally but also more importantly, from the politicians and public speakers that we’ve worked with.”
Nguyen — who said she got the political bug while she was a law student at Northeastern — is one of those individuals.
“I encourage you all to just jump on this ladder of engagement and get your friends to do the same,” Nguyen said, adding that engaging in politics does not necessarily mean running for office.
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“There are so many different ways to get engaged — and there are also so many advocacy groups that you can get involved with — so that you can push for the issues that you care about,” she said.
Michlewitz added that voter engagement is equally as important for politicians.
“It’s incumbent upon elected officials — folks like ourselves — to engage with our constituency,” said Michlewitz, chair of the House Ways and Means Committee. “It’s incumbent upon us to be accessible. … But it is also incumbent upon the voter and the electorate to come and engage with us.”
But how to engage when many young people feel like the system is broken, as Litman asked the panel?
“We have to have a relentless belief in the possible,” Cruz said. “I have a vision for what I believe this country could be, and I’m holding on to that, and I’m asking people to do the same exact thing, because we’re all standing on the shoulders of giants.”
Ultimately, Litman also had a hopeful message for progressives. Run for Something has had more than 70,000 inquiries since November 2024.
“That’s more people in the last 12 months than we had in the entirety of Trump’s first term,” Litman said.
