Category Archives: Judicial Office

Domain Names For Judicial Candidates

While the majority of judicial candidates go with the typical .com and .net domain name extension for their campaign websites, did you know that there are brand new extensions available? You can register all types of specialized TLDs (extensions) for a variety of businesses, services and interests.

The .LAW extension is designed for attorneys, judges, law schools, online law or legal blogs, legal news aggregators and more. The .ATTORNEY and .LAWYER domain name extension is perfect for any private practice lawyer, firm, legal service, or legal entity. And, of course, .LEGAL works for the above, too.

These extensions are not just for candidates, but also for practicing lawyers and attorneys. According to the American Bar Association, more than 50 percent of people looking for an attorney online base their decision on the strength of the potential attorney’s website.

Specialized domain name extensions can help establish an online presence and create an edge in a virtual marketplace.

There are a wide variety of domain extensions are available for registration. You may be surprised what new ones come to market. Soon they will soon be coming to websites near you.

Nonpartisan Judicial Elections

Nonpartisan Judicial Elections: What Candidates Need to Know

Many judicial elections in the United States are nonpartisan, meaning candidates do not appear on the ballot with a political party affiliation. For voters, this removes an easy shortcut of party identification. For candidates, it changes how a campaign must be run.

In a nonpartisan judicial election, voters cannot rely on party labels. That means your qualifications, reputation, and visibility play a much larger role in how voters make their decision.

What Is a Nonpartisan Judicial Election?

A nonpartisan election is one in which candidates run for office without formally declaring a political party affiliation on the ballot. Voters do not see labels such as “Democrat” or “Republican” next to a candidate’s name.

These elections are commonly used for judicial offices, particularly at the local and state level. The goal is to encourage voters to evaluate candidates based on qualifications, experience, and professional judgment rather than political identity.

How Nonpartisan Elections Affect Judicial Campaigns

Running in a nonpartisan election requires a different campaign strategy. Without party identification on the ballot, candidates must work harder to build name recognition and communicate credibility.

In practical terms, this means:

Voters rely more on name recognition and visibility
Qualifications and experience become central to campaign messaging
Endorsements and community support carry more weight
Campaign materials must clearly explain who you are and what you bring to the bench

In many cases, voters are making decisions with limited information. Your campaign must fill that gap.

Nonpartisan Elections in Practice

Many states use nonpartisan elections for judicial positions, including trial courts, appellate courts, and in some cases state supreme courts. However, the structure of these elections can vary by state.

Some states use fully nonpartisan elections, while others use a combination of partisan primaries followed by nonpartisan general elections. There are also jurisdictions where certain courts or counties follow different rules.

Because of this variation, it is important to review the specific election laws and requirements in your state before launching a campaign.

Are Nonpartisan Elections Truly Nonpartisan?

Although these elections are officially nonpartisan, political affiliations are often still visible through endorsements, campaign support, and public perception.

Voters may infer a candidate’s political alignment based on:

Endorsements from political figures or organizations
Campaign donors and supporters
Professional background and prior roles

At the same time, judicial candidates are still expected to maintain a level of neutrality and professionalism that distinguishes them from traditional political candidates.

What This Means for Your Campaign

In a nonpartisan judicial election, your campaign must replace the role that party identification would normally play.

That means clearly communicating:

Your legal experience and qualifications
Your reputation in the legal and local community
Your approach to fairness and impartiality
Your ability to serve in a professional and balanced manner

Because voters do not have party labels to guide them, your campaign materials, website, and outreach efforts must provide that clarity.

Judicial Campaign Messaging in Nonpartisan Races

Messaging in nonpartisan judicial elections should focus on professionalism and credibility. Candidates should avoid overly political language and instead emphasize their qualifications, experience, and commitment to applying the law fairly.

This includes:

Using clear, professional language in campaign materials
Highlighting courtroom and legal experience
Presenting endorsements carefully and appropriately
Avoiding statements that could suggest bias in future cases

These same principles should carry through to your campaign website, where voters will often go to learn more about you.

Learn More About Judicial Campaigns

Know Your Judicial Election Laws

campaign-laws All political offices have specific citizenship, age and residency requirements. Candidates must meet those requirements in order to run and hold office. Candidates for Federal, state and even local judge are no exception.

The rules governing elections are designed to ensure an independent judiciary and help set them apart from both the legislature and the executive branches of government. There are federal laws, state laws and even local laws and regulations that candidates must adhere to or risk being removed from the ballot.

If anyone should know how to follow the rules to the letter, you would think it would be judges. However, the rules can be complex, and in some cases, arcane.

In our own dealings with judicial candidates with Online Candidate, we’ve encountered a number of unusual restrictions on fundraising and general campaigning, such as:

Some judicial candidates cannot actively solicit donations, but are allowed to accept them.
In Pennsylvania, candidates cannot mention donations or engage in any campaign fundraising until a specific date.
In other cases, donations must be made anonymously, and the candidate is not allowed to know who made the donation.

Many rules have changed in recent years. Since Citizens United, special interest groups and political parties spent large amounts of money on state court races. States where deep-pocketed groups pour millions of dollar in independent spending have led to the most expensive 2011-12 high -court elections, particularly in Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, and North Carolina.

This spending has also included negative advertising, something that was one rare in judicial races. Many feel the influx of money is politicizing judicial elections and threatens the integrity of the court.

For judicial campaign websites, there may exist limitations on fundraising solicitations, publication of endorsements and even the timing when one can actually begin campaign online. Even social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, may be limited to judges in both a professional and electoral capacity.

The key takeaway here is that any candidate, no matter what office they are running for, needs to become intimately familiar with their state and local election laws. Rules should be adhered to when getting on the ballot, when fundraising and while advertising during the campaign.

Look to those who have already run or have experience in the position you are seeking. They can be a great source of knowledge and help you avoid unintentional mistakes that can hurt your campaign.

Additional Resources:

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Email Campaigns For Your Judical Campaign

email Despite the growing popularity of social media, e-mail is still the ‘killer app’ for judicial candidates. If you are planning on skipping email during your campaign, you will miss out on a great way to keep contact with voters, build your fundraising base and enhance your GOTV push.

If you haven’t started building your campaign email list, start building your list now! Don’t wait or you’ll kick yourself before Election Day when you realize how much voter communication you have missed out on.

There are a number of paid email list management services on the market. Some services are designed specifically for political candidates, often coupled with other services.

For smaller campaigns, any of the major email service providers will do the job. They include AWeber, Constant Contact and MailChimp. In this article, we’ll give an overview of each service and give you our opinion as to what service we recommend. (Spoiler: It’s AWeber.)

MailChimp is an attractive option for many small campaigns because it is free for lists of up to 2,000 subscribers. However, once you reach that limit, your monthly cost becomes $30 month (as of this writing). While MailChimp is easy to use and customize, it has a few downsides:

You cannot create followup autoresponders with the free version. A good autoresponder message sequence is essential to any good email campaign. Without it, the only messages your subscribers will get will be the ones you send manually.
The deliverability (actual messages getting into subscribers inboxes) may be lower than with other services. This is explained in more detail below.
MailChimp does not currently provide its subscribers with phone support service.
They have added a number of services to the platform, and push them heavily to users.

Constant Contact is another popular email service. Many political campaigns successfully use the service. It has a 60-day trial period. For additional costs, they have a number of integrated services that you can add on to just basic email services. Here are a few downsides:

Constant Contact is more expensive than some other similar service providers. While it allows for importing of email addresses, you cannot use Constant Contact with purchased or rented emailing lists. (Spammers beware!)
It may be difficult to cancel the service. Surprisingly, you cannot cancel your account online or via email. You must actually call them to cancel. Otherwise, you will continue to be billed after the campaign.

Aweber is the email service we use. After working with all three services over the years, we have come to the conclusion that AWeber is a better option for many campaigns and businesses looking to build an email presence.

Here are a few reasons why we recommend AWeber for our clients:

1) Easier opt-in and subscribe forms. The signup forms from MailChimp and Constant Contact in particular are difficult to configure and design. Constant Contact allows you to embed a subscribe form in your site but the code uses tables that is difficult to use and sometimes breaks other parts of your page design. Aweber has a form builder that is very intuitive and easy to use. You can generate HTML code from your edited subscribe form or use a line of Javascript to pull the form into your pages.

2) Message deliverablity. AWeber tends to have a better track record for successfully delivering messages into subscriber’s inbox, without getting stuck in spam filters. This is because AWeber DOES NOT allow users to add people to my mailing list without sending a confirmation email that requires subscribers to click a link to confirm that they do, indeed, wish to be added to the list. MailChimp and Constant Contact allow you add names and email addresses to my mailing list without sending confirmation messages. This is probably a reason why AWeber has a better track record of avoiding spam filters. Because every person on an AWeber mailing list has “confirmed” themselves, there is a much lower chance of subscribers clicking the “spam” button on messages they receive through the service.

3) Advanced auto-responder configuration. Both Aweber and Constant Contact have full autoresponder functionality that automatically sends new subscribers a series of prewritten emails over a certain period of time. While autoresponder messages require some advanced planning, they are powerful tools to help communication and provide information to your audience. MailChimp has autoresponder functionality built into their service, but it is only for paid accounts.

The downside to switching vendors

Many campaigns use MailChimp and Constant Contact successfully and are happy with their service. Once you commit to an email marketing service provider, switching over to another one is not a simple task. You can lose many subscribers in the process. For example, if you import a large list to Aweber, each person will need to re-confirm their subscriber status in order to receive your future messages.

If you do not yet have a mailing list for your judicial campaign, we recommend that you start one early.

Book Resources

These books are a must-read for anyone who is running for judicial office. They will help you to understand the process of running, what to expect, and how to win the election. Use these books as a reference as you go through your campaign.

Running for Judge: Campaigning on the Trail of Despair, Deliverance, and Overwhelming Success

The Campaign Manager: Running and Winning Local Elections

Running for Office as an Online Candidate: Web Strategies for Local Campaigns

Winning Local Elections: A Guide To Winning Local, County and Legislative Political Campaigns

The Political Campaign Desk Reference: A Guide for Campaign Managers, Professionals and Candidates Running for Office

Creating a Judicial Press Kit

Online judicial press kits are helpful in that the information can be kept up to date, and the information is easily accessible. The material can be added to its own section on the website or incorporated into the site contact page or linked elsewhere.

Traditionally, digital press kits are built into a series web pages where the goal is to sell advertising. Using that format on a campaign website is a little redundant, since the point of the site is to sell the candidate for judge

Instead, focus on making the press kit easily digestible information that can be easily downloaded and incorporated into media coverage about your campaign.

So what goes into a judicial online press kit? Unlike a physical press kit, an online press kit can be broken up so it can be downloaded in part or in whole. PDFs work well as a common file format for documents.

You can convert files or even web pages into PDF files through a free tool like PrimoPDF. Images can be grouped together and compressed into ZIP files. WinZip is a popular compression program, but there are free alternatives available such as jzip.

A basic online press kit includes:

A cover letter describing the judge and his or her campaign.
A judicial candidate biography. Don’t forget to add a photo and related web links.
Press releases related to the campaign.
Digital copies of your logos, brochures, flyers, etc.
Photographs of the candidate and campaign. Consider offering several versions for download. Low-res files can be used for web, but print requires better-quality images for decent results.
Newspaper or other media excerpts. Rather than reprinting the material outright, you could create a document or PDF file with links.
Question and Answer sheet covering any major issues or items that cover the qualities that make the candidate a good judge.

Avoid fluff, and keep the material professional and up to date. Done well, a press kit creates a whole new media hub around a candidate and builds upon the overall campaign.

Reach out to local media early. Find out what reporters cover your area and send them a quick introduction and contact information, letting them know where they can find up-to-date information about your campaign.

Anything you can do to make a journalist’s job easier is helpful and, if you’re lucky, may lead to better media coverage for your campaign.

Creating a high-quality judicial press kit doesn’t have to be difficult, but it does require some research and legwork. High-quality kits are designed to include the most accurate and useful information for your local media outlets.

4 Things Judicial Candidates Should Never Do Online

Today, more and more political and judicial candidates are getting themselves in hot water for things they say or do online. It doesn’t have to be this way. With a little knowledge, foresight and attention, any political candidate can create and maintain a positive online presence that will enhance their campaign.

Because there are so many potential online pitfalls, let’s focus on the most common errors that candidates make. These errors reveal a lack of online savvy and can often end up hurting a campaign or a candidate’s online reputation – and their chances of winning an election!

Assume You Have Privacy Online

First and foremost, anything you ever say, post or share online should pass the ‘New York Times Test’. That means, if you wouldn’t be comfortable with what you’ve done appearing on the cover of the New York Times, then don’t do it.

Try To Delete Material After the Fact

This seems to happens often with Twitter, though it can happen anywhere, even on an actual campaign website. A candidate or elected official makes a crude, rude or insensitive remark. Then they delete the post and pretend nothing happened. Unfortunately, social media posts can rarely be fully ‘deleted’ and pretending they never existed in the first place is silly.

If you must delete a post, do it, publicly acknowledge that you have done so, and move on.

Let Your Accounts Die Slow, Meaningless Deaths

If you start a social media account and promote it, you owe it to the people who follow you to keep your content fresh and up to date. People will either forget about your campaigign or wonder why they decided to follow you in the first place. Either way, it doesn’t leave a positive impression.

Spam Out

Bombarding your supporters (or worse, voters who are not actively following you) with automated or unwanted messages of any sort will only serve to annoy others – and can get you a reputation as a political spammer. Yuck.

The biggest offenders are politicians who purchase email lists and send out unsolicited messages. Even though political messages don’t actually fall under the CAN-SPAM act and are technically legal – it’s still spammy and generally unappreciated by the wider audience.

In fact, judicial candidates are probably better off keeping a ‘low key’ approach to social media campaigning. Personal opinions posted could be confused with professional opinions. It’s best never to mix the two.

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