Election Planning: A Framework for Deciding What Deserves Your Team's Time

It’s a midterm election year, so you may already feel pressure to do more: track more races, build more relationships, and brief more teams.

In our conversations with policy directors, the same frustration comes up again and again ahead of midterms: no one has time to read through everything.

That is the challenge this framework solves. We built it by reviewing thousands of customer and prospect conversations to understand what makes election cycles hard in practice. The pattern was consistent: GA leaders need a way to decide what deserves their team’s limited time and what can wait.

Uncertainty makes that hard. When any race could matter, everything feels urgent. This guide offers a simple scenario-planning framework to cut out the unessential. By the end, you will have a short list of focused research questions and a clear sense of what work can start now.

1. Start With Your Organization’s Priorities

Your organization’s upcoming decisions and deadlines provide the clearest starting point for deciding which midterm election developments deserve attention.

What does your organization already need to decide, fund, build, or protect in the next 6 to 12 months?

It may include a budget cycle, capital investment, expansion, or hiring plan. Or, a major contract, program launch, or permitting deadline.

Starting with your organization gives you a practical way to identify the election developments that could affect its work.

Once you have a list of priorities, you can rank them by asking:

Which priorities would be hardest to adapt if costs, timing, requirements, or stakeholder expectations shifted?

2. Map What Could Change

With your short list of organizational priorities, next, ask your team to look at the election landscape and identify the developments that could affect them.

The team may find a candidate who could leave, gain power, or become a new decision-maker. Or, the control of a statehouse or Congress could shift, along with key ballot measures.

For each development, ask:

How could this affect the organization’s priority?

Could it change:

• Whether a bill moves forward?
• How a rule is written or enforced?
• Funding, permits, or other government decisions?
• A relationship the organization needs?
• What the team needs to say, do, fund, or prepare for?

The goal is not to create a full candidate dossier or predict election results. It is to identify where a credible connection may exist.

For each possible connection, ask the team to record:

• The relevant race, office, ballot measure, leadership change, or shift in control
• What could change after the election
• How that change could affect the organizational priority
• The evidence behind the connection
• What remains unknown

Look for a clear link. Check who has the power to make the decision, what committee handles the issue, what candidates have said or done, and how the issue has moved before.

This exercise helps you focus your time. For example, a candidate agreeing with the organization does not automatically make that race important. The question is whether the candidate’s win or loss could change something the organization cares about.

3. Assign the Right Level of Effort

Now you have a first-pass map. You know which election developments could affect an organizational priority, what the possible connection is, and what information is still missing.

The director’s next job is to decide how much work each connection deserves:

Does the team need to monitor, learn more, prepare, act, or stop?

You don’t want to give every item equal attention. You want to give every meaningful connection a clear instruction and make the tradeoff visible.

• Watch protects awareness without creating a research project.
• Investigate prevents research from expanding beyond a defined question.
• Prepare identifies work worth doing before results are known.
• Act requires an explicit decision to commit real resources.
• Let Go gives directors permission to stop spending time on something that will not change the organization’s work.

Choose the smallest level of effort that gives the team enough information to make the next decision.

4. Prepare for Outcomes That Require a Different Response

With your established links, the team can use those connections to prepare for the outcomes that could require a different response.

The team does not need a scenario for every possible result. It needs one only when an outcome would change the organization’s plan.

For each high-priority connection, the team asks:

If this happens, what would the organization need to do differently?

The answer might involve a different timeline, budget, relationship approach, policy strategy, leadership decision, or advocacy response.

If the answer is “nothing material,” the outcome does not need a scenario. If the answer is “something,” the team creates a short scenario plan. It should answer four questions:

• If this happens… Name the specific outcome.
• What would change? Describe what the organization would need to do differently.
• What can start now? List work that will still be useful across the relevant outcomes.
• What should wait? List decisions, spending, or actions that depend on the outcome or another trigger.

Where the organization has the right data and approvals, the team can use a policy-data connection or MCP to estimate the impact of a scenario. The team can compare policy information, such as bill language, committee activity, candidate statements, or regulatory authority, with company data, such as facility locations, equipment inventories, capital timelines, cost estimates, or customer commitments.

The goal is not to predict what will happen. It is to answer a practical question: If this happens, what could it mean for the organization? The team should document the sources, assumptions, and limits behind any estimate.

5. Put the Work Into Motion

At this point, you’ve decided what deserves attention, which outcomes need a scenario, and what work can begin now. Next, you can turn those decisions into a short working tracker for the team.

For each item, the tracker should show:

• The level of effort
• The team role responsible for the next step
• The specific work to complete
• The next check-in or deadline
• The event that would cause the team to revisit the decision

This keeps the work focused. The team does not need to revisit every item when a new headline appears. It should report back when a named trigger occurs or when the director’s next review date arrives.

Next Steps

Using a clear, practical approach to election planning signals that government affairs is working strategically. The team is connecting election uncertainty to organizational priorities, making deliberate tradeoffs, and helping leadership prepare before decisions become urgent.

Meet with internal stakeholders to confirm the organization’s priorities for the next 6 to 12 months, then share the ranked list with your team as the starting point for election planning.

Test the process on one priority with a real deadline, cost, policy exposure, or relationship need. Use the result to show the team what a useful priority map, level-of-effort decision, and scenario look like.

Be equally strategic about the tools supporting the work. A spreadsheet can capture an initial map, but a legislative tracker can provide a stronger shared record as the election landscape changes.