- Grassroots candidates and volunteers emphasized face-to-face campaigning as the most effective way to connect with voters and build trust.
- Several Northern Kentucky residents described entering grassroots politics due to personal experiences with education, government accountability, or underrepresented communities.
- Participants said grassroots campaigns face challenges like limited funding, low name recognition, and voters prioritizing party labels or national issues over local responsibilities.
While going from house to house on the campaign trail in 2024, Brandon Long said he had people tell him they always get mailers in the mail or doorhangers on the door handle, but never had a candidate show up on their doorstep.
“That just felt so patriotic and American and democratic to me,” said Long, who was campaigning for a seat in the 68th House District at the time. “I’m here. I want to represent you. I’m going to show up and listen to you, and I will learn from you, and I will take action. This is what it is supposed to be. It just felt quintessentially American.”
Long, who is the vice chair of the Campbell County Democratic Party, ran his own grassroots campaign last year for the 68th House District seat, which spans urban and suburban Campbell County. Long, a Democrat from Fort Thomas, ran against Mike Clines, a Republican from Alexandria, and lost.
Grassroots campaigns are typically ordinary citizens throwing their hats into the ring. The candidates usually have to put in extra effort to build name recognition through boots-on-the-ground campaigns, such as rallying many unpaid volunteers to knock on doors.
Long said he has been politically sensitive for as long as he can remember. In kindergarten, he would read books about presidents and organize his subdivision into a mock government.
Similarly, Boone County resident Maureen Walczak, who grew up in Daviess County, Kentucky, and said she came from a politically aware family. The kind of family that would have dinner together and talk about world events and politics.
Walczak said her dad would challenge the family on what they’d heard and why it was happening. She said her dad usually voted on policy, not necessarily R or D, even though Davis County was highly Democratic at the time. Fast forward to today, and Walczak is retired and a Boone County resident who has taken an interest in politics, specifically in grassroots campaign efforts.
Walczak was part of the Boone County Republican Party reorganization in 2021, led by now Boone County Commissioner Chet Hand. She became a precinct officer and started learning more about local politics. Then she started knocking on doors for Representative Marianne Proctor, a Republican from Union.
“They (grassroots candidates) see and speak to the federal government over regulation when the states are supposed to be sovereign,” Walczak said. “They speak to the games that are being played with the other establishment candidates. They speak about the things that they’d like to see through. They speak to the things that they’ll be responsible for.”
Long said his own run last year was sparked by observing the state assembly and “the lack of attention given to issues that affect kids, the LGBTQ+ community getting thrown under the bus, and the minority-African American community getting thrown under the bus.”
Long said he wanted to use his run to advocate for those who are not being advocated for.
“There’s a verse in scripture that I’ve always held dear, which is, ‘Speak out for those who have no voice,’ and running for office, for me, was an opportunity to be a voice for those who can’t fight for themselves,” Long said.
Unlike Walczak and Long, who had grown up interested in politics, Boone County resident Stacie Earl’s first involvement in a grassroots campaign was her own.
In 2018, she ran as an Independent for the Kentucky House of Representatives District 66. House District 66 is made up of parts of Boone County, including Hebron, Burlington and Florence. Earl lost that race to the Republican candidate, Ed Massey, a resident of Hebron and longtime Boone County School Board member.
Backing up to 2016, Earl became invested in politics through her daughter’s education at Boone County Public Schools when she was upset with the curriculum the district was trying to implement. Overall, she said there was a lack of accountability in the education system.
“Realizing that the whole system was a joke, I started recruiting candidates,” Earl said. “I would recruit people as people would start talking about what they were seeing, the injustices, how things don’t work. It became a conversation of, are you willing to run, identifying what the issues are, how people have been taken advantage of.”
Independent candidates often must petition to have their names printed on the general election ballot. Earl said her campaign started before there was even a campaign because she had to collect 200 signatures to get on the ballot.
“I was resonating with the parents and my community, and to get my signatures, I set up a booth at the Boone County Fair, and I had people coming over to me, just wanting to talk to me about what I heard,” Earl said.
She said people who work on grassroots campaigns are personally invested in the candidate, unpaid and passionate, offering their time, talent and treasure to see a candidate win.
“You know it’s a real grassroots candidate if they’re giving you their personal cell phone number because they actually want to hear from you, they’re actually going to answer your calls,” Earl said. “They’re going to respond.”
Ann Dickerson is a cofounder of Indivisible NKY, which is a grassroots activist group working to “build a better Kentucky by holding elected officials accountable.”
Dickerson was also a latecomer to politics.
She is Gen X, which she said was a generation taught not to talk about politics, religion, or things considered private matters. She got more invested in politics after Hilary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election to President Donald Trump.
The first grassroots campaign Dickerson worked on was for Seth Hall, a Democrat from Oldham County who ran for the U.S. House in Kentucky’s 4th District in 2018.
“I love the behind-the-scenes stuff,” Dickerson said. “I love the strategy. I love looking at the data and figuring out messaging, or figuring out where the votes are and plotting them.”
Every year that Kentucky has had an election cycle, Dickerson said she has been involved in at least one campaign. In 2024, she was the campaign manager for Deb Flowers, a Democrat from Union who ran against Proctor for the 60th District House seat in Boone County. At the same time, she was also helping Long with some political advising.
Dickerson said there is nothing more effective in a political campaign than talking to people face-to-face. Further, she said, when someone is out campaigning door to door, they are collecting data in real time about what people’s thoughts are, what way they’re leaning, and why they’re leaning that way.
“When you’ve knocked on somebody’s door, and you are talking to them, whether it be issue-related, candidate-related, a combination of the two, it’s very hard for a human being to have had a conversation with you and build an opinion of you based on that conversation, and then receive a negative piece of mail,” she said. “You look at it, and you go, ‘That is nothing like the person that I talked to. Nothing like the opinion that I formed of them.’”
Both Walczak and Earl are currently working on the campaign of Michael Faris, a Republican from Elizabethtown, Kentucky, for the U.S. Senate. That seat is currently occupied by Sen. Mitch McConnell, who is not seeking reelection.
Because the Senate race is a statewide election, it takes even more boots-on-the-ground volunteers from every region of the commonwealth to help with campaigning.
Earl said that during the summer, when all the county fairs were happening, volunteers would staff booths in different areas.
“A grassroots candidate is not going to be flip-flopping to whichever direction the wind’s blowing for the day, or what is the hot topic issues, or having done something then going ‘Oh, I can get that scrubbed, and we can move forward, and I’ll narrate this way,’” Earl said. “There’s really no accountability that way, either, where a grassroots candidate is going to have accountability because all your volunteers are your constituents. You’re not paying these people to help you.”
Walczak said that supporting a grassroots candidate has helped her see what a person stands for, rather than a candidate who spouts popular political rhetoric, which she calls “theatrics.”
“They miss that this person is a good orator because they were hired for that,” she said. “They practice, they say all the right things at whatever platform is right now-‘America first’ or ‘pro Trump.’ They jump on that bandwagon, and people go, ‘Oh, yes, we need that,’ but then they don’t look at the background of these people.”
Just as the volunteers in a grassroots campaign are unpaid and typically working people themselves, so are the candidates they help get into office.
Long said he had to split his time between his personal life and campaigning.
On weekends, he either went door-to-door or his team mapped out every festival, fair, craft show, and anything else happening that year, so he could be there talking to people. When he was driving anywhere, he had a list of phone calls to make. He said he hoped that voters would connect with him in at least one way, whether that be over the phone, through door knocking, or meeting him at an event.
During his campaign, Long said he and volunteers made a combined 10,000 phone calls and canvassed 5,000 homes.
“They have to work, make a living while they’re campaigning,” Walczak said. “They’re not getting paid by PAC money or the taxpayers while they’re running around campaigning.”
PAC money refers to funds raised and spent by a Political Action Committee, an organization that pools contributions from members like employees, union members, or shareholders to support or oppose political candidates, ballot initiatives, or legislation.
Long said that, as grassroots candidates, if they are not raising money or getting PAC money, they are not seen as threats or legitimate candidates.
“I really would love to see a both ends approach,” he said. “Raise all the money you can, but then work your tail off to meet people where they are.”
Aside from money, Long said the lack of name recognition was one of the biggest challenges for a grassroots candidate.
He said he had to run with the knowledge that nobody knows him, and to answer the questions “Who am I?” and “What do I stand for?” to people. He said, when you are not a household name, people think they know what you stand for, whether you actually do or not.
One of the first questions Long said he was always asked while out campaigning was which political party he belonged to. He said that it was difficult because people see the party over the person. People would immediately impose upon him their stereotype of a Democrat, or what a Democrat means. Depending on which part of Campbell County he was in, he said it could help or hurt.
Another thing Long said he encountered on the campaign trail was the tension around stances on national issues. Long said when he talked to people on the left, their question for him was what his stance was on Gaza, and when he talked to people on the right, they wanted to know his opinion on immigration.
“I communicated to both of them, I am running for state representative of Kentucky, no jurisdiction over Gaza or the American border,” Long said. “Their perspective was, if you’re running for something, you should answer to this. I think that it nationalizes every single race, and it increases the division where people are not connected to ‘here’s the issues that affect you that this office actually could do.’”
Long said that with a grassroots campaign, you never know what you’re going to get, so you can’t be polished all the time. You have to be raw and real.
“Don’t discount somebody just because they’re the person with the least money,” Dickerson said. “Whether you’re a Republican, a Democrat, or an Independent, learn what each candidate stands for, where they stand on issues that are important to you, before you decide just to pull a lever because of a letter after a name.”
