The South does not lack people capable of leading. Too often, promising candidates lack the training, resources, professional support and political infrastructure necessary to become competitive leaders. Southern Progressives United PAC wants to help change that.

Winning elections begins long before a candidate’s name appears on a ballot.

It begins with people.

Across the South, there are community leaders, organizers, educators, attorneys, small-business owners, union members, veterans, clergy, advocates and local officials who understand their communities and have demonstrated an ability to lead.

Some are already thinking about running for office.

Many are not.

Southern Progressives United PAC believes one of the most important investments we can make in the future of Southern progressive politics is identifying those leaders, developing their abilities and helping prepare them to compete.

If we want stronger candidates on Election Day, we have to start building them before Election Day.

The Candidate Pipeline Matters

Political movements often spend too much time asking one question:

Who can win the next election?

We should be asking another question much earlier:

Who could become the kind of leader capable of winning elections for the next decade?

Those are not always the same people.

The next important Southern progressive leader may currently be serving on a city council or school board. She may be organizing workers. He may be running a community organization. They may be advocating for better schools, affordable housing, voting access or economic opportunity.

Leadership often begins locally.

But moving from community leadership to political candidacy requires an entirely different set of skills.

A person can understand the problems facing a community and still know very little about fundraising, campaign budgeting, voter targeting, digital communications, field operations, message development or managing a professional campaign.

That should not disqualify good people from leadership.

It should tell us where investment is needed.

Too Many Candidates Have to Learn While Running

Running for office is difficult anywhere.

In much of the South, progressive candidates may face additional challenges. They may run in districts without strong political infrastructure. They may have limited access to experienced campaign professionals. Their donor networks may be small. Local organizations may be underfunded, and national political organizations may consider their races too difficult to justify significant investment.

The result is predictable.

Candidates are sometimes forced to build the airplane while flying it.

They are learning how to raise money while trying to raise it. They are developing a message while communicating it. They are recruiting volunteers while figuring out how to manage them.

Meanwhile, better-funded opponents may begin with experienced consultants, established donor relationships, sophisticated voter data and political organizations that have spent years preparing for the race.

Good candidates can overcome disadvantages.

But we should not make unnecessary disadvantages part of the Southern progressive model.

Candidate Development Is Political Infrastructure

Southern Progressives United PAC views candidate development as more than finding someone willing to put their name on a ballot.

We want to help develop leaders who understand why they are running, whom they hope to represent and how they intend to govern.

That means learning how to listen to voters.

It means understanding a district beyond its partisan numbers.

It means developing a message that communicates values clearly.

It means learning how to raise the resources necessary to compete.

It means understanding modern communications, digital organizing and voter outreach.

It means building a campaign organization capable of turning supporters into volunteers and volunteers into leaders.

And it means preparing candidates for something campaigns sometimes overlook:

governing after they win.

Winning an election is not the final purpose of political leadership.

Serving people is.

We Need a Deeper Southern Bench

Progressive politics in the South cannot depend on waiting for an extraordinary statewide candidate to appear every few election cycles.

We need a bench.

We need credible candidates for city councils, county commissions, school boards, state legislatures and other offices where decisions affecting people’s daily lives are made.

Those local and state leaders also become tomorrow’s candidates for Congress, governor and other statewide offices.

Experience compounds.

A city council member learns how government works. A state legislator develops policy expertise. A local candidate builds relationships with voters and donors. A campaign volunteer becomes a field organizer. A campaign manager develops the experience to help the next candidate.

One campaign can help build the next.

That is how political infrastructure grows.

Losing Cannot Mean Starting Over

Southern Progressives United also believes candidate development requires changing how we think about candidates who do not win their first race.

Elections have consequences, and losing matters. We are not interested in turning defeat into a symbolic victory.

But neither should every losing campaign disappear the morning after Election Day.

A candidate may have built relationships with thousands of voters, recruited hundreds of volunteers, developed a donor network, learned how to communicate publicly and gained firsthand knowledge about running a campaign.

That experience has value.

Perhaps that candidate runs again.

Perhaps the campaign produces another candidate.

Perhaps volunteers become organizers.

Perhaps campaign relationships strengthen a local progressive organization.

The question should be:

What did we build that can compete again?

If every election begins from zero, we should not be surprised when political progress remains difficult.

Finding the Leaders National Politics Misses

This is especially important in the South because some of our most promising leaders will not initially attract national attention.

They may come from rural communities.

They may represent small cities.

They may be young elected officials serving their first terms.

They may come from labor, churches, civic organizations or community advocacy rather than traditional political institutions.

They may not have wealthy networks or nationally recognizable names.

But they may have something more important: credibility with the people around them.

Southern Progressives United wants to help find those people.

We want to help connect leadership with training, strategy, technology, communications and professional campaign resources.

Because we believe Southern progressive power must ultimately be built by Southern leaders.

That principle is also central to what we call King Progressivism.

The movement Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. helped lead was never the work of one famous leader alone. It depended upon thousands of people developing the confidence, skills and organization necessary to lead in their own communities.

That lesson remains relevant.

We do not need to wait for the next great political personality to arrive.

We need to develop thousands of leaders capable of doing consequential work where they already live.

Southern Progressives United PAC intends to invest in that work.

Because before we can build winning campaigns, we have to build candidates.

And before we can build lasting progressive power across the South, we have to build leaders.