Political Work Became a Career. Campaigns Haven’t Gotten the Memo

Political work has become a full-blown career. Campaigns haven’t caught up. 

That’s the blunt takeaway from a new survey of political professionals conducted by the GOP-aligned Center for Campaign Innovation in partnership with headhunting agency Republican Jobs and shared first with Campaigns & Elections. 

Seventy-seven percent of the study’s 427 respondents have worked in politics for four or more years and even more – 81 percent – say they plan to stay in the sector long term. Yet there remain stark differences in the experiences of those on the institutional side of the industry – the party committees, PACs and consulting firms – and the campaign side, which largely still runs on employment structures built for a single cycle rather than a lifelong career.

The disparities between campaigns and institutions are most apparent in pay and benefits, the survey found.

While 84 percent of professionals working at established organizations or consulting firms receive employer-sponsored health insurance and 80 percent receive some sort of paid time off, nearly two-thirds of campaign staffers surveyed say they receive no benefits whatsoever. Just 21 percent of those staffers reported receiving health insurance, 23 percent say they get paid time off and a mere 7 percent receive retirement benefits from their campaigns.

When it comes to pay, the median earning for a campaign staffer sits at $60,000-$79,999 per year, according to the study. Fifty-seven percent of those workers earn less than $80,000. On the institutional side, meanwhile, 41 percent of professionals reported earning $100,000 or more per year, while the median salary range stands at $80,000-$99,999. 

These campaigns staffers perform the same work and serve the same candidates as their peers on the institutional side of politics, said Eric Wilson, the executive director of CCI. But the persistent disparities between the two sectors have real consequences on the ability of campaigns to attract and retain talent.  

“I think that there’s a strategic imperative to look at how do we make working for campaigns, in that hard-dollar context, more enticing, more stable and more rewarding for these people?” Wilson said. “How do we figure out how to give them more stable benefits across three, four campaign cycles? How do we think about them getting them retirement or bridging those gaps between November and February?”

In turn, campaign staffers are often forced to make a decision: stay on the campaign side and deal with intermittent unemployment and financial instability or leave the field and move on to something else.

“The unit of employment in this industry is the campaign. The unit of a career is the person crossing many campaigns,” the survey report reads. “The industry has organized itself so that starting a family and staying in campaigns are close to incompatible.”

More Than Money

For many political professionals, pay matters. But only up to a point.

The survey found that among workers making less than $40,000 per year, only 17 percent say they’re satisfied with their compensation. That number rises steadily to 74 percent among professionals earning in the $125,000-$149,000 range, then stops. 

What replaces it, according to the study, is a desire for more career advancement opportunities. In written responses, political professionals surveyed described wanting more consistency in employment, greater responsibility within their firms and more investment in their long-term ambitions. 

In other words, the report reads: “Solve compensation and the conversation turns to whether there is anywhere to go.”

That desire for career opportunities was most acute among mid-career professionals. Twenty-two percent of those with four to seven years in the field say that advancement is what would keep them in the industry, according to the survey. Among those with more than 15 years of experience, that number drops to just 10 percent.

It’s just one of the pressures mid-career political professionals face. There’s also wage stagnation and a gender pay gap that peaks around the same time. For professionals with four to seven years of experience, that pay gap is statistically significant, according to the survey. But among those with eight to 15 years of experience, it becomes notable; 51 percent of men with that level of experience report earning $100,000 or more compared to just 26 percent of women.

Mid-career is also where attrition among women becomes most apparent. Women made up 31 percent of respondents to the survey, but only 25 percent of political professionals with more than 15 years in the field and 23 percent of those who manage teams of eight or more people. “The women who get through mid-career do well,” the report notes, but “fewer get through.”

The AI Revolution

For all the pressures political professionals are up against, artificial intelligence isn’t one of them.

Forty-two percent of respondents say that the emerging technology has significantly changed or transformed their work, according to the survey. But only 12 percent say they feel threatened by AI and just 26 percent say they’re concerned about the technology replacing them.

But the effects of AI aren’t uniform across the board, Wilson said.

“The people who are worried about it are pollsters and researchers – so oppo and polling,” he said. “They know that kind of work is getting automated.”

Field organizing and GOTV, meanwhile, has been the area least touched by the rise of AI, the study found. Put bluntly, Wilson said, “we need competent, well-compensated professionals to do the work. We’re not going to have robots going door to door.”

Yet while field organizers are among the political workers least affected by automation, they’re also among the worst paid. Seventy-four percent of respondents working in field organizing and GOTV report earning under $80,000 a year, the survey found. Only 11 percent are making $100,000 or more, giving it the weakest pay distribution of any political role.

According to the study, it ultimately comes down to a pricing failure. As AI lowers the cost of other work by increasing efficiency, the value of work that can’t be done by AI should rise. 

“If you think of ‘field’ as building relationships with voters so they will talk to you and learn about your campaign and mobilize and get their friends to mobilize for you, then that’s not going away,” Wilson said. “We still need staff who can speak about the campaigns and go door to door. There needs to be a conversation about reallocating some of those resources and redefining what success looks like for those roles.”

The survey from CCI and Republican Jobs was conducted in July and is based on completed responses from 427 political professionals. Partial responses were omitted from the analysis. Because it is based on a self-selected online sample rather than a probability sample, there is no margin of error reported.