The People Primaries Candidate Guide

The most current version of this guide is maintained online at PeoplePrimaries.com. The online edition includes the current nomination form, vetting questionnaire, promise-signing workflow, and district-specific timelines not reflected in this printed version.

The Problem This Solves

Every reform movement eventually collides with the same wall: the people most qualified to represent their communities are the least likely to run. Not because they lack judgment or courage or the respect of their neighbors. Because nobody asked them.

The candidate pipeline as it currently exists is a self-selection machine. It rewards ambition, comfort with fundraising, tolerance for the performance of politics, and willingness to spend two years asking strangers for money. The people who thrive in that pipeline are not always the people their communities would choose if the choice were genuinely theirs. The people their communities would choose are often too busy working, too honest about what campaigns cost, too skeptical of the machinery, or simply too decent to have spent years cultivating the kind of political identity that party committees and donors recognize as viable.

People Primaries is built on a different premise: the candidate is already among us. They are not waiting to be discovered by a party committee. They will not put their hand up unprompted. They need to be found, and they need to be asked — by people they already trust, in a context that makes the ask feel like a community calling rather than a personal ambition.

The People Primary is the mechanism that makes that ask possible at scale, across all 435 congressional districts, with a shared standard and a shared timeline. It is the answer to the question every District will eventually face: how do we find someone worth running?

What the People Primary Is

The People Primary is not a government election. It has no legal standing. It is not run by any state or county election board. It is a community-driven candidate identification and selection process, run by verified citizens through PeoplePrimaries.com, that produces a People Primaries nominee before the formal party primary season begins.

The process runs on a fixed national calendar so that every district is working in parallel and the movement speaks with one voice:

The July 7th date is deliberate. It gives the People Primaries nominee a head start of more than a year before Election Day. It puts the People Primary well ahead of the party primary season, which means the candidate’s story — we found this person ourselves — is established before any other candidate has entered the race.

Why They Won’t Put Themselves Forward

Understanding why good candidates don’t self-select is essential to understanding why the People Primary works.

The people most likely to self-select for Congress are people who have been preparing for it: political operatives who have been in campaigns their whole careers, local officials who have been climbing a ladder, activists who have been building a personal brand, lawyers and executives who have the financial cushion to fund a campaign during the year they are not earning. There is nothing wrong with any of these people individually. But as a class, they are pre-filtered by the existing system. They have already demonstrated comfort with the donor pipeline. The machine knows who they are.

The people People Primaries is looking for are different. They are the nurse practitioner who has been fighting a hospital corporation for five years over staffing ratios. The machinist whose plant got offshore-shifted and who has spent the last three years helping displaced coworkers find new jobs. The veteran who runs a small business in town and who every neighbor knows is straight and fair. The teacher who has been fighting her school board and winning. The small contractor who understands exactly how the regulatory system works against people like him.

None of them are going to wake up one morning and decide to run for Congress. The idea will not naturally occur to them, or if it does, they will dismiss it immediately. Their reasons are real:

• They do not think of themselves as politicians, and they mean that as a compliment to themselves
• They have seen what campaigns cost and what they require of a person’s family
• They do not have a donor network and do not know how to build one
• They are not sure the system can be changed and do not want to be humiliated in the attempt
• They have never been asked by anyone whose judgment they trust

That last reason is the one People Primaries is designed to address. The ask has to come from people they know, in a context that makes the mission clear, with a support structure already built around them. When a District of seventy organized workers approaches someone they have identified and vetted — not to flatter them, but to make a serious, organized request — the meaning of the ask changes entirely. It is no longer do you want to be a politician? It is your community has chosen you to serve.

That is a different question. Many people who would refuse the first will answer yes to the second.

How Nominations Work

Nominations are submitted through PeoplePrimaries.com by any worker in the district. A nomination requires:

• The nominee’s name and contact information (or enough identifying information for the Committee to make contact)
• The nominator’s name and district verification
• A brief statement of why this person would make a good representative — no more than 200 words
• Whether the nominator has spoken to the nominee about running (not required, but noted)

Self-nominations are accepted. A worker who believes they should run can nominate themselves. But the nomination process is structured to surface names the community trusts, not just names that come forward on their own initiative. A self-nomination carries no more or less weight than any other nomination.

Districts are encouraged to run a parallel active search alongside the open nomination window. This means Committee members reaching out directly to people they know and respect in the community — not to ask them to run, but to ask if they would be willing to have a conversation. The active search and the open nomination window together produce a fuller picture of who is available in the district than either process alone.

The Vetting Standard

The goal of vetting is not to find a perfect candidate. It is to find a serious one. The People Primary is not looking for a professional politician. It is looking for someone with the character, competence, and independence to do the job. Those qualities can be assessed. The vetting process is designed to assess them honestly, without deference to political credentials that the existing system has manufactured.

Non-Negotiable Criteria

Every People Primaries nominee must:

• Be a resident of the congressional district they seek to represent
• Sign The WORK FOR US! Promise publicly and without amendment (Appendix B)
• Commit to accepting no corporate PAC money, no Chamber-affiliated money, and no dark money of any kind
• Accept funding exclusively through ViaUSFunding.com and direct small-dollar contributions
• Not be a career politician — no more than one prior term in any elected office
• Commit to serving a maximum of twelve years of combined service in the House and Senate
• Support passage of the US Majority Amendment as a first-term priority

Any nominee who will not meet these criteria is not a People Primaries candidate. The promise is not negotiable. The District’s support is conditional on it, and the community’s trust is built on the promise being real.

Character and Judgment Criteria

Beyond the non-negotiables, the Committee should assess:

• Earned trust. Has this person demonstrated trustworthiness in their work, community, or public life — not by claiming it, but by having it recognized by others over time?
• Steadiness under pressure. Have they navigated difficulty, conflict, or adversity without breaking? Can they hold a position when it is inconvenient?
• Independence. Are they genuinely free from the donor-party pipeline, or have they already been cultivating relationships with the interests they will be asked to oppose?
• Competence. Do they understand how legislation works, or are they willing to learn? Do they speak about policy with substance rather than slogans?
• Cross-community credibility. Can they speak to people across old partisan lines? A People Primaries candidate cannot sound like a recycled partisan. The country is exhausted by that.
• Accountability. Will they be answerable to the community that chose them, not just during the campaign but after election? Are they comfortable with public accountability?

The Vetting Interview

Every nominee who passes initial review should be interviewed by a subcommittee of at least three District members. The interview is not an interrogation. It is a serious conversation. The Committee should explain the mission, describe the support structure, and ask the nominee to be honest about their hesitations. The goal is not to recruit someone into a role they are unsuited for. It is to give serious people enough information to make a genuine decision.

Suggested interview questions:

1. What do you understand the US Majority Amendment to be, and why do you believe it matters?
2. What has your experience been with the way corporate power affects your industry, your community, or your own work?
3. What relationships do you have with donors, party officials, or corporate interests, and are any of those relationships ones you would be unwilling to end?
4. What would your family need to make this possible?
5. What do you think would be the hardest part of this for you personally?
6. If you win and a vote comes up that the District feels strongly about, but you disagree — how do you handle that?
7. What do you think qualifies you to represent the workers of this district?

The Promise-Signing Sequence

The promise is not signed at the end of the vetting process as a formality. The sequence matters:

1. Committee contacts nominee and requests an initial conversation
2. Initial conversation covers the mission and the commitment required — no ask to run yet
3. Nominee receives the full Field Manual and the promise text to review
4. Second conversation answers questions and addresses hesitations
5. If the nominee is willing to proceed, they sign the promise
6. Promise is posted publicly on PeoplePrimaries.com before any announcement
7. Nomination is confirmed and the candidate’s name enters the public vetting period

Public posting of the promise before the announcement is not a formality. It is the sequence that gives the promise its integrity. The community sees the commitment before they see the campaign.

When Nobody Steps Forward

Some Districts will go through the full nomination and vetting process and find that no one is willing to run. This is a real possibility, especially in early cycles. The existing system has trained potential candidates to believe they cannot win without party backing and corporate money, and that belief does not disappear overnight.

When no candidate steps forward, the Committee has three responses:

• Run a visible non-endorsement campaign. Make noise about the fact that no candidate in the district has signed The WORK FOR US! Promise. Hold the incumbent accountable publicly. Make the absence of a pledged candidate a story rather than a silence. A district that publicly demands a pledged candidate and cannot find one is still applying pressure.
• Escalate the ask. Return to the most promising nominees from the vetting process. Ask again, with more specificity about the support available. Sometimes the second conversation, after someone has had time to think, lands differently than the first.
• Run from within. District members can become candidates. This is not the preferred path — the Committee’s value is as an organizing body, and losing its members to a campaign weakens the ground game. But it is a real option, and some of the best People Primaries candidates may emerge from the Committees themselves.

The Structural Lesson from Justice Democrats

People Primaries did not invent the idea of community-driven candidate recruitment. Justice Democrats demonstrated in 2018 that the party machine can be challenged when ordinary people stop accepting the candidates handed down to them, surface credible representatives from within their communities, and build public legitimacy around those candidates before the machinery has finished narrowing the field.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did not put her own name forward. Her brother submitted her name through a public nomination process run by Justice Democrats. She had never run for office. She was working as a bartender. The nomination process found her before she found it.

That is the structural lesson People Primaries imports from that history. Not the ideology — the mission here is different, and the ideal People Primaries candidate is constitutionalist, nationalist, likely independent or right-leaning, and firmly pledged to protect American workers. But the mechanism is the same: a public nomination process, a community vetting standard, and a support structure that gives the candidate legitimacy before the party machine has decided who is viable.

The party machine wins when it controls the definition of viable. The People Primary contests that definition before the machine has a chance to apply it.

What the Community Owes the Candidate

A candidate who accepts a People Primaries nomination is taking a real risk. They are running without corporate money in a system built on corporate money. They are challenging incumbents who have the full backing of party infrastructure. They are subjecting themselves and their families to the scrutiny and pressure of a public campaign.

The community that asked them to run owes them something in return.

• The ground game. Seventy trained volunteers, knocking every door in the district at least twice. That is what the Field Manual specifies, and that is what the candidate must be able to count on.
• The funding. Small-dollar contributions through ViaUSFunding.com, organized from the day the promise is signed. The candidate should not be raising money alone.
• The story. The District’s most powerful asset is the sentence: we found this candidate ourselves. That sentence must be told everywhere — at every door, in every press release, at every town hall. It is what separates a People Primaries campaign from every other anti-establishment campaign the district has seen.
• The accountability structure. The promise is public. The District tracks it. The candidate runs knowing that the community is paying attention not just during the campaign but after election. That accountability is not a threat. It is the foundation of the trust that made the candidacy possible.

Contribution Infrastructure

ViaUSFunding.com is the small-dollar contribution portal for People Primaries candidates, subject to all applicable campaign finance laws. Launching in 2027, it is designed to give organized workers a dedicated, transparent platform to support pledged candidates early enough to make those candidates visible, heard, and taken seriously.

Before ViaUSFunding launches, The 99-Cent Revolution operates through Stripe at ViaUSFunding.com/99 — giving supporters an immediate way to begin funding the movement as PeoplePrimaries.com rolls out between July 26, 2026, and Labor Day. Every 99-cent monthly contribution flows directly into Buildup Cooperative operations, District training, and the groundwork for the 2028 elections.

All campaign-related financial activity must comply with applicable federal, state, and local law. Contribution limits, reporting rules, committee requirements, and coordination rules must be reviewed by qualified election counsel. This guide is not legal advice.

The Sentence That Breaks the Spell

The current candidate pipeline is held together by a belief: that the choices on the ballot are inevitable. That the names in front of voters in November are the natural result of a process that selected the best available options. That there was no alternative.

The People Primary breaks that belief before it forms. When a community has spent eighteen months finding, vetting, and backing a candidate it chose itself, the story of that candidacy is already in circulation before the incumbent has announced their re-election campaign. The community knows where this candidate came from. They know who asked. They know who said yes.

The most powerful sentence in any People Primaries race is not a slogan. It is a fact: We found this candidate ourselves.

That sentence cannot be manufactured by a political consultant. It cannot be purchased with a Super PAC. It belongs to the District that did the work, and to the candidate who answered when they were asked.

The candidate is already in your district.

They are waiting to be asked by people they trust.

That is your job.