Campaign software for state legislative candidates

District size is set by chamber size, and chambers vary enormously. The National Conference of State Legislatures lists 150 House and 31 Senate seats in Texas, 80 Assembly and 40 Senate seats in California, and 400 House seats in New Hampshire. Divide a state's registered voters by those numbers and you have the shape of your race. Texas had 18,623,931 registered voters in November 2024 by the Secretary of State's count, which works out to roughly 124,000 registered voters per House district and about 600,000 per Senate district.

At the other extreme, a New Hampshire House district is a few thousand people. As a rule of thumb, a House district in most states holds somewhere in the tens of thousands of registered voters and a Senate district several times that, which is why a House race is still a field race and a Senate race starts to look like a small congressional campaign. The state guides at /run-for-office list who sells the voter file in your state, and /learn/how-to-read-a-voter-file explains the columns.

A legislative candidate runs two campaigns with two electorates. Texas shows the gap in the Secretary of State's tables: the March 2024 Republican primary drew 12.94% of registered voters and the Democratic primary 5.47%, against 61.15% in the November 2024 general. Spread over an average Texas House district, that is roughly 16,000 Republican primary voters and 6,800 Democratic primary voters, and about 76,000 general-election voters. Your primary universe is a list you can knock; your general universe is a list you segment.

Build them as separate saved lists from vote history. Structured search filters on party, precinct, state house and senate district, and history; on the Campaign tier you can type it instead: 'Republicans in HD 28 who voted in two of the last three primaries' returns a saved list. The primary list is persuasion and turnout among reliable partisans. The general list splits into your base to turn out, the other side's base to skip, and the presidential-year-only voters in between whose history says they might show up.

Runoffs and the November after a contested primary are smaller electorates again, so keep the primary list intact after the primary; it is most of your runoff universe. Everything a walker or texter learns lands on the voter record as a campaign-scoped annotation, so the supporter identified in February is still tagged in October.

Most Democratic candidates get access to the voter file through the state party's VAN (VoteBuilder) account, and most Republican candidates through the state party's GOP Data Center access. Both are usually conditioned on the party's rules and sometimes on a contested primary being over. If you have that access, export your district and upload it as a CSV; NGP VAN exports map automatically, as do state Secretary of State files and L2, i360, and Aristotle subsets. There is no live sync with VAN or GOP Data Center; you export and import, and the annotations your team creates live in your own workspace.

If you do not get party data, you are not stuck. In most states the county elections office or the Secretary of State sells the file with vote history to candidates at modest cost; the state guides say who and for how much. That file plus your own field work is enough to run a House race. A commercial extract from L2, i360, or Aristotle adds phones, modeled scores, and household attributes when the budget allows, and it imports the same way.

One rule to plan around: commercial voter extracts are licensed to one client, and the file you upload is held in a silo that belongs to your campaign alone, enforced with database row-level security. That is what makes it safe to bring a licensed extract into a shared platform, and it is also why the party cannot simply hand its extract to every candidate on the ballot; each campaign uploads its own.

Texting at legislative scale means thousands of conversations, and two rules govern it. Under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, autodialed or prerecorded texts to cell phones require prior express consent, with statutory damages of $500 per violation and up to $1,500 when willful. And the carriers require every organization texting from 10-digit numbers to register a brand and a campaign through The Campaign Registry before a message is delivered.

Political senders also go through Campaign Verify, a nonpartisan nonprofit that verifies candidates and committees registered with the FEC or a state, local, or tribal election authority. It says it decides submissions within minutes to two business days, and a mailed PIN takes roughly 5 to 10 business days; carrier approval of the campaign registration follows. Budget weeks for the full chain and start it the day you file. The registration wizard in Culper walks you through it, and sending stays disabled until the carriers approve.

Once approved, peer-to-peer texting is the volume channel. A manager creates a texting campaign from a saved list; numbers on the suppression list are flagged before anyone sees them. Volunteers are assigned to the campaign and work a queue from the web or the phone: one voter, one message, one button press, then the replies. There is no send-to-all button. The manager sees live counts of who needs a first message, who needs a reply, who is in conversation, and who opted out, and every STOP lands instantly on a global suppression list no campaign can override. Plan volume by deciding how many first messages each texter sends per shift and sizing the list to the texters you actually have. The full rules are at /learn/political-texting-rules-tcpa-10dlc.

Precincts are the organizing unit. Walk generation splits a list by voter precinct so each precinct becomes one walk, or by proximity into blocks of a size you set (default about 150 doors, range 30 to 500). Batches carry a group name and a priority, so a district with 60 precincts is a set of folders with the swing precincts marked urgent. Choose knock-and-talk with a script and survey, or door-hanger-only for a literature drop the weekend before early voting.

Captains are staff members with the walk permissions (create, edit, assign) and nothing else, so they can staff their precincts without seeing outreach or fundraising. Each walk is hand-assigned, open for any volunteer to claim, or restricted to a list; two walkers on one walk split the doors. Volunteers join by email invite or share link, get the iOS and Android app links in the invite, or use a browser link without installing anything. Assignment sends a push notification to the app and nothing else, so tell a new walker directly the first time.

The live overview map shows every walker in the district; each walk has a results page; the voters-reached report shows touches by channel and day. Yard signs get their own map with install and removal assignments and named sign-drop routes. Technique is at /learn/door-knocking-guide-for-local-campaigns, and the chair model many parties use is at /learn/what-is-a-precinct-chair.

The order matters because texting approval is the long pole and everything else depends on the file being in.

• Request access and take the onboarding call; the workspace is created with the office, district, and election date, and you have dashboard access on day one.
• Start 10DLC brand and campaign registration and Campaign Verify vetting the same day.
• Export the district from VAN or GOP Data Center, or buy the state or county file, and import it. Confirm vote history columns mapped.
• Set the jurisdiction and voter universe in settings so counts stay inside the district.
• Build the primary universe and the general universe as separate saved lists.
• Write the primary door script and survey; invite captains as staff with walk permissions and volunteers by share link.
• Generate the first batch of precinct walks for the swing precincts and mark them high priority.

These are the things a legislative campaign needs that the product does not provide, so you can budget for them.

• It does not come with a voter file for your district. You export it from the party's system or buy it from the state or county and upload it.
• It does not sync with VAN or GOP Data Center. Export and import; your annotations stay in your workspace.
• It does not text anyone until 10DLC registration is approved by the carriers, and there is no shortcut.
• 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.
• It does not run scientific polling, plan or buy paid media, handle press, or do opposition research.
• It does not file campaign finance reports or candidate paperwork; the state guides list the agencies and /learn/campaign-finance-basics-for-local-candidates explains the basics.
• It does not plan or design mail. It can print and mail a piece you design to a saved list with a quote first, and it logs mail produced elsewhere so the touch counts.
• Pricing is set after an onboarding call. A legislative campaign with a field team is usually on the Campaign tier; a caucus or party running several is on Committee.

1. 1.NCSL: Number of Legislators and Length of Terms in Years (chamber sizes by state)
2. 2.Texas Secretary of State: turnout and voter registration figures, 1970-current (Nov 2024 and March 2024 primaries)
3. 3.47 U.S.C. § 227, Telephone Consumer Protection Act, Legal Information Institute
4. 4.The Campaign Registry: 10DLC brand and campaign registration
5. 5.Campaign Verify: political sender vetting for 10DLC (eligibility and timelines)