At least one candidate training school is bracing for a flood of applicants post-2024.
Leadership at the The Campaign School at Yale University (TCSYale) believe that regardless of the outcome at the presidential race, newbie candidates will be inspired to run for office. For instance, if VP Harris wins, more women could be inspired by the first female president in U.S. history, and a second term for President Trump could inspire more liberal candidates to run to counter his administration’s policies — something that happened in 2016.
In fact, Aubrey Montgomery the new president of TCSYale’s board of directors, saw it for herself following Hillary Clinton’s loss eight years ago.
“In the first Trump administration, we were seeing unprecedented applications in 2017 and 2018 to come to our school — women who were first-time candidates running up and down the ballot all around the country,” Montgomery told C&E. “I think, in a lot of ways, we’re preparing the campaign school for a surge of applicants — regardless of the outcome, whether we get the first woman president, I think it’ll inspire more women to run. And certainly if we lose to Donald Trump again, I think it’ll inspire more women to enter politics like it did in 2016.”
Consultants have seen this phenomenon as well and tried to position themselves to scoop up the business of first-time candidates. But the candidates entering the field in 2025 will face much different challenges, which Montgomery said the school is preparing for. To wit, personal and cybersecurity are a much greater focus of the week-long program than ever before, as is strategy around early vote and artificial intelligence.
“I think we’re starting to see its [AI’s] emergence certainly in advertising, but even to generate press releases or to help you write email copy. So we added this idea of artificial intelligence and its applications in campaigning as a module of our training,” she said.
But Montgomery pointed to the second assassination attempt on Trump as a reason why security training has taken precedence at the school.
“We hear this a lot from women running about personal safety, their family’s safety, their digital safety. And unfortunately there’s a little little more concern about how to secure yourself and your campaign,” she said. “I think it’s an unfortunate side effect of just how polarized our politics is right now.”
TCSYale also gets help from companies like Microsoft and Meta on training related to how to protect the digital footprint of your campaign. Montgomery notes that experts are warning how unprepared the country remains to combat election interference from state actors like Russia.
“We tackle this specific case of protecting the assets of your campaign — digital security,” she said.
