- Pritzker Fellows
- Current Fellows
- Amanda Litman
Amanda Litman
Co-Founder & President of Run for Something
Biography
Amanda Litman is the co-founder and president of Run for Something, which recruits and supports young, diverse progressives running for down-ballot office. Since launching in 2017, RFS has elected more than 1500 leaders across nearly all 50 states, mostly women and people of color, and built the largest pipeline of potential candidates on the left.
She’s also president of RFS Civics, a 501c3 that works to end the gerontocracy.
Shortly after launching Run for Something, Amanda wrote a book,Run for Something: A Real-Talk Guide to Fixing the System Yourself, published by Atria in 2017.
More recently, Amanda published When We’re in Charge: The Next Generation’s Guide to Leadership (Zando/Crooked Media Reads) in May 2025.
Politico named Run for Something (and Amanda!) one of the 50 ideas driving politics in 2018. Bloomberg called her one of the people to watch in 2019. Fortune named her to their annual 40 under 40 list in 2020.
In 2022, Amanda was one of the Time NEXT 100, a list of 100 rising stars from around the world. She was also a 2022 Dial Fellow at the Emerson Collective. She is a 2025/2026 Obama Foundation USA Leader.
Before launching Run for Something, Amanda worked as a digital strategist — she served as email director on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, the digital director for Charlie Crist's 2014 Florida gubernatorial campaign, the deputy email director for Organizing for Action, and an email writer for Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign.
She graduated from Northwestern University in 2012 with a B.A. in American Studies. Amanda now lives in Brooklyn with her husband, two daughters, and their rowdy rescue dog.
Seminars
"The Generational Handoff in Politics Is Now: Everything Has Changed"
Every part of the American political ecosystem is in the middle of a generational handoff, in spite of the many forces attempting to stop it.
The party committees, the consulting firms that bill them, the political media that cover it, the donors who fund it, the strategists who spend it, and the people who actually put their names on the ballot: each of these is a distinct cohort with its own gatekeepers, its own incentives, and its own version of the battle over who gets to decide where power is distributed.
Amanda Litman is the co-founder and president of Run for Something, which recruits and supports young, diverse progressives running for down-ballot offices, and the author of When We’re in Charge, a leadership guide specifically for millennials and Gen Z.
Each week, Amanda will take one part of the shifting political world, dig into those changes, and try to understand them. Why now? Who is on the front lines? Are things uniformly changing for the better? How do, or will, we know? What can you as college students do now to be part of this generational earthquake?
Seminars are off the record and open to current UChicago students only.
So, here’s a test I bet you’ll fail. Name the person who’s actually in charge of the Democratic Party. Not "the Democrats”—the specific body, the specific person, the specific decision they control. The DNC, the state parties, the House and Senate campaign committees, the legislative campaign committees, the county parties, and the nine hundred outside groups that would like you to believe they're the party are all different animals with different power, and the fact that almost nobody can distinguish them is itself a form of power. You can't hold accountable what you can't name. Let’s talk about what those bodies mostly do and how they touch the more than 500,000 elected offices in this country.
Amanda has done the recruiting that affects who makes up the party and will reveal what the screening actually looks like, what "electable" means in practice and who decided that, and what it costs a person to say yes.
The consultant class is not a conspiracy. It's just a bunch of broken habits. A relatively small number of firms take a percentage of every ad running on TV or online, and that incentive structure has shaped a generation of campaigns more than any candidate or message has.
However, the reflexive move of dismissing all of them is how campaigns lose in extremely stupid, avoidable ways. This week, we’ll consider how consultants are chosen, how the money moves, and what actually matters in campaign tactics.
Special Guest (via Zoom): Morris Katz, former Lead Media Strategist on Zohran Mamdani’s Campaign for Mayor of New York City
The media that formed most people's assumptions about how politics works—beat reporters, candidate network hits and Sunday shows, a press release that gets picked up—is not the media that decides elections anymore. What replaced it isn't one thing either: a Substack economy, a creator economy, a podcast economy, and a set of algorithmic incentives that reward the exact behavior political professionals were trained to avoid.
This is where the generational split is widest. We’ll discuss the differences (if they exist at all) between a creator with two million followers who takes campaign money and doesn't disclose it and a consultant taking a 15 percent commission and what shapes a new communications strategy in a campaign in 2026 (and why so many get it wrong).
Special Guests (via Zoom): Emily Amick, Lawyer, Journalist, Political Analyst. former Counsel to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer & Creator of @EmilyinYourPhone; Annie Wu Henry, Digital Strategist, Creative Director & Content Director at Way to Win; and Adam Mockler, Political Commentator, Digital Media Creator & Host of The Adam Mockler Show on YouTube
Fundraising is a relationship industry, and relationship industries reproduce whoever's already in them. That's why the donor class skews old, why it skews wealthy, and why "who do you know" is still the most predictive variable in whether a good candidate can run at all. We’ll talk about whether any of the changes underway—small-dollar giving, the wealth transfer, a new cohort of donors—are actually changing who has power or just changing who the gatekeepers are. We’ll also go over the terminology and get you smart on PAC versus super PAC, etc.
We meet the day before Election Day, which is the best possible day to argue about strategy: every decision is already locked, and none of us know the answer yet.
The generational fight in campaign strategy is really a fight about evidence. One camp came up believing in canvassing and human contact; one came up on testing, targeting, and now AI-assisted everything; one thinks all of it’s downstream of whether anyone has heard of you. All three have data. And does any of it really matter?
We’ll pull the competing narratives about what happened in this election—who won, who lost, and what the conventional wisdom going into it was versus how the one-week-post-E-Day stories are spinning it.
We’ll examine who’s pushing what and why, including considering their financial and personal stakes, and possible groundwork they’re laying for future fights. Our focus will specifically be on the future of the Democratic Party, especially going into a 2028 presidential primary that will be completely exhausting. In the two years since Trump won again, where is the party now?
We’ll bring in a small panel of experts—candidates and electeds who’ve ran and won (or ran and lost) in 2026— to talk about what they experienced on the ground and how they’re seeing the change play out. You’ll have a chance to interrogate them on everything we’ve talked about to this point: How do they think about the party? The consultants? The media? The money? Where has the tension come up? In this off-the-record, honest conversation, you’ll get to probe for true answers and thoughts on what comes next.