What it takes to run for city council, Part 3

In the heat of the campaign, it's all about getting the word out.

We’ve reached the third part of our three-part series, “What it takes to run for city council.” This section will focus on the mechanics of getting the word out about you as a candidate and the issues you care about. This section assumes that you’ve done the hard work of figuring out your platform—what issues are important to you and what experience do you have that make you a good candidate.

As we mentioned in Part 1, a campaign for Sebastopol City Council can run between $5,000 and $50,000. Most candidates spend on the low end of that—between $4,000 (Stephen Zollman) and roughly $15,000 (Diana Rich). Michael Carnacchi, who served on the city council from 2018 to 2022, spent less than $2,000 on his campaign and thus didn’t have to file any campaign finance paperwork.

Postcards, door hangers and signs

Especially if you’re on the low end in terms of fundraising, a big portion of your money will go toward printed campaign literature and signs.

Sandra Maurer, who ran her own campaign with a small team of close supporters, raised almost $7,000 for her campaign in 2022.

“If you wanted to know where I spent that money, I could tell you that,” she said. “I had three very large signs, 85 yard signs, 3,000 door hangers and 820 postcards.”

For Diana Rich, it was important that her literature matched her values—and not just in terms of their political content.

“My mailers were recycled paper and recyclable,” she said. “I used a union shop and I sent mailers to every single household. Is that pricier? I bet it is.”

She sent out mailers three times to the entire town.

“This is not a digital community,” she said. “There are plenty of people who get their information through their mailbox still, but that’s a decision. It’s a lot cheaper to just go with social media. It’s a lot cheaper to just target known Democratic voters. That’s one of those decisions candidates have to make.”

It’s easy to get wrapped up in trying to produce the perfect mailer, with just the right colors and the perfect logo, but Una Glass, who designed her own campaign literature and had it printed at Sprint on Main Street, said, “I think the public is interested in people who know the community and who are real, rather than packaged by social media or by campaign consultants or whatever. If people just see some slick campaign mailer, they’re less influenced by that. They’re much more influenced by somebody who has kind of a grassroots thing that really addresses real issues.”

Here are Glass’s suggestions for what should go on a mailer:

“Three to seven issue areas that you think are important and where you stand on them. Your most important endorsements from members of the community, electeds and organizations. A brief bio explaining your life experience, involvement in our community and values, plus any special skills that you have that will help you be an effective council member. Finally, why you are running.”

Maurer touted the benefit of doorhangers:

“Going door to door feels like a really important part of campaigning, because you’re meeting and greeting people in person and talking one on one to people,” she said. “We had door hangers, so if somebody wasn’t home, we just put the door hanger on and kept going. And you don’t meet everybody, but if you leave the door hanger, they know that at least you tried.”

Vice Mayor Stephen Zollman’s handmade campaign signs from the 2022 election exemplified Glass’s point about authenticity over slickness.

As a result of not raising much money—Zollman said he capped individual contributions at $500 so as not to be swayed by big donors—he and his team had to get creative when it came to expensive campaign items such as lawn signs.

“Tied to my Green Party roots, I felt you shouldn’t just be creating things that you have no way to dispose of in an environmentally conscious way. So Woody and June, who are big Green Party members, told me about recycled signs, and we got them from a nice gentleman, Carl Tannenbaum, who ran for sheriff the last time, and unfortunately lost. So we recycled his signs.”

Zollman and a few friends got recycled paint, came up with their general theme, and got busy. “We used many coats of white to paint over the dark blue he had, and then we just did stencils,” Zollman said.

Mayor Diana Rich also used recycled signs—she went dumpster diving for the cardboard, cut it to size, then hired an artist to silkscreen the design onto the cardboard. Rich said this was more expensive than using coroplast signs, but she wanted her signs to be recyclable.

“I worked with Patrick Amiot and with a wonderful young woman to do the screen printing—that was a full day effort,” she said. “And then we had to make all these stakes, and there was another group of people to attach them to the signs. Then we had to go out and set them all up, which involved a whole other group of people.”

Neysa Hinton used coroplast signs, but she keeps them year after year, and updates them with stickers for every new election. Hinton, who has served on the council since 2016, is running for re-election in November.

Social Media

At the beginning of this series, campaign consultant Dennis Rosatti said, while he advises his clients to do social media, it doesn’t have the kind of impact in Sebastopol that it might in a larger town. None of the candidates I spoke to for this series put their social media strategy at the center of their campaign.

Councilmember Sandra Maurer said she didn’t really do any social media for her campaign.

Mayor Diana Rich said, “I did Facebook even though I wasn’t a Facebook person, because I discovered that many people in Sebastopol use Facebook as a way to get information.”

Stephen Zollman cautioned people to be careful with social media like Facebook or Nextdoor because of its potential for escalating negativity.

“I would just kind of encourage people to be a little bit more introspective with how they deal with social media as a whole,” he said.

Rather than firing off the first thing that comes to mind, Zollman said, “I would just encourage people to, if you have differences…just to invite that person out for coffee. You know, we all have differences with people, but grab coffee, try to get a different understanding, a different perspective, and at the end of it, you still may walk away going, ‘You know what, we just have to agree to disagree?’”

Door to door

Every former and current candidate I spoke with talked about the importance of door-to-door canvassing.

Former Councilmember Sarah Gurney said door-to-door canvasing is important not merely for getting your identity and ideas out there, but also for what you learn along the way.

“I think the door-to-door effort is really critical, not just to winning but more importantly to understanding who you’d represent,” said Gurney. “You experience each stop along the route: the road condition, the sidewalk, the front yard in detail, the house, the front door, and hopefully, in a personal conversation, a taste of that voter’s perspective on our community. Canvassing is eye-opening.”  

In terms of having real, substantive communication with lots of voters, former Councilmember Una Glass said going door to door can’t be beat.

“All of this social media and mailers and all of that stuff is just nothing compared to knocking on somebody’s door and talking to them,” she said. “I know many people who have run for Sebastopol City Council and walked the entire town twice. So, like, start really early and be very disciplined and go out every day.  I think that makes a really big difference, because in a small town like Sebastopol, you can really talk to people about the nuances of real issues without just talking about a bunch of sound bites.”

“I love going door to door,” said Councilmember Neysa Hinton. “I used to come home at night after work, and I would just start up until dusk and walk door to door.

Hinton made going door-to-door into a social occasion.

“I like to walk with someone else,” she said. “I just ask my friends to meet me after work, and we walk together, and that makes it more enjoyable, and it helps you find the street addresses. So what usually happens is they have a clipboard and they mark off the address—whether the person is home or not—and I’m going to the door. But if you get friends that have some experience to where they start to get comfortable, then a lot of times we can do both sides of the street at once. I campaign a lot door to door with my daughter, who lives in Sebastopol, and I’ve got her where she can go to the other side of the street, but if they really want to talk to the candidate, then she’ll yell, ‘Mom! Come over here.’ I enjoy it. I like meeting my neighbors. I find it really fun to go door to door. For me, it’s way more enjoyable than debates and stuff.”

And you never know what will happen when someone opens that door.

Hinton said that once, when she was going door to door, “There was a lemon tree that had a sign on it that said, ‘Don’t you dare steal my effing lemons.’ And I was with a friend, and they said, ‘Oh my gosh, I don’t think we should knock on that door.’ And I said, ‘That makes me want to know more.’ And the person that answered was super nice. I felt like they might vote for me.”

“I’ve also had somebody—when it was pouring down rain—a much older gentleman, that had a caregiver, and he said, ‘Well, I think you should come in from the rain and have a shot of whiskey, because a politician needs to be able to hold their alcohol.’”

And so she did.

Parting advice from Hinton

As Hinton looks forward to her third campaign, she had some thoughts and advice for her potential competitors.

“I believe that the council should represent the community as a whole and have a variety of voices on it,” she said. “I hope that the people that decide to run will come with a collaborative spirit and a voice that they understand doesn’t represent, just themselves, but that it represents the community we live in…A very smart elected official told me, ‘Once you run, then you represent everyone. You really have to remember that your vote represents everyone, whether they voted for you or not.’”

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of this series.