Strength in Numbers

“One morning just like every other morning I was reading the news on the internet and remarking to my wife about all the terrible atrocities that were going on and every morning she would always say ‘Oh, well why doesn’t somebody do something about that?’ Well one morning she said, ‘Well, what are you going to do about that?’”

That was the push Representative Alan Doane needed to throw his hat in the proverbial ring. When he ran for office in 2010, he had no formal training to help him form a successful campaign. He faced a far better funded and trained candidate in that first election, but that was the only election he lost.

Doane said that the experience gave him “the resolve to learn what the rules of the game were and come back and play by the rules and win.”

He took the initiative to gain the tools and skills needed to win the upcoming election with the help of American Majority trainers. He said that the training he attended opened his eyes to the intricacies of campaigning.

“The biggest thing for me was math. I had no idea that math actually entered into elections. I believed at that point in time that it was more of a popularity contest.”

He soon discovered that numbers were far more revealing about voter behavior than he had previously assumed.

“Using that training I was able to look at the past numbers of what had happened in our legislative district and I predicted the vote count for that fall.”

But running a campaign is not only a numbers game. People, after all, are not statistics. Knowing how to win an election is no substitute for knowing who will be electing you. 

Doane’s campaign saw that door knocking is the number one thing you can do and also the cheapest thing you can do.

“It’s hard to ask people for money but the two hardest things to do campaigning and the two most effective are asking for money and knocking on doors.”

Taking the time to speak face-to-face with the electorate about the issues that matter to them paid dividends for him as he won his current seat three times by wide margins. 

He firmly believes that, “The more local you can keep your politics, the more effective you can be.”

Fast forward a decade and he is an active member of the Montana House of Representatives having won each subsequent election by substantial margins. He was elected in 2013 and even served as Majority Whip during the 2015-2016 and the 2017-2018 sessions. 

To those on the fence about running for public office, he says “Be involved. Government belongs to the people that show up.”