Q&A: Lessons From a Decade of Training Candidates

When Kelly Dietrich launched the National Democratic Training Committee a decade ago, it was a relatively slim operation. 

Dietrich would simply record tips for aspiring candidates and campaign staffers and post the videos online. His stated goal was to share the strategies and best practices he had learned from his 20 years in politics to provide Democrats with a starting point for running for office or working in the campaign business.

Fast forward to 2026. The NDTC has now trained over 128,000 candidates and campaign workers and operates an annual program of $5 million. Campaigns & Elections recently spoke with Dietrich about what he’s learned over his 10 years at the NDTC. 

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. 

C&E: The NDTC has trained tens of thousands of Democratic candidates and campaign staffers. Where are the biggest gaps you’re still seeing? Are there candidate types, office levels or geographies where the pipeline feels most fragile heading into 2026?

Dietrich: Democrats are still not competing at the level they should, especially at the local and city levels. It’s so difficult to recruit people for school boards – those hyper-local offices. It’s not something that many organizations have the ability to focus on. We’ve been a part of great groups in Virginia, in Texas, in Georgia, who have recruited people up and down the ballot, and they can focus on those, but even they can’t get to the super hyper-local races, and those really do matter.

C&E: Campaigns are, across the board, increasingly struggling to convert a lot of first-time donors into recurring supporters. From a training standpoint, what are you telling candidates and their teams about how to build a fundraising program that sustains itself beyond the initial launch?

Dietrich: That is the biggest question candidates often have, right? How do I raise the money? I don’t have the personal money, and fundraising is all about relationship building, coupled with motivation and a clear ask. 

We tell candidates that you’re building a relationship with these donors. That relationship may be over email, it may be in person, it may be over the phone. But you, as a candidate, specifically – because you want these donors to not just give to you, but you want them to go out and vote for you – you want them to talk to their friends. You want them to become evangelists for your campaign. Building that relationship is key to getting donors to give again and again. 

The other key, as simple as it sounds, is asking again and again. The three magic words in real estate are “location, location, location.” In political fundraising, it’s “resolicitation, resolicitation, resolicitation.” Oftentimes, candidates are not donors themselves, and they put themselves in the, in the mindset of a donor, and they hesitate or think no one would write that check, or no one would give again. Donors can, and they do if you ask them to.

C&E: I also want to ask about what I think is the elephant in the room for a lot of political professionals right now, which is artificial intelligence. How are you incorporating AI tools into your training curriculum? And where are you seeing candidates and staffers most resistant or most receptive to adopting those tools?

Dietrich: Yeah, look, every candidate has to make a decision on AI – if they’re comfortable using it, and if so, how? The most popular course that we have right now is how campaigns can use AI. Campaigns are, at every level, under staffed. There’s too much to do in not enough time. AI can be an incredibly powerful tool if you use it effectively and ethically to help you accomplish your campaign goals, so that you are then in a position of power to make decisions about how AI may or may not affect your community. 

People often think of AI as, like, making a campaign video. No, AI can be used incredibly effectively for fundamental tasks. One example: When you have to rolodex yourself for the very first time you want to run for office, you have to ask yourself, who am I going to reach out to? Who do I know? Traditionally, that means exporting your contacts out of your phone, exporting all of your LinkedIn contacts, your social media contacts. We put it all into one place, we de-duplicate it, and then we go look it up. AI can now take those spreadsheets of yours and do all of this in a matter of minutes, saving you hours of data entry and step-by-step processes. That’s one way it could be incredibly effective. 

Now, obviously, as a campaign, you want to make certain there’s some best practices in place. You want to make certain you’re protecting privacy, so that your data isn’t being shared out there, right? You’ve got some control over that, but it’s a decision every campaign has to make for themselves. It can be incredibly helpful, incredibly powerful. You shouldn’t make fake videos of your opponent with it. You should not take money or jobs away from artists. You should use it to enhance what you’ve created.

C&E: I’m not going to speak for every campaign, but as someone who’s covered this for a while, there’s often this tension between the candidates and the consultants, the staffers, the political professionals who actually run and work on these campaigns. So, from a training perspective, how do you communicate to first-time candidates or political newcomers the nuts and bolts of professional campaigning?

Dietrich: Getting people to understand that you have limited time, money and people on a campaign, how you use those three is directly going to affect how likely you are to achieve your goals and win. The point of a campaign is not to make as many friends as possible. It’s to get you the votes you need to win your election, so that you can be in a position of power to affect the change that your community and you want to make. Every decision you make needs to be centered around that. 

The best candidates are those that can delegate to a team. Now, the vast, vast majority of campaigns involve a candidate with less than $5,000 and no full-time staff – and probably some dedicated volunteers. How can you create the systems and structures that allow you to be bigger than just one person? You can’t knock every door by yourself. You need help, right? Even if you can knock every door by yourself, it is better to have help. So it’s really important to encourage them to think about a management structure and how they are going to achieve their goals and realize that success isn’t about them doing everything along the way. It’s about creating the systems and processes to allow other people to help them do it along the way.

C&E: After training so many candidates over the past decade, you’ve probably seen every version of a campaign that falls apart. What’s the single most common mistake you see from candidates who lose races that they should have won?

Dietrich: I’m going to say a candidate who thinks they can do it all themselves; they have the answers, they’re not listening to the community, they talk about what they want to talk about, as opposed to what the community wants to talk about, they’re not willing to do the work. 

What I mean by that is: Are you willing to make the calls to raise the money? Are you willing to knock doors to ask people for their vote? As a candidate, we think of this as a burden or a sense of shame that you have to ask people to do things for you, but it’s not. You’re empowering people to be a part of change. And if you’re not willing to ask people to help you, it makes your job exponentially harder.