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Challengers first

Almost all political energy is spent on the incumbent — what they did, what they said, what ought to happen to them. Decades of that energy have removed very few people. The order is reversed here, and the reversal is the strategy.

Start from the seat​

The unit is a seat, not a scandal. A seat is the thing a citizen actually votes in, it exists on a schedule that does not depend on the news, and it has a question attached that can be answered: who else could hold this?

Starting from the seat changes what you spend time on:

  • You are looking for candidates, not for outrage.
  • You are working against a calendar — the filing deadline and the primary — rather than against a feeling.
  • You end with a name, which is the only output that moves a seat.

Most of the people who could hold it are not on any list​

The strongest challenger for a district is frequently somebody who has never run, is not in a party's pipeline, and would not be found by anyone whose job is to look at the pipeline. That is not an accident: pipelines select for people who have already been vetted by the arrangement this movement is trying to remove.

So the roster is built from the outside in — recommended by citizens, assessed against published criteria, and open to people with no political résumé at all. See Good New Leaders and How someone gets on the roster.

Assess before anyone has a favourite​

Assessment after a field has formed is just advocacy with a spreadsheet. The rubrics are published in advance, so a challenger knows the standard before anybody applies it to them and a citizen can see that the standard did not move to fit a preferred name. See Qualifications.

Most challengers have no voting record at all — they have never held the seat. That is deliberate and it is not held against them. What they have said in their own recorded words is the evidence base, it feeds the Flamingo Award only, and it never touches the voting-record awards. See The Wall.

The incumbent's record is the measuring stick, not the destination​

You still need the incumbent's record — it is what tells you what the seat has been doing and what a replacement would have to do differently. But it is an input to choosing a challenger, not the point of the exercise. See Voting Records and Elected Politicians.

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