Nick Jacobson YC ‘23 was the Democratic candidate for Pennsylvania’s 85th State House District in this year’s general election. While at Yale, Nick was one of The Politic’s Managing Editors. He lives outside of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Nick spoke to The Politic a week after the 2024 election.
So, Nick, first off, I’m curious where you’re from, what that looks like? What part of Pennsylvania is it? Just give us a little bit of color and describe the place so we can get ourselves situated.
I was born in Geisinger Community Hospital in Danville, but my family lived in Snyder County, outside of a small town called Selinsgrove, which is home to Susquehanna University. My parents came to the area the year before I was born, because my mother got a job at Susquehanna University teaching anthropology. We lived there when I was young, and then eventually moved into the forest, about 20 minutes north, outside of another small college town, Lewisburg. We live in a log cabin, which I continue to think is the nicest house that you can build. I went to the local public high school [and] school system, Lewisburg area school district.
The [State House] district is the 85th House District of Pennsylvania, and it runs from its far east end, which is right on the Susquehanna River—where I’m from—out about an hour West, basically to the midline of Pennsylvania. The district is quite close to the center of Pennsylvania, both laterally and longitudinally. On the East End [of the district] there are more institutions. There are the universities [Susquehanna and Bucknell], there’s a federal penitentiary. There are a couple of hospitals that are right outside the district. Then as you go further west in the district it becomes more dominated by farmland. There is some industry, particularly construction, woodworking, agricultural—industry that surrounds the agricultural business. And then when you get to the far west end of the district there’s a small town, Burnham, which is home to standard steel, so kind of an older, union area, that is very different than it was 50 years ago.
What’s the district like politically? How do political leanings vary across the district? Do you see historical patterns reflected in that political variation?
A lot of the area was originally German immigrants, and has a long Republican tradition. Kind of ‘stay out of my way and let me live my own life.’ Union County, which is where I live now, has voted for every Republican presidential candidate since the party was founded. Snyder County deviated once to vote for Teddy Roosevelt when he ran for his Bull Moose Party as a third party candidate in the 1912 election. So there’s old Republican roots in the district. This is not the story that you see in some other parts of Pennsylvania or some parts of America, of a Republican takeover of an area.
But I think, particularly when you get out to the west end of the district, there is also a story of just incredible Democratic decline. Juniata County, which is in the far southwest part of the district, has lost well over 50% of its Democrats In my lifetime. So it went from maybe a 40-60 county to closer to an 80-20 County. We got 12% of the vote in our share of Juniata County, which is a more conservative part of the county. Really bad margins for Democrats in a way that when I was born you would not have had. There are old democratic families who are still around, but that power base has really deteriorated [in Juniata County] in a way that has not been true in Union and Snyder counties.
What made you decide ‘I want to run this year,’ and how did you think about that history and your place in it when you decided to run?
I’ve worked on a lot of losing campaigns. Growing up, I worked on losing campaigns in the area for the US house, for the state house in Pennsylvania. I think the only way you ever start winning campaigns is by running them seriously and taking people seriously. I think Howard Dean has a line about how “everybody deserves to have you ask for their vote, whether they’re going to vote for you or not.” That’s the only way you get people to vote for you—asking them to do so. I have a broader belief about the importance of fighting hard fights, you know, as a Democrat, and showing up for people.
But I think this election also felt quite urgent to me, particularly because of the infrastructure money that is getting spent in America right now. I don’t think either of us will be alive again when we spend well over a trillion dollars building the infrastructure of the future in our country, and I think the places that take advantage of it are going to be setting themselves up for one kind of future, and the places that don’t are going to miss out on that. And I felt strongly that we did not have the kind of representation in Harrisburg [Pennsylvania’s capital] that was going to deliver on that basic support for the district. And I thought here I am. I’m
free of any debts to special interests, and can run a very independent, very energetic campaign, and I think we could do a lot of good. I thought we could do a lot of good for the district. It’s my home, and I love it, and I think there’s a lot of strength and a lot of great people here, and I wanted to do my part in contributing to its future success.
How were you received on the campaign trail—knocking on doors, marching in parades, doing meet and greets? Did you feel any differently than you would have felt normally walking into a room in Union County or Snyder County?
I think one of the biggest surprises of the campaign was how willing people were to talk, not necessarily to agree with me, but I found people on the whole to be much more pleasant and open then you would think if you just scroll through social media or turn the television on. And I think a lot of people felt the same way about meeting me. You know, ‘wow, we can have a real conversation, even though we don’t agree on things.’ So that was quite a pleasant surprise. In knocking on doors you also meet a lot of just general skepticism about ‘this is an impossible race,’ ‘Nick, go have fun,’ ‘are you delusional,’ which you just take in stride.
Did you feel that the things you were saying, the messages you were pushing, were resonating in the way you thought they would? When you talked about infrastructure, did you feel like people were receptive to that?
I was very concerned in the campaign with being positive and forward looking and grounded in the district. I think a lot of politics is very distant from people’s actual lives, and a lot of the things that we talk about are very distant from people’s actual lives. When you think about the amount of energy, and anger directed particularly towards Washington DC, about issues that nobody ever sees walking around in their everyday lives, I think that feeds into a kind of political paralysis—[into] frustration and division. I was very concerned in the campaign to be grounded in lived experience. And I do think people resonated with things that we were talking about.
I think what we didn’t do well was draw a contrast with our opponent. Public education is a very good example. I would talk about public education and our local schools to people in the district. A lot of people, you know, really support our local schools here. And our representative does not. [He] routinely votes for programs that send public dollars out of our local schools, largely into wealthy private schools in Philadelphia—not exclusively, but disproportionately there. But I don’t think that we were able to convert that into a very effective messaging in the campaign. I think we did run up against the nationalization of politics, as I think you’re going to do, in a moment where politics is very nationalized. The only way to surmount that challenge is to take it head on and to say no. No, politics does not have to be paralyzed by national disputes that don’t come down to much for us, and we should have a politics that is focused on what happens in our everyday lives. But it’s going to take more than one guy at your door one time telling you that before it sinks in.
You talked a little bit about your opponent’s positions there. I’m curious how you feel your campaign looked in comparison to his. Did your campaign look very different from his? And what does that mean? Is there any significance there?
You could ask him his perspective. My perspective is that he essentially did not campaign.
He sent two mail pieces out to people in the district with his campaign funds. He sent, I think, five mail pieces out with taxpayer dollars, and he would have his legislative booth set up at local fairs…
Just so that I’m clear on that—legislative means that he can put his paid state staff in and cannot use campaign materials…
Correct, it’s not campaign materials. It’s taxpayer printed materials, coloring books and information pieces and pamphlets and flyers and stuff that’s. That’s all taxpayer dollars. I don’t want to make it sound twisted or anything. It’s your representative showing up in your community, and being a presence there. But it’s not clear to me that he did any other campaigning than that. But, like I said, I don’t have a ton of visibility on that.
He started the year with about $100,000, he ended the year with about $100,000. He spent about $60,000 or $70,000 of campaign funds this year, but I think only about 20,000 of that was actually on his campaign, and the rest of it was donations to other Republican candidates. He had some travel expenses for the RNC. You could look into it. We spent about $100,000 on the campaign.
What it was like to put together a campaign for the first time? How was fundraising, what was it like to gather volunteers? How did it all feel?
The most wonderful thing that happened in the campaign was the emergence of a campaign manager [Maggie]. Her first political experience was going down to Georgia to be an election protection person in the [2022] Senate runoff. I met her during petition signing, and she said “Nick, I want to help you.” And she easily became the most important person to the campaign. She just dived into it head first, and I’m so grateful for it. It was such an enormous help and, by the end, I think we had a much more organized campaign operation than we started with. Maggie was probably the most significant person to building the campaign.
What is it like to build a campaign? It’s chaotic and it’s very unclear. I certainly benefited from training and support from different organizations that exist to help young, first time candidates. But really it’s just a lot of learning as you go. Building the plane as you fly it. Engaging young people is very important, so we ended up with a summer internship program for college and high school students. There was a lot of Canva to make materials. We had a graphic designer make our first palm card, which was really helpful, and the logo. [We did] a lot of shopping around for yard signs.
Fundraising is just asking people. People give money when you ask them to. That’s what you have to do. And you believe in the cause, and you have a good reason for it. And that’s certainly something that I learned. In general, you just have to be clear about what you need, and why you need it.
That was a scattered answer, but it probably reflects the process of building a campaign rather well. It was scattered. I wouldn’t hold that up as the example of how to build a campaign, and I think that there are some basic organizational things, planning and strategy, that we would have benefitted from right up at the start that just didn’t happen because of the kind of chaos of the campaign. Basically you wake up knowing what you have to do in the day and you end the day trying to figure out what you’ve got to do tomorrow.
I do want to get some reflections from you on the election as a whole. It was a big loss for the Democratic Party, especially in Pennsylvania. I am curious if your race gave you any particular perspective on that loss that might be useful to people who are trying to make sense of election results in Pennsylvania?
I think there are all kinds of things. I have read some interesting takes on the election. I’m very focused on building campaigns that talk to people where they are, and build relationships and power and structure from the ground up. That’s what we tried to do in the campaign—I knocked on about 3,000 doors, we knocked as a total on the campaign of over 5,000 doors. Most of those [were] Republicans and independents, so I can’t say that I felt surprised by the election results, at least in this area. I don’t feel like I have such a great window into the rest of Pennsylvania, but at least I can speak for the 85th house district. I think that the Democratic Party in general was not able to connect with voters on the messaging that they had in the area, and I think the messages that stuck in people’s minds were ones coming from Republican voices.
Do you have any view on why that was? Do you feel like you have a grasp on why those messages were so much more salient?
This isn’t exactly a direct way of answering that. As I think about the question, a bunch of cliches and analyses that you can read better elsewhere come to mind.
The way I think about politics is taking a look around at where we are as a community, whatever size that is, and trying to identify a couple of things that we think we can get done that would make a difference for people. To me, the heart of the message in our little campaign or any campaign of any size has to be that the campaign cares about the issues that you care about, and it’s going to do something to make them better. And you have to tell the right stories and the right issues. And I actually think in our area, I think Democrats did a pretty good job in a tough, tough race. Union County and Snyder County got the tiniest bit bluer in 2024. Mifflin and Juniata counties got the tiniest bit redder. So I think there was a lot of on the ground work that did make a difference and that will pay lasting dividends.
I would say the thing I most say to people now as we debrief our campaign is that we’ve not seen all the dividends that it will pay over the coming years—the kind of door to door, face to face, honest, straightforward communication that we tried to model and present as an alternative to the extreme and often fantastical language that comes out of President Trump. I think that’s the way forward, whatever size campaign you’re talking about. You have to know who you’re talking to, and usually that means you have to go out and meet them. And it’s not something that happens in analysis rooms and spin sessions. I think it happens in conversations with people.
I think that’s as good a point as any for me to end the interview. Is there anything else in particular you feel like you haven’t gotten out that you really want to get into The Politic?
I’m very proud of the campaign that we ran. I’m very grateful to the hundreds of people who participated in it. I think our country right now is in a moment of real doubt and uncertainty and fear about the future, about the capacity of the people to govern themselves and to carry on a project, to surmount the challenges that democracy poses to every generation of people who inherit it. And I think the way that we will overcome those challenges and pass our country off and our world off to the next generations of people is through the hard work of relating to each other and moving forward together in our real lives. And I saw just an enormous amount of that in the campaign and an enormous amount of faith and energy and optimism and confidence. And that’s something we need to hold on to in what I suspect will be a very difficult four years.