I'll Never Run for Political Office
by Kitty Felde
“I’ll never be a politician,” I mumbled.Papa looked up from his phone. “Why not, mija?”“I wouldn’t like it if people said mean things about me. And I don’t like meetings where people talk and talk and talk.”“I have to agree with you there,” he said. “But it’s the nature of the beast. Politics is all about talking and talking. What else don’t you like?”I thought about it for a minute. “I definitely don’t want to call people up on the phone and ask them for money for my election. And I’d be embarrassed to knock on the doors of strangers to ask them to vote for me. Sometimes I don’t know why anyone wants to be a politician, Papa.” 
Fina doesn’t want to run for political office. And she’s not alone.
Our current political climate has created a nationwide depression about government work. A 2024 poll by the Harvard Public Opinion Project found that among 18-to-29-year-olds, just 12% have any trust in Congress. A recent Pew Research poll shows that 63% say they have little or no confidence in the future of the U.S. political system.
Money
It’s expensive to run for Congress.
The average price tag for a 2024 race for the U.S. House of Representatives is two million dollars.
Thinking about running for the Senate? Open Secrets says an average Senate campaign these days costs $13.5 million.
Gender
A Cambridge University study found that men were two-thirds more likely than women to report that they “definitely” plan to run for office at some point in the future. Women, on the other hand, were 45% more likely than men to assert that they would never run.
Roughly a third more college men receive parental encouragement to run for office or discuss politics regularly with their friends. They're nearly twice as likely as college women to visit political websites. And more than twice the number of men as women say they are confident in their qualifications to run for office.
Currently, about one in four members of Congress is female - 25 in the Senate, 126 in the House.
(photo courtesy of Stanford University)Safety and Privacy
Another reason men and women are reconsidering running for public office is the safety and protection of their private life and the lives of their families.
There were more than 7500 threats made against members of Congress in 2022. Just 22 were prosecuted. And former President Trump narrowly escaped assassination in 2024.
Rutgers University Political Science Professor Shauna Shames has surveyed more than 750 public policy and law school students and reports that a lack of personal privacy is another reason young people are hesitant to run for office.
There is one bit of good news out of that Cambridge study:
"Women and men both aspire to work to improve the world around them, but women are less likely than men to see political leadership as a means to that end."
Or, as Papa tells Fina:
“You don’t have to be a congresswoman to make a difference, you know,” he said. “You’ll find a way.”
