It was the Wednesday after Election Day, sometime between cleaning up the campaign office and having a final round of beers with her team, that Sarah Willenbrink-Sahin felt the panic set in.
“Oh, crap,” she thought. “What do I do next?”
Soon, Willenbrink-Sahin, a regional field director for the Ohio Democratic Party who lives near Dayton, was applying for any work she could find: at Costco, as an administrative assistant. Her co-worker, Jake McClelland, made plans to drive for Lyft and return to working at a local bakery. In Minnesota, Jack Dockendorf, who oversaw a competitive state legislative race, prepared to go back to school. Jordan Wolfe, a local organizer, planned to file for unemployment and live off of savings until he found his next job.
The boom-and-bust nature of campaign life is part of what makes a career in politics so unsustainable for so many. At the end of each midterm election, up to 20,000 people suddenly lose their jobs. The luckiest staff members are hired as congressional aides or legislative assistants. Consultants return to their corporate and advocacy clients. And the rest scramble to figure out what’s next.
“We struggle during the campaign season, pretty willingly,” Dockendorf said. “But when the dust settles, it’s: What are we all going to do? It’s something we ought to think about a lot more.”
It turns out that it helps to have made a living wage. Lucas Benjamin, who worked on a Massachusetts voter initiative, faces what are typical financial burdens for an out-of-work campaigner: a lease he decided to break and looming student debt. But he had the rare fortune, for a campaign worker, to have earned the equivalent of a $51,000 annual salary and has enough savings to weigh his options.
No good data exist to measure the effect of these boom-and-bust cycles on the efficacy of campaigns themselves. Nearly everyone acknowledges that the job is not sustainable for the workers; it’s why campaign work is so often described as “a young person’s game.” But, over the course of the election, many campaign workers argued that the inability to retain people of talent and experience leads to weaker campaigns. People of color, who tend to lack the safety net of their white peers, say the lack of stability is also part of why campaigns are so homogenous.
Stefan Alexander Smith, and the lengths to which he’s gone in order to stay in politics, is a prime example.
Smith landed a dream job when Democrat Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign hired him as deputy digital director for the state of Michigan. But despite the doors it opened for him, he almost didn’t last in politics. His unemployment stint after the 2016 elections wiped out most of his savings, so that when he was offered another job, as digital director for the mayor of Boston’s re-election campaign, he couldn’t afford to move. Smith raised money from friends and well-wishers on Facebook. He reluctantly parted with his rent-controlled apartment and sold his beloved station wagon, Bertha.
“I’m very much a person you don’t see on campaigns,” he said. He’s lived in public housing, he grew up on food stamps and his family couldn’t help him afford college. “I feel pretty confident in saying I’m probably the poorest person on every campaign I’ve ever worked on.”
Once he was in Boston, he anticipated his next bout of unemployment by renting an attic from one of the mayor’s political supporters for $500, which he furnished with a crockpot and a fridge from Rent-a-Center. It was only this year that he finally grabbed the brass ring. The Democratic Party of New Mexico, where he’s worked since March, has asked him to stay on through the beginning of 2019.
“The upfront costs of entering politics is so steep if you don’t have a support system,” Smith said. “I have had to work and worry at every single stage.”
Many campaign professionals would argue there is no fix to this problem — there simply isn’t a need, in the off-years, for so many political operatives. Nor is it easy to discuss how to make campaign work more sustainable while the campaign is raging. This year, many campaign workers seeking better pay found themselves contending with the notion that their demands would divert money and attention away from Election Day.
There are also those who are loath to see the instability as a problem at all. Campaigns, this line of thinking goes, can always recruit a new crop of idealistic young people willing to work grueling hours for little pay.
After all, it’s not as if politics is the only option. Willenbrink-Sahin, who applied to work at Costco, has a master’s and a background in teaching. Smith figures his experience working for a major presidential campaign would make it pretty easy to find work at an ad agency.
This year, the unemployment cycle is a jarring coda to a year in which inequality in the political world was a constant topic on the campaign trail. First-time candidates like Kerri Harris in Delaware, MJ Hegar in Texas and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York talked openly about the financial challenge of seeking office from a working-class background. (Ocasio-Cortez won her congressional race but said she can’t afford to rent a D.C. apartment until her job starts in January.) Interns in Congress, on the campaign trail and at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee demanded, successfully, to be paid. And the workers on more than two dozen progressive political campaigns joined labor unions — sometimes meeting resistance from fellow Democrats.
None of these shifts, however, changed the basic reality of campaign work. And so, win or lose, thousands of campaign workers woke up Wednesday morning to find themselves out of a job.