Campaign software for mayoral candidates

What the mayor actually controls depends on the form of government. The National League of Cities reports that council-manager is the most common form, used by 55% of cities by 2006, with mayor-council second. In a mayor-council city the mayor is independently elected with real administrative and budget authority; in a council-manager city a professional manager runs the departments and the mayor's formal power is narrower. Voters rarely know the difference, and your message has to be honest about which one you are running for. More at /learn/what-does-a-city-council-do.

Whatever the form, the electorate is the whole city, and in most cities that election is nonpartisan: NLC counts more than three-quarters of municipalities without party labels on the ballot. Timing still decides who shows up. The Texas Secretary of State's tables show 61.15% of registered voters turning out in November 2024 against 14.43% in the odd-year November 2023 election, and the MIT Election Data and Science Lab puts national 2024 turnout at about 64% of the eligible population. A mayoral race on an odd-year or spring date is decided by the habitual voters who show up regardless.

Start from ballots cast in the last two mayoral elections, which the city secretary or county elections office publishes, and work backward. In a city of 100,000 residents with about 60,000 registered voters and 15% turnout, that is roughly 9,000 ballots and a two-way win number around 4,500; many cities also require a majority and send the top two to a runoff, which is a second, smaller electorate to plan for. The method is at /learn/how-many-votes-to-win-a-local-election.

A number like 4,500 is still a door number, but not for one person. Import the voter file (state and vendor formats map automatically), cut it by vote history into habitual voters and presidential-year-only voters, then divide the habitual list by precinct or neighborhood and give each piece to a captain. The volunteer program is sized from there: enough walkers to knock the habitual list once before early voting and the confirmed supporters once more during it.

Coalition and slate dynamics are real at this level. A mayoral candidate often runs alongside council candidates on a shared platform, and a party or civic group may be organizing the same precincts. Culper has a Coalition/Slate campaign type for that group, and any campaign can share a walk with another campaign so one volunteer pool can knock a shared turf; the results mirror back only for voters each campaign is independently entitled to see, and no personal data is copied across.

Walk generation produces the turf: pick a list, split by proximity into blocks of a size you set (default about 150 doors, range 30 to 500) or split by precinct so each precinct is one walk, choose knock-and-talk or door-hanger-only, preview the map, and create the batch. Generated walks get a group name, so 'Northside, Oct 11' or 'Precinct 40s' shows up as a folder, and a priority from low to urgent so captains know which turf comes first.

Assignment is where teams differ from crews. Each walk is hand-assigned to specific walkers, open for any volunteer on the campaign to claim, or restricted to a named list; two or more walkers on one walk split its doors. Captains are staff members with the walk permissions (create, edit, assign) and nothing else, so they can staff and schedule their turf without seeing the outreach or fundraising side. The live overview map shows every active walker across the city, and each walk has its own live map and results page.

Walkers use the iOS or Android app or a browser link. Visits are GPS-verified, survey answers sync as they are captured, and the leaderboard scores doors, surveys, signs, and events so team captains have something to compete over. Assigning a walker sends a push notification to the app and nothing else; a volunteer without the app installed needs a text from the captain the first time.

On an individual candidate campaign, your precinct captains are staff members. The permissions panel has buckets for voters, outreach, walks, events, leaderboard, fundraising, social, and volunteers, so a field director can get everything in the walks and volunteers buckets while a captain gets only walks. The formal precinct-chair role, scoped to one precinct's voters and walks, exists on party, PAC, and coalition workspaces rather than on a single candidate's campaign; if your slate runs a shared workspace, that is where chairs live. What a chair does is explained at /learn/what-is-a-precinct-chair.

Staff and volunteers join by email invite or share link, and one person can hold roles on several campaigns from one login, which is how a slate shares volunteers without sharing logins. The candidate account owns billing; a campaign manager has everything else.

A citywide race is large enough for a text poll to be useful. A poll starts from a saved voter list; only on-roll voters with a usable mobile number become recipients. The first text is an invitation with no link; a voter who replies YES gets a second text with the link to a web form. Questions can be yes/no, a 1-to-5 rating, single or multiple choice, short or long text, or a number, and responses tie back to the voter record, so a respondent who rates a message highly becomes a list you can walk.

Two features matter for message testing. An A/B split sample sends two versions of the instrument to random halves, which is how you rank two framings of the same issue. And texts only send between 8am and 9pm in the recipient's local time zone, resolved from their address; a recipient whose zone cannot be resolved is skipped rather than risked. Polls need the same 10DLC approval as any other text.

Be honest about what this is. An opt-in text poll is not a probability sample and will not give you a horse-race number you can trust. It is good at ranking messages, surfacing issue language voters actually use, and finding supporters. Use it for that.

Events are scheduled with a category, a location, a capacity, and a public or private flag; volunteers see them in the app and sign up. Adding GPS coordinates to the event location turns on mobile check-in, so a volunteer who arrives at the Saturday launch checks in from the phone and the attendance counts on the leaderboard. A mayoral campaign typically runs a launch, a run of neighborhood meet-and-greets, canvass kickoffs, and an early-vote rally; all of them are the same object with a different category.

The people who attend are the ones to ask for the next thing. Sign-ups and check-ins are recorded per event, so the meet-and-greet crowd from March is a named list to recruit from in June and to remind during early voting in November.

Outreach sends SMS and email to any saved list with templates, variables, and delivery and open tracking, and requires documented consent for every number texted. Peer-to-peer texting puts volunteers on a queue, one voter and one button press at a time, with the manager watching counts of who needs a first message, who needs a reply, and who opted out. Every STOP is honored instantly and lands on a global suppression list no campaign can override. The rules are at /learn/political-texting-rules-tcpa-10dlc.

For mail, you can design a postcard or mailer, send it to a saved list, and approve a quote before anything is printed; or record a mailing you produced elsewhere by uploading the artwork so it counts. The voters-reached report shows every touch by channel and day across walks, texts, email, and mail, which is the number a mayoral campaign manager actually needs on a Monday morning.

A mayoral race needs things no software provides. These are the ones to budget for separately.

• It does not come with a voter file for your city. You obtain the file from the county or state and upload it; the state guides at /run-for-office explain how.
• It does not run scientific polling. Text polls rank messages and find supporters; a benchmark survey with a real sample is a pollster's job.
• It does not plan or buy paid media. Television, radio, and digital ad strategy stay with your media consultant.
• It does not handle press, debate prep, or opposition research.
• It does not file campaign finance reports; see /learn/campaign-finance-basics-for-local-candidates for what those involve.
• It does not text anyone until 10DLC registration is approved by the carriers.
• It does not process online donations yet. Stripe Connect payouts and embeddable donation widgets are in development; confirm timing on the onboarding call, and use Anedot, ActBlue, or WinRed for online contributions in the meantime.
• Pricing is set after an onboarding call. A mayoral campaign with a real field team is usually on the Campaign tier; a slate running several campaigns from one workspace is on Committee.

1. 1.National League of Cities, Cities 101: Forms of Local Government (council-manager 55% by 2006; mayor-council second)
2. 2.National League of Cities, Cities 101: Partisan and Non-Partisan Elections (over three-quarters nonpartisan)
3. 3.Texas Secretary of State: turnout and voter registration figures, 1970-current (Nov 2024 61.15%, Nov 2023 14.43%)
4. 4.MIT Election Data and Science Lab: voter turnout (2024 about 64% of the voting-eligible population)
5. 5.Campaign Verify: political sender vetting for 10DLC