Tina Podlodowski is the Chair of the Washington State Democratic Party. She joins us as a “Wire Insider” to discuss the work the party’s been doing in local elections and recruiting candidates.

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“So, getting people involved in these kinds of local elections is really just building on the infrastructure that we put together in 2018.

We held organizing academies throughout the state. We trained over 5,000 organizers: People who can do the work to lead canvasses, understand electoral tactics in working with all of these things.

As Washington State Democrats, we have been working locally, with all of our local party organizations at the county and legislative-district level to identify candidates and to have those groups adopt these candidates in these elections. So, that’s just another opportunity for them to take the skills that they learned in 2018 and put into play in congressional-district elections and legislative-district elections and make that happen at the local level.

Far more of these kinds of candidates that you see at the local level, too, are going to be folks that we recruit that are diverse. So, women, people of color, folks from the LGBTQ community, immigrants — people that have not necessarily held elected office before, because the bench needs to change to fully represent the changes that are happening in the demographics in Washington State.

People get excited, you know, when they see somebody from their community running for one of these slots, and they get far more engaged.

So I think, if anything, people who say, ‘Oh this is this is going to be a drain on resources.’ I’m like, ‘No, this is going to be another influx of brand-new resources that’ll be all trained and ready, as well, for 2020 in the presidential cycle.'”

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