Select a good candidate
(I’m deliberately going to be lazy and not do any research for this section, because at this time of writing (mid-September 2026) the candidates for the general election are already chosen. I’m just getting some thoughts down.)
To win an election, it’s important that the candidate is someone who people want to vote for. All of the campaign activities, after candidate selection, may make comparatively very little difference. Most people only influence the selection of candidates by voting in primaries. Actually, most people don’t vote in primaries, so most people have no effect on selection of candidates.
It’s also important that the candidate be someone who will do a good job once in office. This is an almost completely different set of criteria than winning, and may even be in opposition to it, if you ask some people. The main focus of this web site is how to win, but if you have any influence over who is nominated, please keep in mind the question of suitability for the job.
One way to help select a good candidate is to run for office yourself, if you can be a good candidate. Other ways include being involved in party politics, letting people know about good potential candidates if you have an audience, and encouraging other people to run if you think they would be good at it.
If you’re voting in a primary election, and the nominee will face serious competition from other candidates, you should take into account their chances of winning against the others. To some people this usually means selecting the more “moderate” candidate, and that probably is something to take seriously. Other people think it’s more important to have an “exciting” candidate (although I’ve heard that in Germany the culture actually favors “boring” candidates, for fairly sound historical reasons, and I think there’s something to be said for that.) How to weigh these criteria and others tends to be controversial, and I don’t think there’s any kind of real evidence to point to.
What makes people want to vote for a candidate in a general election? This is not the right time to get into that; maybe in a future update.