The Stump Speech

More Learning

I am writing this post in an effort to educate anyone like me who is thinking about running for office. One of my goals with doing this is to get more people like me to run for office. We cannot sit on our hands anymore. We have to run for big offices and small ones. School boards matter. Library boards matter.

You might detest all the little knits and barbs that come your way, but you will hate socialism a lot more.

I am learning a lot about this business of politics. As I learn, I want to lift the veil for you. Join the growing team here.

Today in business, we don’t communicate in the same ways we used to. When I started, it was all face-to-face or on a landline phone. No cellphones. Mostly, it was face-to-face in my job.

Today, of course, most communication is digital. Even if you are doing a video, you aren’t in the room and can’t read body language.

The one chance you have to communicate with a large body of people is at meetings. Most meeting organizers give a candidate a few minutes to do a stump speech. We are used to seeing the President or someone else at a convention with a teleprompter do a long talk. This is not that, and there is no time for that.

There is no time for long stories. No time to build a plot. I have heard a lot of stump speeches now. Some are good. Some aren’t. We are all in the same boat. I am not an expert, but I am learning.

Since I started this journey, my stump speech has gotten better. At the beginning, I meandered. In business, I didn’t prepare a lot of the time. I was so familiar with what I was going to talk about that I could do it with no notes and extemporaneously. I was used to speaking in front of people in business, but this is very different. You are there not only to sell yourself, but to motivate people to work for you and to get out the vote.

People might believe in you, but if they don’t participate, nothing happens.

You need three or four stump speeches. You can use notes if you’d like. But you have to avoid “reading” them. A stump speech is performative. Maybe that’s why the theatre kids on the left are so persuasive. We from the business community tend to be very logical.

It takes several attempts to draft a good one. Then, you have to practice it.

Depending on the function, you will get five minutes, three minutes, one minute, or even just 30 seconds. Obviously, the thirty-second one is brutal. I blew my first chance at it, but I was able to get people laughing because of my error.

In the thirty-second one, you say your name, office, website, one bullet point about why you are running, and then ask for their vote. Here is mine.

I am Jeff Carter. running for State Treasurer. My website is JeffCarterNV.com, I am running so Nevada doesn’t turn into Illinois. I hope you go to my website, learn about me, and vote for me in the primary.

With length, you get to relay something more. One thing that works is personal stories. If you have some sort of personal connection to the office you are running for, you can turn it into a point you want to get across to voters. Here is an example from mine.

This race is personal for me. I don’t know about you, but my wife and I saved for our kids’ college. We put all the money in a 529 program. In 2007, we told the Illinois State Treasurer to put all the money in government bonds. In 2008, the treasurer lost 38% of my daughter’s college money because he put a real estate wrapper around the bonds.

That story is true and verifiable. It shows why I have a personal motivation to do what I am doing. It’s relatable to anyone who saves for their kids’ college. It is essential to be genuine and authentic in politics these days. It’s important to put out verifiable information instead of conjecture. People want to back real people, not caricatures.

You might not like Trump, but one thing he did was bring a demand for authenticity into politics. That’s why Gavin Newsom looks so fake. He doesn’t look fake. He is fake.

In the Candidate Pathways sequence, I have been doing every speaker stresses authenticity. I would encourage you use this app before you run for office. It truly helps you organize yourself and get your ducks in order so you can worry about the things you need to worry about in a campaign rather than the minutiae that will eat up your time.

Last night, we were in Reno and spoke with the Washoe County Republicans. They had a huge group. Washoe is the second-largest county in Nevada after Clark. Over the past three weeks, I have spent a lot of time in the northern part of Nevada. If you haven’t been to northern Nevada, you ought to make a trip. Some of it is breathtakingly beautiful. I was given three minutes, and my guy Blain said I did a good job.

Your stump speech matters even if it’s a small office.