What You’ll Learn in This Blog Post

• Reading — history, biographies, newspapers, Wikipedia — is the single easiest starting point for anyone who wants to understand how politics actually works.
• The street-level education you get from volunteering on a campaign or for a party cannot be learned from a book — and the people you meet doing it are often the same ones who will help you when you run.
• Excellence in volunteer work gets you noticed by the right people — and being noticed by the right people is often what leads to being asked to run for office.
• The ability to speak in public without notes — to inspire and move an audience — is the single fastest path to political advancement and the one skill most candidates underinvest in.
• Staying consistently informed about current events gives you a deep inventory of real problems to run on — and voters can immediately tell the difference between candidates who read the news and those who don’t.

Introduction: Learning Politics — and Using It

We’re going to talk about how to learn about politics — and I’m going to take this one step further. I’m going to show you how what you learn can be used to run for office someday. Here’s what we’re going to cover: the information you need to know, the information you must know, the principle of go, do, and join, how you excel in everything that you do, and how you take all of these things and use them to set yourself up to succeed in a political campaign.

Step One: Read — The Easiest Way to Learn Anything

Where is the easiest place to learn about politics? Read. Go online. Read Wikipedia, read history books, read newspapers, read biographies of iconic figures. It is the easiest way in the world to learn any subject. All of that information is at your fingertips. It is not hard to find.

Think back to grade school or middle school. If you wanted to understand a subject, what did you do? You read. That is your starting point here. Everything else builds on a foundation of knowing what has happened before, who the players are, how the system works, and what issues have shaped political history.

Step Two: Go, Do, Join — The Education You Can’t Get From a Book

The second place to learn about politics is where you get the street smarts — and that is the principle of go, do, and join. If you are truly interested in learning about politics, go volunteer for a candidate. Do what you can to help them in their campaign. Go volunteer for a political party: carry petitions, collect signatures, go door to door at election time promoting their candidates.

As you do these things, you are going to meet people who could someday help you in a political campaign. But more than that, you’re getting an education by doing that simply cannot come from a book. It’s experiential. It’s the encounter you have with a voter at the door as you’re trying to hand out literature. It’s putting up yard signs with a friend — or someone who becomes a great friend. It’s handing out literature at a shopping mall, doing whatever you’ve been asked to do in a campaign and doing it well.

One core principle of the go, do, join approach: whatever you volunteer to do, do it to the best of your ability. If people see that you are a person of character — that when you’re asked to do something or volunteer to do something, you actually do it and do it well — they are going to notice. That is how you get noticed as a volunteer. Excel in all you do, and pretty soon, someone may ask you to run for office.

Now, here’s something important: if you’ve read a lot and gotten involved and you find yourself completely repelled by everything you’ve read and every experience you’ve had, chances are you’re never going to be a good candidate for office. That’s valuable information too. But what happens with many people who follow this path is they get bitten by the political bug. And once you’ve been bitten by a political bug, it’s something you can never quite get rid of. That bug stays in your system as long as you live.

Step Three: Make Friends — And Keep Them

The art of making friends and keeping friends is one of the most important skills in politics. The quickest way to make a friend is to be a friend. As you volunteer — for candidates, for a party, in your neighborhood — if you notice someone who’s struggling or having a hard day, help them. Ask what you can do. It is the fastest way to build a genuine relationship.

Once you’ve made a friend, you have to keep a friend — and that means staying in touch. The most astute political candidates I’ve seen over my career maintain a running list of people they need to stay in contact with, and they work through it systematically. Every six months, they find a reason to reach out: a quick phone call just to check in, an article from the paper they thought the person would find interesting, a brief email that says, hey, I’ve been thinking about you, wondering how you and the family are doing.

Small gestures like these send a powerful message: you care about the relationship, not just what the person can do for you someday. And if you can maintain that kind of connection with influential friends over the years, you’ll find that when the day comes to run for office, you have hundreds of people ready to help you — because you’ve been showing up for them all along.

Step Four: Learn to Speak in Public

Through forty years in this business, I have seen more candidates rise to the top quickly because of their ability to speak than for almost any other reason. The ability to walk to a stage on a moment’s notice, with no notes and no script, and talk to a hundred people in a way that inspires them, moves them, speaks to their emotions, and gives them hope — that is magnetic. It is the secret sauce of anyone who wants to rise quickly in politics.

You are not born with this talent. You have to develop it. The investment of time and practice pays off beyond what most candidates expect. If you are serious about a future in public life, learning to speak in public is not optional — it is one of the highest-return skills you can build.

Step Five: Stay Current — Build Your Inventory of Problems to Solve

As you prepare for a race someday, pay attention to what’s going on in the world. Read your statewide newspaper. Read your local paper. Watch the news. Because if you’re going to run, you’re going to have to tell people why you want the job — and you need a real answer to that question.

If you make it a habit over the years to read and stay current, you’ll build up a long mental list of problems that need solving: things you’ve seen that frustrated you, inequities you’ve noticed, local issues that never got fixed, statewide policies that don’t make sense. You can’t talk about a hundred problems in a campaign. But you can talk about the ones that genuinely bother you — the ones you’re actually passionate about fixing. When voters ask you why you’re running, if you can speak specifically and compellingly about the problems you want to address and how you plan to fix them, you are already one step ahead of most of your competition.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What’s the best thing to read if I want to learn about politics quickly?
A: Start with your local and state newspaper — understanding the specific issues in your community matters more than broad national coverage if you’re thinking about running locally. From there, biographies of politicians whose careers you admire are enormously useful. They reveal how real campaigns were built, how coalitions were formed, and what separates winners from candidates who came close. History books on landmark elections or legislative battles give you the larger context that makes current events make sense.

Q: How do I find a campaign or political party to volunteer for?
A: Your local party committee — Republican, Democrat, or otherwise — is the easiest entry point. Most have websites with contact information, and they are almost always looking for volunteers, especially around election season. You can also look for local candidates running for city council, school board, or state legislature and reach out directly to offer help. Show up, introduce yourself, and ask what they need.

Q: How do I know if I’ve been “bitten by the political bug” in the way you describe?
A: It usually shows up as a combination of things: you find yourself reading political news when you don’t have to, you feel energized rather than drained after time spent on a campaign, you start thinking about problems in your community and forming opinions about how to fix them, and you notice you care whether your candidate wins in a way that goes beyond simple preference. If those experiences resonate with you, there’s a good chance the bug has taken hold.

Q: I’m introverted. Can I still learn to speak in public effectively?
A: Yes — and some of the most compelling public speakers are introverts who learned the craft deliberately. Organizations like Toastmasters are a low-pressure environment to practice, and many skilled political speakers describe themselves as introverts who simply prepared and practiced until it became natural. Start small, speak often, and the skill builds.

Q: How far in advance of running for office should I start doing these things?
A: The honest answer is: the sooner the better, and there is no such thing as too early. Candidates who have spent years reading, volunteering, building relationships, and developing their public speaking before they ever file for office have an enormous structural advantage. That said, people have won competitive races starting from scratch in twelve to eighteen months — it just requires much more intensive effort in a compressed time frame. Start now, wherever you are.

Want to Go Deeper?

Jay Townsend has spent more than 40 years advising candidates at every level of American politics. For more campaign strategy resources, visit JayTownsend.com or subscribe to Jay’s YouTube channel for new videos every week.